So this is gonna be the pinned post for this blog. For now I’m just using it to provide handy links to old content. If there’s something else you’d like to see on here, please let me know.
2019 Dragon Ball Liveblog Part I (Dragon Ball 1-153)
2019 Dragon Ball Liveblog Part II (Dragon Ball Z 1-194)
2019 Dragon Ball Liveblog Part III (Dragon Ball Z 195-291 + Movies and Specials)
2023 Dragon Ball Apocrypha Liveblog Part I (Dragon Ball GT, Various Specials, Movies, etc.)
2023 Dragon Ball Apocrypha Liveblog Part II (Dragon Ball Super anime and manga)
Anyway, here’s a cool picture of Cell that you might like.
If you went back in time to about 1998 and told my younger self that in the 2020's there would be a He-Man movie, a Thunderbolts movie, and two Super Mario Bros. movies, and that I would skip all four of them, my younger self would probably wonder if I was stupid. The answer is obviously "yes", but my movie-watching choices has nothing to do with that.
Also, why would you go back in time to tell my past self about upcoming movie releases and not warn past-me about 9/11? For that matter, why wouldn't you go back in time and visit your own younger self? It just seems like an odd choice for someone who has the power to travel through time, and...
Sorry, I'm getting off track. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now explain that Marvel has turned Thunderbolts into an unrecognizable mess, a name they slap on any bullshit that needs a title. The new Mario movies look all right, I guess, but nothing about them compels me to run out and watch them, especially not in a theater. As for He-Man, well, that's what I'm here to discuss.
If you're not familiar with Masters of the Universe, the following videos will teach you everything you need to know. First, the toy line from 1982.
Within a year, the toys had become so popular that they made an animated series in 1983.
This concludes my exhaustive, two-minute course on He-Man. If you watched both videos, congratulations, you get an A+ in He-Manology. If you skipped the videos, or if your internet connection isn't so great, then let me stress the two most important points of the franchise:
Saying, singing, or chanting "He-Man" in a big booming voice.
Big muscly punches.
Now that we're all on the same page, we can discuss the topic in greater depth.
I'm old enough to remember the original line of the toys, and feeling somewhat unsure about the cartoon. I think a lot of 80's nostalgia has conflated the show with the toys, and that's probably fair, because in the long run they were only a few months apart. But I remember checking out the cartoon for the first time, and this Prince Adam guy shows up to explain how he transforms into He-Man, and I was mildly annoyed at all of this new lore that was never mentioned in the toy ads or the mini-comics included with the toys.
This isn't all that deep. The He-Man toy line started because someone wanted to do a Conan the Barbarian toy line and that fell through, so they slapped some stuff together and made a new sword-and-sorcery IP with some sci-fi elements included. The minicomics were just a little bonus for the customer, and they provided some suggestions for how to play with the toys:
Beast Man is Skeletor's sidekick
Teela's toy is actually two characters somehow, so you should buy another one.
You should take your Ram Man toy and smash him into Castle Greyskull as hard as you can.
This isn't exactly a series bible for a cartoon series, so Filmation had to throw in a lot of new worldbuilding to flesh things out. So now you have Prince Adam to explain what He-Man does in his off-hours. He's doing the Clark Kent thing with Teela, and all the good guys live in or around the royal palace. Skeletor and his guys can't get into Castle Greyskull, so they all live in Snake Mountain instead.
They kind of nerfed the characters for the cartoon, because Concerned Parents(tm) were worried about the violence before it even aired. So there's surprisingly little physicality in the show. He-Man punches the opening credits, as we saw, so it's not like there no punching at all. That would be ridiculous. But they usually had him punch walls and boulders and stuff. The rule as I understood it was that they couldn't do anything on the show that a child could imitate. So instead of He-Man and Skeletor swordfighting and kicking each other in the face, Skeletor would made a giant spider appear and He-Man would just throw boulders around it to make a little boulder pen for giant spiders. Then the spider would explain that he's actually a medical doctor who doesn't understand how he got to Eternia, and He-Man would take him to Castle Greyskull, where the Sorceress would teleport him back to his own universe where he could be reunited with his wife and 47 children.
Now don't get me wrong, the cartoon still ruled, but it ruled in a softer kind of way. This was fine. If you wanted Hard He-Man, then you could just get out your toys and smash Ram-Man into Castle Greyskull some more. Concerned Parents(tm) didn't understand that we didn't need the cartoon to teach us violence. The mini-comics had already shown us the way, and that way was brute force.
The reason I don't care about the 2026 He-Man movie is because they already made a He-Man movie in 1985, Secret of the Sword. The film was noteworthy for introducing the Evil Horde figures to the cartoon continuity, but the true point of SotS was to serve as a backdoor pilot to the upcoming She-Ra cartoon. The toy line was unapologetically marketed as "He-Man For Girls", and while I enjoyed the movie, I had no idea how to proceed as a fan.
Like, okay, so the Evil Horde guys were part of the He-Man line. Basically they're like a rival villain group, so they hate He-Man and Skeletor. Pretty fun stuff. That's how the toys were promoted. But the cartoon lore established that the Horde characters were She-Ra's enemies, and they were fighting a whole other conflict on a different planet, occasionally crossing over with the He-Man characters. This was probably done because the She-Ra toy line didn't have many bad guys. There was Catra and maybe one other villain, and that was it.
At the same time, the He-Man line had begun to align itself with the cartoon. They made an Orko toy and a Prince Adam toy, and so on. I think the strategy was to get boys and girls to buy all these toys, but I don't remember girls being too interested in She-Ra, and boys were only interested in She-Ra because she's He-Man's sister. I remember going to the She-Ra section of the toy aisle and finding the whole thing alien and confusing.
I mean, what made the He-Man line work was the gimmicks. Nearly every figure had the same body, but Buzz-Off had bee wings, and Whiplash had a cool alligator tail, and Webstor had a grappling hook in his backpack. I think She-Ra toys had gimmicks too, but they were things like the skirts changed color, or you can brush Swift Wind's mane. And yeah, those are fine ideas for toys, but My Little Pony was already doing that sort of thing. All She-Ra offered to the formula was violence, but the toy line didn't seem interested in playing that up. Sure you could ram Glimmer into the Crystal Castle as hard as you can, but I don't think they really made anyone want to do that.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the toys were kind of the whole point. By 1985 the toy line had mostly peaked, and Filmation was trying to pivot to She-Ra, and then they tried to do a live action He-Man movie in 1987, which is insane, really. Everyone was into Transformers by then, and even that was starting to die down as the Ninja Turtle craze started.
The difference is that the Transformers and TMNT franchises have had a lot more success with revivals and revamps over the decades. It's always amazed me how people half my age will have TMNT nostalgia, because they got into one of the other TMNT shows that aired during the 21st century. There are Transformers fans that are only into Beast Wars, or the Bay movies, or the IDW comics, or whatever. He-Man has had a few revivals too, but none of them seem to have gained a foothold in the same way.
I think part of the issue is that He-Man is much more rooted in the toys than Transformers or TMNT. All of those toys were fun, of course. But when the Transformers line started, Marvel Comics came up with the whole lore behind the toys. Cybertron, the war, the mission to gather resources from Earth, and so on. This led to additional worldbuilding like the Matrix, the Quintessons, Unicron, the Autobot diaspora on planets like Junk and Paradron, and so forth. I remember getting my first Transformers and not really knowing what to do with them. They were fun to transform, and they worked as toy robots and toy cars, but the symbols and names meant nothing to me. Then I started watching the cartoon and was blown away by all of the personalities and backstory.
I guess what I'm saying is that the Transformers brand can function independently of the toys. Michael Bay can make a movie about the Transformers and it can mostly work as a standalone alien invasion flick. Obviously, they're going to sell toys anyway, but it's not critical to the film's success.
Same with TMNT. The Ninja Turtles were a comic first, and I remember reading the issue where April meets the Turtles for the first time and they explain the events of #1 to her and she goes "What a great story!" And I was like "You're right, April, that comic kicked ass." The cartoons have changed and tweaked various things, but they've always been working from the same premise Eastman and Laird came up with from the start. So it's easier to greenlight a new Turtles movie and get audiences to show up for it. The strength of the characters and the concept will see them through.
With He-Man, what made the toys hot was the toys, not the lore. Ram Man had spring-loaded legs so he could launch himself into things. He-Man and Skeletor's swords could be combined togehter to make one big sword which was the key to Castle Greyskull. Most characters could swap their armor and weapons because they had the same body.
Then you get into the later toys with more advanced gimmicks. Fisto has a giant metal fist on one arm. His arch-enemy, Jitsu has one too, except he's a martial arts guy, so his giant hand is open for delivering chops. Clawful has a giant hand, but he's a crab man, so his giant hand is a huge lobster claw. Mekanek can extend his neck. Sy-Klone has a thing on his waist so you can spin his torso 360 degrees.
Okay, let me unpack how cool Sy-Klone was. This guy's like a space-man or something. He looks like this:
The radar screen in his chest is just a decal, but it looks cool anyway. He can spin really fast, which means he can fly, obviously. Of course Sy-Klone has helicopter power, that's just simple physics.
In the commercial for the toy, he lands in front of Skeltor with a bunch of his goons, and Sy-Klone just spins his arms really fast and punches them all over. Game over, Skeletor.
But that's not all! If he can spin his torso around so freely, then that means he can spin his legs around just as easily! Which means he can deliver roundhouse kicks! Incredible!
This toy fucking rules, simply because they gave him some extra articulation and a spinning mechanism. Meanwhile, I do not remember a single thing abut the Sy-Klone character. Is he an alien? A former villain who saw the light? I have no idea. I could look it up, but I don't even care. I just remember how much fun it was to make this guy flail his arms around.
And that's why these He-Man movies never work. They put Mekanek in the new movie as a goof. Ha ha, remember Mekanek? And the audience is like "Uh, barely, I guess." Sy-Klone might be in the movie too, but so what? I have no interest in his character. The actor might spin around really fast but it was more fun when I was the one holding the toy.
You could probably solve this dilemma by introducing new toys with fun play features, but I don't think they do that anymore. All the He-Man toys I see anymore are just collectors items designed to replicate the original line. They're reminders instead of innovations. And that works for Transformers or TMNT, because the toy releases remind you of how devious Starscream is, or how goofy Bebop and Rocksteady are.
The He-Man characters never really had that. They were much more sandboxy. You could take them out of the box and kind of do whatever you wanted with them. The new movie follows the most important story beats, the ones most people seem to be able to agree upon. Skeletor is evil, He-Man uses his sword to get his powers, and I'm pretty sure they fight over control of Castle Greyskull. But they did that in the 1987 movie too. They did that in the 1985 movie. They did that in the 1982 commercial. It's just variations on a theme.
There's not much of a throughline for the whole thing. The 2002 cartoon appeared to do something with the idea that Skeletor was once Prince Adam's wicked Uncle Keldor, but I never bothered to watch the whole thing to find out where that was going. Secret of the Sword introduced She-Ra as Adam's long-lost twin sister, but it didn't really change much. I just found out Kevin Smith did a He-Man show recently where Skeletor kills He-Man in mid-transformation, and Teela becomes the main character, which is a bold choice, but that seems kind of counterintuitive. Like having the Coyote catch the Roadrunner.
I guess it opens the discussion of how violent these characters need to be. Should Skeletor kill people in these stories? I mean, he's the Lord of Destruction, so I know he's cool with it. It's totally in character for him. All the toys come with swords and spears and clubs so it's strongly implied that they're trying to kill one another. But then you have the 80's Filmation series, where Skeletor is a bumbling fool much of the time, and he rarely manages to hurt anyone. Skeletor zapped Courtney Cox in the 1987 movie, and they show the festering wound. Even that felt kind of shocking at the time, and she ended up being healed by the end of the film. I'm betting Prince Adam recovers at the end of this Kevin Smith series, but still, the sight of Skeletor drawing blood is kind of incongruous with the usual portrayal of the character.
And I guess that also works against a live action He-Man film, because where do you land on the violence? There's a desire to take the villains more seriously, to move away from the constraints of the Filmation cartoon. But if you move too far from that source material, then past a point you're just doing another sword-and-sorcery-and-spaceships fantasy. The original mini-comics are probably the ceiling for how violent you can take this material, but it's hard to imagine all these guys fighting with swords and magic and Ram Men without someone getting seriously hurt.
Not that I expect anyone to try this again anytime soon. The new movie is in theaters now, and the conventional wisdowm seems to be that it's "fine" or maybe even "okay", but it's unlikely to turn a profit, because they made a He-Man movie in 2026 for crying out loud. The target audience is 45 and up. Nobody under 30 is taking a date to see this, unless they're some sort of hipster couple, or one of them has some sort of kink for failed Jared Leto movies. Making a He-Man movie in 2036 sounds like a very unlikely scenario.
I think I heard someone suggest they only made this movie because of the success of Barbie, and that's an old, old toy line that somehow became a box office smash. Well, yeah, but the way I heard it, Barbie's movie was successful because it was a good movie, and the Barbie concept is more evergreen than He-Man. They managed to do a Barbie movie 64 years after the toy line began. That'd be like doing a He-Man movie in 2046. I'll be 69 by then (nice), and I don't think nostalgia or camp would be enough to make the movie popular. They'd need to do some sort of artsy-fartsy thing with it. Make it about He-Man but also it's really about some sort of existential crisis. I don't know. My point is that Barbie actually had the pop-culture presence to make that kind of idea possible. I don't think He-Man ever will.
None of this is my problem, of course. The announcement of the new He-Man film, and my disappointment with the trailers, has led me to realize just how much I enjoyed the toys, and the comics and cartoons that accompanied them. I've heard Homestuck described as an event more than a webcomic you could read. You had to be there. If you missed it, then there was no way to experience it again. Maybe He-Man was the same way. I mean, you could watch the cartoons, they're all on YouTube now, but you'd need to be a kid with parents giving you He-Man toys every so often.
Or not. Maybe there's a broader cultural footprint for He-Man, like that "What's Going On" video by Slackcircus. I think the "Princesses of Power" version of She-Ra kind of became it's own thing, but Catadora shippers are still under the He-Man umbrella. Someone will create some series about Webstor and Jitsu hanging out and that'll become a big deal. Maybe the next He-Man movie will be entirely about Land Shark. Hell yeah, Land Shark is the best.
But it doesn't really matter. He-Man is about a lot of things, but it's mainly about having fun, however you do it. Whether it's watching a movie, or smashing Ram Man's head into Castle Greyskull, or making fun of the cartoon's homoerotic overtones, or just reminiscing about the toys, the franchise has more than served its purpose. It doesn't have to die here, and I don't think it will. But it also doesn't need to be resurrected as a Hollywood blockbuster. That's not what gives a thing it's value.
What makes He-Man special is each of us, enjoying He-Man in our own way. That's what binds us together, that's what makes us friends even when we don't know each other. Like when you've been ramming into Castle Greyskull for like an hour and then you finally realize the guy you hated was on your side all along. Yes, that's right, maybe the real Masters of the Universe were the friends we made along the way.
No seriously, get a Ram Man toy and a Castle Greyskull playset, and just go berserk. You've never truly lived until you do.
No use dancing around it, I didn't hit my goal on the original deadline. Several things got in the way, IRL stuff, work kicking my ass, writer's block, etc.
But Trackbear lets me edit my goals, so I just extended the deadline out another two months. That was a month ago, and I still haven't made any real progress. So I just extended it another two months for safety.
I feel bad about this, not because I had to adjust my timetable, but because I haven't update my longfic in two years, and I was sure I'd be back on track by now and... I'm not. On the other hand, it's a fanfic, so the stakes a pretty low, and it's not like I ever had an update schedule before.
I suppose what bothers me more is the lingering fear that I might be burnt out on the thing. I don't think that's true, since I still think about the stuff I want to write all the time. But I've been working on this thing since 2015, and what if I've changed as a person, to the point where I'm no longer someone who can see this through?
Nah.
If I really felt that defeatist about it, I wouldn't keep pushing out the deadline. I'd just call it off and let the fic gather dust. I want more, and I've just had stuff get in the way of me getting it. For example, I had all those liveblog projects I wanted to do, Evangelion, Chainsaw Man, and JJBA. I had a lot of comic books I wanted to read. Well, those are all done. The time passed anyway, and I made a lot of progress. I still have more stuff I want to do, but the fic is re-emerging as a priority. For a while it felt like it was in the way of other things I wanted to do, but now that's flipped around.
I had planned to read the original run of Justice League of America this summer, and I suppose I still can. There's still some books I'd like to read, and I can resume watching that Youtube Physical Chemistry course I started back in January. I paused that because I was having trouble keeping up with my reading list, but I think I can find a good balance now. Nothing has changed but the date. And like they say in the Time Patrol, there's time.
I guess finishing the SBR thing was cathartic for me, because I set out to work on it and my fic at the same time, and now that it's done and posted there's nothing like that left to distract me. So I guess I'll be spending tonight making some plans, and with any luck I can get back on the horse.
You know some major shit went down when the only spoiler-free image I can lead off with is the page with no characters on it, and just the words "THE END."
All right, so last time Johnny thought he'd saved the day by killing the President.................... Valentine, in the year 1890, just want to make that clear, ha ha... when it turned out that Valentine unleashed a second Diego Brando upon the Steel Ball Run race. And this Diego doesn't use the Stand Scary Monsters. No, he uses a special guy we like to call ZA WARUDO.
Basically, Valentine knew he couldn't survive against Johnny Joestar so he figured the next best thing would be to recruit someone to complete his plan in his place, and that turned out to be a Diego from another universe.
So this version of Diego is just as skilled at horse racing as the original, plus Valentine filled him in on Johnny's powers and the secret bunker Valentine built to store the Saint Corpse. Also, this version of Diego has, you know, the best Stand ever. The World, in case you didn't know, has the power to stop time for a few seconds, allowing Diego to throw knives and other nasty tricks.
Since the secret bunker is at the finish line for the final stage of the race, both Johnny and Diego have to complete the course, even though neither of them really give a shit about the Steel Ball Run any longer. Diego might still want the prize money, but he knows the Saint Corpse is a greater prize, and Johnny never cared about the race in the first place. He only entered because Gyro seemed to have some secret knowledge of how Johnny could walk again. Well now Gyro's dead and Johnny can walk again, so he has even less reason to care about the race than before.
You might think the World vs. Tusk would be a mismatch, just because Dio Brando used The World so effectively in Part 3, and the only way Jotaro could stop him was to discover his Stand had the same time-stopping ability. But Araki makes this Part 7 battle work. Tusk Act IV might not be able to stop time, but it can move during stopped time, apparently due to its power to breach dimensional barriers. Also, if Johnny hits Diego even once with his inifinite rotation attack, Diego is instantly defeated.
Diego's main advantage is that Valentine warned him about this ahead of time, and Diego has a plan to counter the infinite rotation attack if it should come. And The World can still stop time before Johnny can get into range. It's too risky for The World to punch Johnny like it did to all the good guys back in Part 3. But Diego still has some tricks up his sleeve.
The climactic showdown happens on the Brooklyn Bridge, less than a kilometer from the finish line. Johnny tries to get at the very edge of Tusk's range, hoping that this will be far enough away that The World won't be able to reach him during a timestop. He fires, and Diego stops time, then approaches Johnny. While the World flanks Johnny's left, Diego pulls a gun to shoot him from the right.
Interestingly, Diego tries to just pull the trigger, but nothing happens. I think he knew the bullet wouldn't come out of the gun, but he expected the hammer to ignite the gunpowder, and it didn't work, so he has to do it with his hands and put it back in the gun.
I'm a little confused as to how this doesn't just kill Johnny immediately. I think the World didn't even hit him, he was just there to distract Johnny so Diego's gun would hit him. And it looks like Johnny gets shot in the neck, so you'd think that would be game over, except Johnny fires a bunch of nail bullets in response.
The spectators have no idea what just happened. From their point of view Johnny suddenly fell off his horse, and Diego dismounts to approach him. I guess no one saw Diego teleport off his horse with a loaded gun, but oh well.
Diego points out that he's gotten Johnny off his horse, which means he can't use his Infinite Rotation attack now. It's like that was the sole purpose of that attack, which is fine strategy indeed, but I feel like Diego is overlooking the part where he shot Johnny in the neck. It's like he knows that won't kill him.
And maybe it can't. We've seen Johnny get shot a few times. Valentine, Diego, and Wekapipo all shot him back in Philadelphia, and he just sort of shrugged it off. Valentine shot him again at the end of their conflict in New Jersey. And of course, Johnny shot himself in Gettysburg when he discovered Tusk Act III.
So it's possible that when Johnny gained the Act III power, he got a lot harder to kill. Act II let him move the holes from whatever he shot his nail bullets at, and Act III let him travel in and out of those holes. So maybe when you shoot Johnny he can just move the bullet wounds to somewhere less fatal.
Anyway, Johnny's not done just yet, because when he fired all those wild shots with his nail bullets, he wasn't aiming recklessly. He can't do the Infinite Rotation attack now, but he did earlier when his nail bullets hit the bridge, and since it's... y'know, infinite... it's still in play. Diego is aware of this, and he anticipates the attack to pursue him from the surfaces of the bridge.
Diego knows this is unstoppable, but he has a plan, and he's prepared to make the necessary sacrifice to prevail. When Tusk makes contact with the World's leg, Diego has the World attack its own leg, chopping it off before the spin can affect the rest of its body. This fucks up Diego's own leg, since damage to Stands is reflected upon their users. However, Diego can now knock the spin-affected leg of the World towards Johnny, which means he ends up taking the attack himself.
All of this was suggested by President Valentine when he first approached Diego to take over his scheme. Valentine knew Johnny's power was unbeatable, and yet Johnny had to be neutralized as a threat, so the only possible solution would be to turn Johnny's power against himself.
With that, Diego gets back on his horse and rides away, his right foot dangling gruesomely by a thread.
So Johnny's screwed now. He can't move or do much of anything, just like Valentine when he was in this same predicament. The one thing in Johnny's favor is that he could attack himself again to cancel out the effects, but he can't do it without a horse, and he can't get on his horse in this condition.
Meanwhile, Diego crosses the finish line and wins the race. He just keeps running to the church where the secret bunker is.
Valentine explained this part to him as well. The bunker was built to store the assembled Corpse, and once installed, a mechanism will lower it deep into an underground chamber, where it will be inaccessible to anyone for eighty years. Why eight years? Was Araki thinking about doing something with the Saint Coprse in 1981?
As the "owner" of the Saint Corpse, Diego would reap its blessings, but also the United States in general would receive its favor as well. Again, Valentine had hoped to enjoy this victory himself, but if he couldn't survive to see this, then at least he could ensure that someone else would.
This whole thing looks a little too science-fictiony for an 1890's facility, but oh well. It doesn't really matter anyway, since Diego has beaten or outlived everyone else involved in the hunt for the Saint Corpse. There's no one left to stop him, unless you count....
Lucy Steel! How did she get here?
Simple: Stephen Steel knew about this facilty, and he guessed its true purpose when he found out about Valentine's plans for the Saint Corpse. Diego realizes that Stephen Steel knows too much.
We then get the single worst looking panel in all of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Every time I see Lucy's overinflated boobs in this image, I feel like this was some sort of vandalism of the page. Like a mischevious fan edited this panel in Photoshop to give Lucy a weird, shelf-like bosom. Even if Diego was holding her upside down, this still wouldn't make any sense. Lucy's fourteen years old.
Anyway, she came here in case Johnny failed. She's been here all morning, waiting for Diego to show up.
Diego finds this laughable, since Lucy doesn't exactly have a Stand power or anything else to threaten him with. What she does have is a mysterious bundle, and Diego eventually grows curious enough to investigate it.
We flash back to the previous day, after Johnny went running off to chase after the thief who stole the Saint Corpse. Lucy then went further up the railroad track to find something. Her plan was to take the train to New York, beat the racers to Trinity Church, and be there when the thief arrived to secure his prize. And Lucy planned to be ready...
Turns out the bundle contains the head of the Diego from this universe, the one who died fighting Valentine back in Chapter 76. Lucy cut off the head and brought it along, having learned from Valentine that when people meet their alternate-universe selves, they annihilate one another.
Diego knows this too, as Valentine had assured him that his own duplicate was already dead and no threat to him. Diego probably never imagined that someone would bring parts of the dead Diego to him like this. And now that it's happened, he has no idea what to do. He stops time in a panic, but that only delays the inevitable. And he can't run very far because of his injured leg.
Diego tries to attack Lucy in desperation, but it's too late. The heads converge, and Dio dies, along with the World.
So one question that just occurred to me: How did Lucy know to do this? When Johnny left the Steels, they only knew the Saint Corpse had been stolen, and Johnny recognized the hoofprints as belonging to one of the other racers. He didn't suspect Diego because he was dead.
After he left, Lucy noticed the tracks came out of the ground, near where Valentine's body had disappeared, so she realized that the enemy had come from another universe, but how could she be sure it was Diego and not, say, Evil Pocoloco or something?
Well, maybe it was obvious. The only other riders with any knowledge of the Saint Corpse were Gyro and Hot Pants, and both of them had acted honorably towards Lucy. And she knew Valentine didn't trust any of his own associates with the secret, so maybe Diego was the only logical choice. And she was right, so maybe it's not so hard to connect the dots.
So where's Stephen Steel been during all of this? Well, he went to help Johnny. He rides up and pulls Johnny onto his own horse, which will allow Johnny to use the Inifnite Rotation on himself and undo his affliction. This immediately disqualifies Johnny from the Steel Ball Run race, by the way. The rules clearly state that you have to ride the whole way on one horse, so getting on this other horse is a no-no.
But again, Johnny never cared about winning the race or even defeating Diego. He just wanted to put an end to this whole affair, and while he didn't quite succeed on his own, his rescue of the Steels did bring him some valuable allies when he needed them the most. Maybe the real prize of the Steel Ball Run was the friends we made along the way.
Well, no, the real prize of the Steel Ball Run race was like 50 or 60 million dollars. They bumped up the amount somewhere near the end. And despite Diego's apparent victory, he was later disqualified when they couldn't find him after the race. His horse was discovered on the side of the road, and I sort of wonder if anyone ever found the other Silver Bullet, the one the original Diego Brando rode into battle against Valentine the day before. The existence of two identical horses would surely raise some suspicions.
Anyway, with Diego and Johnny disqualified, who the hell won the race? Pocoloco, of course. Despite all the twists and turns in his performance, he really did have one-in-five-billion luck on his side after all. All he had to do was stay in the game and wait for all the big shots in this story to eliminate one another.
The first time I read Part 7, I found it strange how Pocoloco started out like a major part of the cast, only to fade into the background over the course of the story. I expected him to be part of the good guy team, like how Hot Pants was sort of an ally at times. Or maybe he could have become an enemy like Sandman. But instead he just quietly won the race.
I think Pocoloco's presence in the story doesn't really fit the typical character arc because he was more of an illustration of the concept of "flow" and "luck" in Part 7. Valentine was trying to use the Saint Corpse to control the distribution of good fortune in the world, directing good things towards himself and the United States, while sending misfortune and calamity to everywhere else. He was trying to disrupt the natural course of probability, and that's what made him evil. He wanted to rig the game.
By contrast, Pocoloco didn't have to do anything to become incredibly lucky. It just happened, and he decided to make the most of it. That's how luck is supposed to work. You can't earn it or achieve it. It's random chance. Someone had to be the luckiest man in the world, and it might as well be Pocoloco.
So perhaps it's fitting that Pocoloco triumphed while Valentine failed. Maybe it was Pocoloco's luck that kept their paths from crossing. Valentine might have been able to use Love Train to steal his luck, or maybe Pocoloco's luck was too strong for that, which is why he never ran afoul of Valentine in the first place. Pocoloco was so lucky that he managed to steer clear of any involvement in the Saint Corpse, so he could just run the race normally while the competition all got themselves eliminated.
Second place goes to Norisuke Higashikata, who would use his winnings to go into the fruit parlor business, which would continue to prosper 120 years later in JoJolion.
Sloop John B won the prize for finishing the Final Stage before the rest, so he got a hefty cash prize for that. I was watching a Hamon Beat video discussing every contestant in the SBR, and he was kind of hard on Sloop John B because he had such a low score on points. Basically he comes off as a crappy jockey, who only placed as well as he did because so many other racers dropped out or died.
But in his defense, that's the point of the race. It's not just who racks up the most points, or logs the best time. Baba Yaga was in the running for a while, then his horse got injured near the end and he had to drop out. Both Diegos had a clear shot at winning, but they took their eyes off the (steel) ball (run) and got killed over the Saint Corpse.
Sloop John B survived to the very end. Only 39 racers finished the race and he was one of them.
Wait, I'm sorry, I had Sloop John B mixed up with Nellyville, who finished fifth with a really low score. Well, same thing. He finished the race, and 98% of the competition can't say the same. Same deal for Georgie Porgie, who had pretty much the same performance. Yeah, Gyro might have scored more points but he's dead, so there you go.
So what happens to the Saint Corpse? Well, Stephen decides that it's best to just leave it in this bunker, now that only he, Lucy, and Johnny know about it. With Diego and Valentine dead, there's no longer anyone who "owns" the corpse, so it shouldn't have any more undue effect on the distribution of good fortune.
He observes that Diego, in the end, was not "qualified" to own the Corpse. This seems to catch Lucy's interest.
Her reaction on this page has long fascinated me. At first I thought she had somehow deceived Stephen. The chamber was open when she confronted Diego, and here it's locked, so I thought maybe she hid the Corpse without telling him, or did something else with it. But that was contradicted by events shown in Part 8. In 1901, Johnny comes back to New York to steal the Saint Corpse, and Lucy chases him to Japan to retrieve it and put it back where it belongs.
Now that I look it over again, I think Lucy has suddenly realized that she is qualified to become the owner of the Corpse. She survived Valentine, and killed Diego, who defeated Johnny, so maybe that proves something after all? I'm not sure the Corpse works that way, but it doesn't seem to matter much. Lucy apparently just finds the idea amusing. If she is worthy to own the Saint Corpse, she's willing to walk away from it, which might be the thing that makes her the worthiest of all.
As for Johnny, he boards a ship heading east. The customs officials are the same guys we saw officiating the race, but that was just a temp job for them. They object to Johnny bringing Gyro's corpse aboard the ship, but Johnny insists upon taking his friend back to Naples for a proper burial in his homeland. And he does spinny stuff to the casket so there's nothing they can do about it.
Also on board is fellow SBR racer Norisuke Higashikata, and his daughter, Rina. At least, I'm pretty sure that's Rina. The lore in Part 8 establishes that Johnny fell in love with her during this voyage, and their descendants became the protagonists of Parts 8 and 9. Norsiuke's son fathered the Higashikata family in Part 8, and hopefully they don't show up in Part 9 because I kind of hate them all. I'm pretty sure they can't legally appear in JoJoLands because Haato didn't have a passport to travel to Hawaii.
Johnny reflects on his journey across North America and recalls praying a lot along the way. Praying for good weather, favorable river crossings, and so on. He decides to pray again for a safe trip to Naples.
Pray to whom, Johnny? Pray to whoooom? Ah, never mind.
Johnny says that several years later, another coup takes place in Naples, and this time it's successful. The monarchy is abolished, and that kid Marco whom Gyro was trying to save ends up getting set free after all. Then he dies of a cold. Whoops.
The Zeppeli family then moved to some other country. I'm not sure what to make of this, but oh well.
And that's it. Part 7 is over.
Looking back, I think this is a solid Part, but it can't touch Parts 2, or 3, which are my favorites. If anything, I think reading JoJo comics these past few years has renewed my appreciation for Part 1. I should probably revise my ranking system at some point.
I can respect the sheer scope of Part 7. It was the longest Part before JoJolion surpassed it. And even if Part 8 was longer, it was all set in the same town, while Part 7 spanned the breadth of the United States. Johnny Joestar is from my home state of Kentucky, which I appreciate. The scenery is breathtaking and the western aesthetic is unique and appealing.
But I find the treatment of Lucy Steel throughout the story to be rather disgusting. Araki can't seem to decide if she's an innocent child or a sex symbol, and I really don't like watching the story waver between the two. And the noncommittal use of Jesus Christ is just baffling to me. It just feels like a waste of good lore. It'd be like having Superman guest star in a story and he just takes a nap through the whole thing and no one mentions him being there. What's the point?
I've occasionally questioned my appreciation for the early JoJo Parts, but having gone through Parts 4, 6, and 7 recently, I can see there were significant problems that I just can't overlook. Some of the Stand battles are just ridiculously bad, to the point of being nonsensical. And it feels like the final battles of the later Parts keep trying to steer clear of the iconic Jotaro/Dio battle, only to end up becoming needlessly convoluted. They're entertaining, and often good, but they feel less satisfying overall.
I think Part 8 might have jumped up to 3rd or 4th place in my rankings, just because it went down a lot smoother when I finally read the whole thing in one month. Maybe the Part 7 anime might improve my opinion of the whole thing.
But yeah, that's pretty much it for now. One of these years I'll check out Part 9, but I think that's gonna be a long ways off...
mfw all the anime-only JoJo fans thank me for not spoiling the secret of the "High Voltage" arc.
The rest of you sickos can join me under the cut. All bets are off.
Okay, quick note about the D4C battle and its impact on the state of New Jersey. Apparently that whole bit about the land converging upon Lucy Steel's position was literal, and also permanent. I sort of figured it was some bullshit that goes away after the battle ends, like how Polnareff grew back some fingers after the Vanilla Ice fight, or Stephen Steel getting shot thirty chapters ago and being totally fine now. Anyway, this map shows the part of New Jersey that was altered by the incident.
Last time, Johnny defeated President Valentine once and for all. We're just sort of tidying up loose ends at this point.
Before he died, Valentine tried to cut a deal with Johnny. It was just a failed attempt at a distraction, but he did give Johnny one of Hot Pants' Cream Starter spray devices. These things are literally HP's Stand, and she's been dead for a while now, but apparently Cream Starter just exists as a physical object independent of its user. Anyway, Johnny uses this to reattach his severed left hand, and he also fixes his horse's neck.
I'm assuming he used it to fix up Stephen Steel, since he seems to be totally fine now.
What I want to know is: What happened to the other Cream Starter spray device? Hot Pants had two of them. Maybe one was annihilated during her encounter with the alternate universe Hot Pants, but I doubt it. And what happens to this one after the story is over? Does someone just take it and become the new Hot Pants?
Anyway, Johnny is tying up the Saint Corpse so it won't get away again, and Stephen gives a (platonic) hug to his underage wife. I think she's okay after all of this. Valentine mentioned that Johnny could use Cream Starter on her injuries as well, but I'm not sure she actually had any.
Also, Johnny can stand up and walk. The last time we saw him try this, his legs couldn't support his weight. I'm noting this here because I always forget at what point in the story Johnny manages to walk again. Well, it's here in Chapter 90.
As far as how he regained the use of his legs, I'm pretty sure the advancements in his Spin technique had something to do with it. From the beginning, Gyro warned Johnny that the Steel Ball itself wasn't the solution to his problems. Gyro couldn't just chuck a ball at him and fix him in one shot. Nor did he ever promise that Johnny would be able to fix himself once he learned enough from Gyro.
I'm also reluctant to give any credit to the Saint Corpse. Maybe repeated exposures to the Corpse's weird powers had some sort of theraputic effect on Johnny, but he seemed to make the most dramatic progress in Philadelphia, when he had no Corpse Parts. The Corpse gave Johnny his Stand, but Johnny didn't lose the Stand when the Corpse was taken away.
I suppose I could propose a fringe theory that Johnny could walk all along, but his paralysis was psychosomatic, or he just needed the race to motivate him to rebuild those muscles. That sounds kind of cheap, like those fan theories about every TV show being a coma dream of one character in the hospital. Newhart and St. Elsewhere pulled that kind of stunt over thirty-five years ago.
So the only conclusion I can reasonably draw is that Johnny got some sort of therapy out of practicing the Spin techniques. As he moved on to more advanced lessons, his mobility improved. Now, at the end, he's able to walk on his own, and this happens just after he used the horse-assisted "infinite rotation" technique that even Gyro had never seen before
Anyway, I really like his line about how he expected this moment to be more dramatic, but it's like a full moon. "The thing itself is... kinda unconcerned about it." It's a subtle kind of thing, which is probably why I forgot when this happens. Also, and maybe it's just me, but I find it easy to forget that Johnny couldn't walk. Araki usually draws him seated or on horseback, but something about the composition always fools me into thinking he's standing up like anyone else.
Johnny isn't sure what to do next, although he definitely wants to recover Gyro's body before it gets carried out to sea, and return it to Naples for burial. Then he can tell Gyro's family about how good a race he ran in the USA. But he isn't too concerned about his own standing in the SBR race, since he never cared about the race to begin with. He only entered to shadow Gyro, and then later he stayed in it to gather the Corpse parts. Well, Gyro's dead and the Corpse is recovered, so Johnny's race appears to be run.
They notice the other racers passing by, and Stephen realizes his own dream of a transcontinental race is about to come true. Despite all his planning, he never dared to imagine that he'd actually get to see the closing ceremony. And it certainly hasn't turned out the way he envisioned.
Well, with all that settled, I guess it's time to wrap this up and... Aw dammit, the Saint Corpse is gone again! Johnny you had one job!
Tracking the thief won't be too hard. Johnny even recognizes the horse tracks as belonging to one of the SBR racers. The problem is, who else would even know enough about the Saint Corpse to try to steal it, and how would they know to find it here? Valentine, Gyro, Diego, Hot Pants, Sandman, and anyone else involved with the Saint Corpse are all dead. Who's left?
Johnny's only choice is to follow the tracks and find out, but before he goes, Stephen Steel gives him a tip: Before the race began, President Valentine had some sort of bunker built in New York City, which just so happens to be at the finish line of the 9th Stage of the race. Now that Stephen knows about the Saint Corpse and Valentine's intentions for it, he's certain that Valentine planned to store the Corpse in that bunker, so the thief must be taking the Corpse there for the same purpose.
So wouldn't you know it, Johnny's still in the Steel Ball Run race, because he and the guy he's chasing are headed for the same building at the end of the race route. He asks Lucy to search for Gyro's remains and look after Gyro's horse, and then hauls ass for Union Beach, where the 8th Stage ends.
I'm not sure who's doing the live commentary for the race at this point. We haven't reached New York yet, so maybe there's a crowd at Union Beach too. Anyway, Pocoloco, Norisuke Higashikata, and Baba Yaga are the three main guys left to beat at this point. Well, scratch Baba Yaga, his horse just got injured near the end of the 8th Stage, so he's out of the running. Apparently he ran it too hard and now he's paying the price.
Johnny catches up to Pocoloco and Norisuke Higashikata, but he can tell neither of their tracks match the thief he's after. So who does that leave? By this point, there's only a few dozen riders in the race, and none of them make much sense as suspects.
I also wanted to point out that Pocoloco does show up a few more times in these final chapters of the story. I thought his appearance in Chapter 55 was the last we see of him, but that is the last time he gets any lines of dialogue. After that he just appears long enough to remind the audience that he's still in the race.
Okay, but if he's not the thief, who is? Well, about that. You might want to ask Kakyoin, because he knows a thing or two about this particular guy. And his name is...
...
...
...
ZA WARUDO!
Hell fucking yeah! The World is back, baby! The best Stand ever, and he's here in Part 7 to stop time and chew bubblegum, and he's all out of bubblegum.
But wait, that's Diego Brando with the World. But he's dead! And besides, Diego's Stand is Scary Monsters. What's going on here?!
We get a flashback to explain this. While Valentine was trying to recover from Johnny's infinite rotation attack, he traveled to other parallel universes hoping to jump to a new body. This didn't work, and so he eventually returned to the "base" universe to try to negotiate with Johnny instead. But before returning to face Johnny, he tracked down a parallel universe where Diego Brando was still alive and close enough for Valentine to flag him down.
Valentine quickly explained his situation to this alt-Diego. He lost to Johnny Joestar, and he wasn't sure he could survive, but he couldn't allow the Saint Corpse to fall out of the hands of the United States. So Valentine asked this alt-Diego to go back to the "base" universe and complete Valentine's plan.
Why Diego? Well, beggars can't be choosers for one thing. Valentine admitted that he didn't trust Diego, but he recognized Diego's ruthless ambition, and that's what he needed in that moment. Diego could be relied upon to take the Corpse and secure it in the New York bunker, simply to benefit himself. And in turn, this would benefit the United States, so Valentine's plan would be satisfied at the same time.
Anyway, this alternate Diego has a different Stand, the World, and he talked to Valentine long enough to know what to do with the Corpse and how to deal with Johnny's powers.
After Johnny's first disastrous encounter with the World, he gets knocked off his horse, but he quickly puts everything together. This was Valentine's contingency plan if he couldn't kill Johnny or trick him into cancelling the Infinite Rotation effect. So Johnny has to beat Diego to put an end to this once and for all.
There is something to be said for this twist. We haven't really seen it in before in JoJo, mainly because the bad guys are to self-absorbed to even consider defeat. Kira was only serving his own sick gratification, and Diavolo was defending his own power base by keeping his identity a secret. Father Pucci was carrying out one of Dio's schemes after his death, but I think we can all agree that Dio never intended for this, and he would have carried out that plan personally if he hadn't gotten killed. Kars betrayed his entire species to become the Ultimate Life Form. He certainly wasn't going to make a spare mask just in case he got blasted into space.
But Valentine is concerned with the prosperity of the United States, so his twisted patriotism can accept dying, so long as his goals are met. Ironically, handing everything over to Diego sounds like a really terrible thing to do to his own country. I mean, you know that's how it would go down, right? Diego would use the Saint Corpse to become King of America or something. Or he might rule in secret, or whatever, but he would dominate the entire country, at the expense of its people.
Because Diego is selfish, and has no particular love of the USA or any other nation. Valentine seems to think the Saint Corpse will bring some sort of good fortune to the United States even after he's dead, but I don't think that would work so well under Diego's command.
And perhaps that's the final word on Valentine as a character. He's just as selfish and cruel as Dio, but he refuses to admit it. Valentine says this is all about the good of his country, but he's hurt and killed a lot of people to make this plan work, and now he's empowering a second Diego to rule in his place. He cares more about his precious plan than he does about his people.
So let's take a look at the race standings, because why not? Those hour time bonuses from the earlier stages had confused me, but it turns out those hours are deducted at the 8th Stage, specifically so they won't complicate the outcome of the 9th. The winner of the final stage will get a prize, but the overall winner of the race will be determined by points alone.
Only four of the contestants can win the overall race: Pocoloco, Diego Brando, Norisuke Higashikata, and Johnny Joestar. Everyone else is too low on points to take the top score, even if they got the 100 points for finishing first on the final stage.
From Union Beach, there's a bunch of boats to carry the riders across the Atlantic from New Jersey to New York. I'm not sure why they didn't just use an overland route, but part of the idea here is that this is kind of a reset for the final leg of the race. Regardless of how late everyone arrives at Union Beach, they all go to New York together, and they all ride the final 15km together.
This irritates Johnny, as he's only trying to catch up to Diego, but he can't convince the officials to make his boat go faster, so his only choice is to chill the fuck out and wait the two hours it takes to make the crossing. While he's waiting, Johnny catches a fish and eats it on the deck.
Okay, you might be sick of me bringing up Jesus all the time, but hear me out. This scene of Johnny's little fish fry here reminds me of John chapter 21, where Peter and some of the disciples go fishing after Jesus' curcifixion, and then they meet the resurrected Jesus at shore. They have a miraculous catch of 153 fish, and Jesus calls them over so he can cook them breakfast.
I always liked that story, because Jesus is just sort of chilling out and has a fire set up with charcoal so he can grill up some fish for his hungry guys. We all all each of us his hungry guys. Why does this panel feel more Gospel-accurate than any of the pages featuring Jesus himself? I don't know. Do horses like fish? Maybe Johnny gave Slow Dancer some oats earlier. Maybe some sugar cubes, or an apple. I'm not sure what horses like to eat, but Slow Dancer's earned a treat.
Finally, the boat reaches land, and Johnny hauls ass to catch Diego. As he begins, he notices a man shoving his way to the front of the crowd. It's Johnny's dad, and he brought Nicholas' old boots. This was what they had been fighting over when he disowned Johnny and they never saw each other again. So the meaning is obvious. At long last, George Joestar has come to cheer on his son.
After Johnny passes by, George explains himself to the crowd around him. He says he mistreated his son for years, and when he heard about Johnny's performance in the race, he realized just how wrong he had been, so he came all this way to show his support, for whatever that's still worth. Everyone claps for him, but I'm not sure why, since George's story is mostly about him being a huge asshole.
Although I guess it does kind of resemble the parable of the Prodigal Son, even if the father and son are reversed. You see... Okay, I'll stop now.
Back to business, Johnny is still trying to figure out how to defeat Diego once he catches up to him. He has to get within range for his nail bullets to have any effect, but if he gets too close, Diego will stop time and kick his ass. So Johnny opts to keep his distance and wait for an opening, except...
Wires! Diego knows Johnny is after him, so he's been setting up traps along the way. I guess the World could do this during stopped time, but it seems like a lot of work. Johnny can use Tusk to blast the walls the wires are anchored to, but that just keeps him from getting killed. He still gets knocked off his horse.
Johnny uses Tusk's Act III ability to make a hole follow after Diego, and then Tusk's arm reaches out to grab him as he rounds the corner. Diego stops time and prepares to chop the arm off of Tusk, except Tusk can move in stopped time. This freaks Diego the fuck out, and he realizes that Johnny's Stand is more dangerous than he thought.
Apparently the inifnite rotation not only allows Johnny's attacks to penetrate dimensional barriers like D4C's but also the time-dilation effects of the World. Or maybe those two phenomena are aspects of the same thing. Either way, it's kind of a standoff. Johnny can't risk getting too close to Diego, and Diego can't risk getting too close to Johnny.
So Diego's next attack involves tossing gasoline all over Johnny, then throwing lit matches at him. But Johnny uses Tusk to descend into the sewers below the street, which will (somehow) help him douse the flames, as well as let him close in on Diego without being seen.
This chase leads to the Brooklyn Bridge, and I guess Johnny has to make his play before they get there, since I'm pretty sure they didn't put a sewer line under the bridge.
Diego counters by stopping around a crowd of women and letting them surround him. When Tusk appears to get his ass, he stops time so he can escape. All Tusk attacks are innocent fangirls, who explode for some reason.
So Johnny has to surface and follow Diego onto the bridge. He estimates that Diego can only stop time for five seconds, so if he can get within five seconds of Diego and shoot, there's less chance of Diego being able to counterattack in stopped time. It's not much of a plan, honestly.
Diego has already scouted Johnny's intentions, and he's prepared to make a "sacrifice" to counter the Infinite Rotation. What could he mean?
At last, Johnny takes aim and fires, and Diego stops time. And we'll find out what happens next time, in the thrilling conclusion of Steel Ball Run. Doncha dare miss it!
"Hi, everyone. This is The World, and I just wanted to thank you all for the warm reception. I know my user is a real prick, but I'd like to say that it's a real honor to be asked to come back for JoJo Part 7. Everyone has been super nice, and they even let me pet the horses.
"Whenever I stop time, or punch holes in people, I always think about how fortunate I am to have such a wonderful job doing what I love, and I owe that all to you. Thank you so much, and until next time, 'za Warurdo!' Ha ha! Love you all!"
Steel Ball Run has pushed my suspension of disbelief to its absolute limit, but two things I refuse to accept are:
That anyone knows anything about the 'Rotatioooooon'
That an unconscious Lucy Steel managed to stay on Gyro's horse through this entire battle.
All right, so last time, Gyro was preparing a final assault on President Valentine. The strategy is the same: The boys can't hit him through the reality warping effects of "Love Train", but if they attack while riding their horses just right, they might be able to punch through. Johnny lost a hand in the last attempt, so Gyro's trying to improve his odds by luring Valentine into the water.
The problem is that Valentine has already figured out that the horses are key to whatever Johnny and Gyro have been trying to do. So all Valentine has to do is attack Gyro's horse before Gyro can strike. And Johnny has figured this out, which is why he's trying to warn Gyro now.
But it doesn't really change anything, because Gyro has no Plan B. Valentine uses his power to jump to alternate realities and he brings back some more duplicate selves to help him fight. This puts Gyro in a bind, because he only has one shot, and he has to hit the "base" Valentine to defeat the Stand. The other Valentines are just cannon fodder, and if he picks the wrong one, or takes too long to decide, they'll injure his horse and spoil his shot.
Johnny shouts to Gyro that the "base" Valentine is missing an ear. Gyro lopped it off with an earlier attempt at Super Deluxe Golden Ratio. That's how Valentine figured out that the horse is key to the attack. But that does Gyro no good, as the alternate Valentines can switch bodies. Only one of them has D4C, and that's the one he needs to attack. Hey wait a minute...!
Gyro finally realizes he just needs to attack the Stand, since the damage will harm the User, i.e. the "base" Valentine. Valentine retreats into the "light field" of Love Train, but it does no good. the Steel Ball follows them inside, I think.
Then it turns into a Stand? Now, wait, the Stand emerges from the Steel Ball. The Ball remains outside of the Light Screen and this guy passes through. This is Ball Breaker, and yeah, we did see this Stand briefly when Gyro took an x-ray of Ringo Roadagain's house. The JoJo wiki states that Ball Breaker didn't debut until Chapter 87, but the same design was used back in 35. This was undoubtedly a side-effect of the Corpse Eye that Gyro was using at the time, but now Ball Breaker has manifested on its own.
This always confused me, because it doesn't stick around long enough to be that memorable in the story, so whenever I'd hear about "Gyro's Stand", I'd get mixed up because he has no Stand for 90% of the story. And as far as I can tell, he doesn't even know about Ball Breaker himself. It only shows up briefly, and only Valentine gets to see it, and no one else has any reaction to the thing.
I'm pretty sure it's only named "Ball Breaker" to give it a name. Gyro certainly never had a chance to name it. But nevertheless, it's here.
The important detail is that Gyro's ultra-incredible Golden Rotation technique has led to the manifestation of a Stand. This is sort of an inversion of Johnny mastering Spin and gaining a Stand around the same time. There was a connection between all of these things--Spin, Stands, the miracles of the Saint Corpse, and the "Flow" of luck--but the relationships were never entirely clear. Gyro could see Stands despite not being a Stand user himself, so it seemed likely that he could become a Stand user later on.
And now he has. By perfecting his Spin technique to this extent, he's unlocked his latent Stand ability, which has the power to penetrate Valentine's ability to alter his fortunes.
This also kind of explains how Gyro's previous attempts resulted in the Steel Ball getting hair or ears stuck to its surface. Ball Breaker comes out of the Steel Ball during one of these special throws. On those earlier tries, it probably couldn't reach as far into the Light Screen, so the best it could do was to grab whatever it could. Now it's all in, and while I'm not clear on what it's doing, it appears to age the left side of Valentine's body.
As the attack ends, the two Valentine duplicates try to jump in, but Zeppeli takes them out with ease, because all they've got are guns. Gyro beats them with that same trick he used on the gunfighter from the beginning of the story. Always a crowdpleaser.
So Gyro just won the big one, right? Well, not quite. Valentine, the "base" one with D4C, gets right back up.
Valentine's left side is still decrepit, but he claims to be one step ahead. And Gyro is wounded, so apparently he managed to get some kind of hit during that last exchange. The problem is that the wound is moving towards Gyro's heart, like we saw with previous wounds ever since this Love Train bullshit started. Gyro might be able to try a second attack, but he could very well die in the attempt. There definitely won't be a third try.
Faced with this dilemma, Gyro calls out to Johnny and tells him "Lesson 5". Johnny is confused.
Lesson 5 is that the best shortcuts they took in this race ended up being the detours. Gyro always wanted to take the most direct routes possible to save time, but that often brought him more trouble than he bargained for, like when he tried to ford that lake instead of going around. Also, they deviated from the race course several times in pursuit of Coprse Parts. And despite all that, they managed to stay in top contention.
And this is all true, but that's not really what Gyro is trying to tell Johnny here. Lessons 1-4 were about Spin technique, so Gyro thanking Johnny for showing him how to race smarter instead of harder? Well, that's just a nonsequitur. Or is it?
While Johnny tries to make sense of that, Gyro attacks again. Same result. Ball Breaker penetrates the Love Train field, Valentine is horrified by this power, but he knows he can withstand it, and he's pretty sure Gyro knows it too.
And while Valentine endures the attack, D4C lands a fatal blow on Gyro, finishing him off.
What went wrong? Well, during the fight, part of the Steel Ball's surface got scraped off. Gyro's horse was running right, and his throw was perfect, but the Steel Ball itself was no longer perfectly spherical, which reduced the potency of the attack. This was apparently sufficient to manifest the Ball Breaker Stand, but the Stand's effectiveness was limited. Ball Breaker could hurt Valentine, but not kill him.
According to Valentine, this happened because the Steel Ball briefly passed through one of the light screens produced from Lucy's body. I don't understand how this works, since the whole point of Gyro's attacks is to penetrate the light screens and hit the target. But maybe he's referring one of the times Gyro attacked before he got the hang of it. Like when he stopped Valentine from killing Johnny.
Except he says it was specifically because Gyro had Lucy riding on his horse, so that could only work for the throws he made during this arc. Maybe Gyro still doesn't have the knack for this technique, or maybe it just can't be done with Steel Balls.
Anyway, Gyro doesn't have to worry about that anymore, because he falls off his horse and dies.
Gyro becomes very upset, and has a flashback montage of all the time he spent with Gyro over the course of this race. In particular, we get this scene where the boys took Lucy back to Kansas City, and Gyro insisted that she couldn't ride his horse because he took a vow about it. Johnny asked him why he wouldn't allow women on his horse, and Gyro explains that it's for the Goddess of Victory. If he allowed women on his horse, Lady Luck would get jealous and forsake him.
Which... I guess turned out to be true. Gyro broke his vow when he carried Lucy away from Valentine, and then he lost. Or did he?
Gyro mentioned the tennis ball hitting the net, which his dad used to bring up all the time. In those kinds of situations, it could literally go either way, so you want to have a "goddess" on your side.
Anyway, in the here and now, Valentine picks up one of the guns used by his duplicates and shoots every bullet into Gyro's corpse, just to be sure.
Anyway, Johnny goes wild and tries to fight Valentine, who is also eager to eliminate Johnny. But Johnny keeps shooting when he isn't ready. I think that may be because he knows he's short on time. He's hoping he'll just luck out and shoot a nail bullet right when the horse is in the perfect position.
But then Valentine finally wounds the horse on the neck, and Johnny eats shit.
As Valentine closes in for the kill, Johnny realizes he's fucked. He only has one fingernail left to shoot, and without the horse to aid his rotation, it's useless. So all he can do is wonder what Gyro was trying to tell him with that "Lesson 5" thing.
The he finally figures it out.
It was a callback to "Lesson 1", when Johnny first met Gyro. The rotational energies of the Steel Ball somehow caused Johnny's legs to move, but Gyro called this a simple reflex.
So Johnny uses the Steel Ball he picked up from earlier, and throws it at his fallen horse, which makes it kick Johnny into the air.
And that gives Johnny the rotational energy he needs to complete his attack. They were focused on riding the horses to get this boost, but there's more than one way to get it. Alternately, I suppose we could describe this as Johnny transferring Golden Rotation into the Steel Ball, then into the horse, then back into Johnny, who can now stack than into the Golden Rotation he's about to use for his next nail bullet.
So yeah, the best shortcut, but it's a hell of a detour. Or as Johnny calls it, a "Roundabout Path".
To Valentine's horror, something very similar happens with this shot, except Johnny already had a Stand, and now it's evolved to a higher level. This is Tusk Act IV, and it just pulls the light screen open and forces its way in.
Valentine's like "Oh no! What's this Stand going to do to me?" Well, it's a JoJo, so here's a hint:
Get ORA'ed, idiot!
Valentine goes down hard, but he's not completely out of this fight! Remember, he can just vanish between his coat and the ground and travel to another dimension, where he can swap bodies with another Valentine in a different universe.
Only, it doesn't matter. Valentine arrives in the other universe to find himself buried under the ground. He manages to pull himself out and finds his counterpart just in time to save himself, but before the restored Valentine can do anything both he and D4C became completely distorted from the infinite rotation effects of Johnny's attack.
I'm running out of room here, but suffice to say that Valentine keeps trying to switch to a new body, only to end up with the same result. His Stand has been affected by Johnny's attack, so changing bodies makes no difference, since the "base" Valentine always receives the Stand, and the Stand can't get rid of the affliction.
If Valentine tries to get clear of the spot where he was defeated, the rotation just forces him back to that spot. If he switches bodies, the new body is forced back to the same spot. If he stays in that location, he'll be buried alive, because apparently the "base" universe is the only one where this spot is exposed to the air.
Of course, he could try returning to his original universe, but Johnny's there waiting for him to come back, so he can finish his ass off. I'm not sure how well Johnny understands what Valentine is experiencing, but he knows Valentine has to return, because this is where the Saint Corpse is.
I'm not clear on the passage of time in this scene. Johnny waits here long enough for his fingernails to grow back, but that time interval varies depending on which level he's at. Tusk Act IV might have accelerated his fingernail regeneration for all I know.
But it feels like Valentine gets to spend a lot more time in the alternate universes. My guess is that no matter what he does in those parallel worlds, he always returns to the "base" world shortly after he left.
Valentine even has time to experience a flashback to his childhood, when a soldier visited him to explain how his father died. He was captured by an enemy during a war. I'm guessing the Mexican-American War based on the date on the handkerchief, which is Funny Valentine's birthday. According to the soldier, Funny's dad was tortured for information, but he didn't break, and the handkerchief gave him the strength to endure it. He wrote Funny's birthday on it as a momento, so it reminded him of what he was doing this for.
To prevent the enemy from finding it, he gouged out his own injured eye, and crammed the handkerchief inside the socket. You'd think they would have searched there, since according to the story the enemy searched all of his other bodily cavities, including his anus. My point is this is a pretty fucked up story to tell a kid.
Anyway, this sheds some light on Valentine's character, since he was impressed at an early age by his dad's patriotism. Even animals will risk their lives to save their children, but Funny's dad was willing to die for his country, because of how much he believed it would benefit his son.
The story galvanizes Funny's resolve. And he still has the handkerchief, even as he's buried alive in another universe.
So Valentine returns to the "base" universe and tries to cut a deal. He admits that Johnny has defeated him, but asks Johnny to attack him again with the spin going the opposite way, in order to cancel out the effect. In exchange, Valentine will use D4C to bring another, living Gyro from another universe, so Johnny can have his friend back.
Valentine also promises (on his father's handkerchief) not to seek revenge against Johnny or his friends. See, this is what I was trying to get at with the Saint Corpse earlier. Okay, bear with me for a second.
Incidentally, the Saint Corpse has separated from Lucy's body. I guess she's going back to normal because of Valentine's defeat? I don't know. So I guess it's fitting that I'm going to talk about the Corpse again. All right.
So the Saint Coprse is Jesus Christ's dead body. This is supposed to signify that it's a big honkin' deal. I find it amusing that this has never been mentioned since the Corpse's identity was confirmed in Chapter 67. "Yeah, it's definitely Jesus' dead body, and we shall never speak of this again."
Throughout the last twenty-odd chapters, the Corpse is just a "Magic Doohickey", and it kind of doesn't matter what it is or where it came from. It might as well be those diamonds they're fighting over in the alternate universe versions of this story. And that bugs me because why introduce the Jesus element to the lore if you're not going to do anything with it.
Valentine's handkerchief is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Araki sets up the backstory of it. It's not just a handkerchief. It belonged to Valentine's father and it's a symbol of what his father stood for in life and of what Valentine is fighting for. So when Valentine explains this to Johnny and swears by the handkerchief, it actually means something as a gesture. In a few short pages, Araki establishes that the handkerchief is sacred to Valentine.
The Saint Corpse never gets that kind of treatment. It's left to the reader to recognize Jesus Christ as a religious figure and insert their own understanding of his significance. You would think Valentine might swear by Jesus, or at least on his Corpse. But neither of these things is truly sacred to him. And this might be a telling aspect of Valentine's character, except Jesus doesn't appear to be sacred to anyone else in the story either. The attitude seems to be "Yep, that's Jesus' corpse. Wow, that's a big deal, huh?" and nothing else.
And that wouldn't be a problem in itself. The other JoJo Parts establish "sacred" people and objects for the characters to fight and die over. Erina's honor, the statue in Joestar mansion, the Red Stone of Aja, Holly Kujo, Josuke's hair, Remi's unsolved murder, Giorno's dream, Jotaro's DISC, and so on.
It's just that it's strange to me that Valentine's handkerchief gets better narrative treatment than the Saint Corpse, which is central to the entire story. It feels like watching Star Trek V, if all of the characters wanted to find God, but they didn't actually want to meet God or talk to him or anything. Just chart the planet he's supposed to be on and go home.
All right, back to the matter at hand. Johnny wants to be convinced that Valentine is really on the level. This isn't some Goku bullshit where he'll let the bad guy go so he can have a better fight later. Johnny wants to be sure. So Valentine explains why the Saint Corpse has to be in the hands of the United States. He feels it can't be trusted with any other nation. He used the Steel Ball Run race to locate the Corpse Parts because he knew there'd be a conflict over the Corpse, and this way it could be settled in a transcontinental race instead of a war.
Johnny is also particularly touched by Valentine's regard for his father. Valentine claims he has explored other universes to find a version of his dad who survived his captivity, but he hasn't been successful. Johnny admits that if he had that kind of power, it would never occur to him to track down his estranged dad. Well, yeah, yours is still alive, Johnny. You can see him whenever you want, you just don't. That's how estrangement works.
Anyway, Johnhy appears to be mostly convinced that Valentine might actually be in the right of all of this. He's the President, he was winning for much of the story, if Jesus was against Valentine's plan, he would have stopped him by now, right? Of course, Valentine tried to rape Lucy, which I think is disqualifying by itself, but Johnny didn't see that part.
Nevertheless, Johnny says that even though he's 100% convinced, he wants to be 101% convinced. So he finds the gun that Valentine used to shoot Gyro and asks him to pick it up as a test.
See that gun came from another parallel universe. If it should happen to come too close to its duplicate from a different parallel universe, it would be drawn towards it and they'd both be destroyed. But that shouldn't matter right now. If Valentine picks up this gun, nothing should happen.
I mean, if he was hiding a duplicate of the gun on his person, that'd be a problem. The gun would suddenly fly out of his pocket or whatever, and converge with that gun on the ground. Then Valentine would be exposed as a dirty liar, and his promises would be revealed as worthless double-dealing. But that's crazy talk. When has the President of the United States ever lied about anything?
And Johnny is aware of all this. It's silly really. But if Valentine humors him and picks up the gun, then he'll know for sure, and they can be pals. New Gyro, the Saint Corpse is controlled by the U.S. government, everyone wins! Oh, and Valentine gave Johnny one of Hot Pants' Cream Starter sprays to heal himself and his horse. Just pick up the gun, Valentine. Everything will be cool.
Yeah, Valentine had a gun hidden under his coat. I guess he got one in one of the other parallel universes before coming back here. The deal he proposed was just a ruse to get Johnny to undo the infinite rotation effect, and then Valentine would have shot him. But Johnny expected this kind of treachery so he's got no choice but to attack and hope he's faster on the draw. If he can kill Johnny, the Stand dies with him, and that should cancel the effect.
So it all comes down to an old fashioned draw. You think you can take Johnny? Go ahead on.
Well, no, this doesn't work. Johnny just shoots him, because he was prepared for this the whole time. Valentine gets some shots off, but I don't think D4C managed to do anything.
Then, as Johnny appears to have defeated Valentine, Gyro shows up as a ghost and says his farewell. In particular, he reminds Johnny not to tell anyone his real name. Johnny apologizes, because he really wanted to believe Valentine's offer, but he just couldn't. He shoots Valentine a few more times and his body sinks into the ground.
So all we're left with is Johnny, Lucy and the Saint Corpse. Now maybe this is Araki's commentary on Christianity. It preaches a lot of high ideals, but like Valentne's handkerchief, it's all a bunch of empty promises from a man who's been dead for centuries. The Saint Corpse doesn't seem to produce miracles in the religious sense. It just gives gifts to some people while taking things away from others.
And that'd be something. I don't believe that myself, but I could give Araki credit for coming up with that kind of message. Except I'm not sure he did come up with it. I think I just invented that interpretation in an attempt to fill in the void.
And that's the end of Funny Valentine. What an asshole. I retract my earlier statement about him shotgunning a beer. You do not, in fact, "have to hand it to him."
It doesn't appear much, but I really dig that blue flame effect in Johnny's eyes when he's determined to whoop some ass. I don't think Part 1 did this with Jonathan, but the effect does appear in the opening of the anime, when Johnathan ascends the stairs to fight Dio.
Hell yeah! Maybe this was in the Part 1 manga and I missed it, or maybe they were sneaking a Part 7 reference into this shot. Either way, it rules.
So we're still in the D4C arc, but this final leg of it is called "D4C - Love Train," which I'll explain in a minute. This is what Lucy Steel looks like now that she's merged with the Saint Corpse. She's stuck on the train and apparently dying, so this picture of her standing in a meadow has some artistic license to it, but I do think it looks pretty cool.
I'm not a big fan of how Lucy is depicted in this story. I like the character, and I'm not completely against the ordeals she suffers as story beats. She's a teenage girl in 1890, surrounded by adults willing to harm her or at least refuse to help her. That's valid, but it's undermined by all the cheesecakey shots of Lucy throughout the series, like she's the hot babe of the story.
It sort of worked for Trish Una in Part 5, because she was a 15 year old girl in a cast of characters ranging from 15-20. More importantly, the story didn't constantly put Trish in danger of sexual assault. But Lucy is surrounded by adult men, and frequently relieved of her clothing. It's not a good look.
So that's part of why I like this wooden robot look of hers. In the story, it seems to be hurting her, but on this page, she just looks like a Star Wars robot wearing a dress. No one can hurt her on this page, I guess is what I'm saying.
So the major characters in this story are either dead or near this train. President Valentine is taking the Saint Corpse (inside Lucy's body) to the Atlantic Ocean. Johnny and Gyro are in hot pursuit to rescue Lucy and stop Valentine. Stephen Steel is also on the train, still injured from getting shot earlier.
I think that's everybody. Diego and Hot Pants tried to defeat Valentine but got killed. In particular, some weird power caused objects to converge on Hot Pants and she basically got stabbed to death by debris. I don't really understand how that works, but Valentine has concluded that this is an upgrade to his Stand Ability provided by the Saint Coprse. We've seen this before, where holders of Corpse pieces would get a power boost of some sort. Johnny, Diego, and Valentine got their Stand powers from Corpse Parts, and Johnny's abilities got a boost when he was in possession of another Corpse Part. So it makes sense for Valentine to get a bigger boost now that he has the whole thing.
This upgrade is called "Love Train", and it creates a gap in space, which extends outward from Lucy's body. Using D4C, Valentine can enter this gap, and nothing else can touch him while he's inside. One way to look at this is that now he doesn't have to find a flag or a door to hide under when he needs to slip away. The surfaces he needs are pretty much anywhere now.
This sounds like it would break the D4C ability, but the thing is, Valentine no longer needs to travel the multiverse. Those other universes he goes to are similar to this "base" universe, except the "base" universe is the only one with the Saint Corpse in it. So Valentine kind of needs to stand his ground. Love Train helps him do that.
I don't think I understand the bit about the land drawing closer to Lucy's position, or whatever killed Hot Pants. It doesn't seem to matter all that much, so I'm just going to skip it.
Gryo rides up to the train's engine while Johnny locates Lucy in the passenger car. Gyro finds the engineer, expecting him to be some new enemy he has to fight, but instead it's just a regular-ass person. Apparrently Valentine rigged him in some D4C deathtrap.
Remember when Valentine pulled Diego halfway through a flag so his legs were in one universe while his top half was in another? This is what Valentine has done with the train's engineer, using what looks like a pane of glass. I don't quite get it, but if the engineer lets go of the lever, he'll fall into the other universe, where the corpse of his duplicate is lyijng. They'll meet and combine and self-destruct, so the engineer has no choice but to keep the train moving. He's already lost some fingers and one foot because he almost lost his grip.
Gyro talks this over with the guy, but he can't see any way to help without getting him killed. He sympathizes with the poor guy, but all he can do is suggest he hold on to the handle and pray that Gyro and Johnny can defeat Valentine.
Maybe I'm seeing things, but this feels like a not-so-subtle commentary on the United States. I mean, the villain of Part 7 is the U.S. President, so it's probably been a not-so-subtle commentary the whole time. But here we have an innocent guy whose only crime was showing up for work, and now he's been rigged in a Saw-style trap and no one can help him. He didn't ask for this, he doesn't even get paid that much, and no one can help him. And this is the sort of person Valentine exploits to "keep the train moving." And if the poor guy dies? Well, thoughts and prayers, I guess.
Back at the passenger car, Johnny attacks Valentine through the window. Valentine tries to use Lucy as a human shield, but he doesn't know that Johnny can move the holes he makes when he shoots something. He lures the holes into a newspaper and uses D4C to send them to another dimension, but it doesn't work. The holes just move from the paper onto his hands. Which kind of makes sense. How do you send a hole to another universe?
What ends up saving Valentine is this new Love Train ability. While he's inside the gap between space, the attack upon him from the holes is deflected from him and ends up hurting someone else. Johnny keeps shooting at him, but each shot winds up hurting other people all around the rest of the world.
As Valentine himself observes: "Again, in some distant land... there are humans taking the burden of the 'misfortune.' Somewhere other than the place I am." Now that one jumps past commentary and now Araki is just reading aloud from a newspaper.
So this is bad for the good guys. Johnny's attacks on Valentine can't connect, and the only thing working in his favor is that Valentine can't attack him without moving out of the Love Train gap. D4C sticks an arm out to hit Johnny, but Gyro manages to stop him with the Steel Ball. D4C then swats him away, barely scratching Gyro's hand in the process, but the wound starts moving up his arm.
Valentine tries to attack Johnny the same way, and Johnny only manages to protect himself by shooting the connection between the car and the engine. The passenger car slows down, pulling Valentine out of range.
This gives the good guys a repreive, but Johnny starts to panic. I think Gryo is okay now? He says the wound reached his heart, but he survives, so maybe it resolved itself as Valentine got far enough away.
Johnny is succumbing to the same despair he had in past tight spots. On some level, he thinks he's destined to suffer reversals like this, and his happiness and success are just temporary gains to be snatched away later as punishment for the death of his brother Nicholas. Johnny can't find any way to beat Valentine, and he'll use the gap in space to bring the train car back for another round. There's nothing they can do.
Gyro reminds Johnny of that enhanced rotation they talked about earlier. The Steel Balls and Johnny's Tusk ability rely on "Spin" Techniques, which are amplified by an understanding of the Golden Ratio. In theory, this power can be further improved by combining your own body's motions with those of a horse. Gyro doesn't know for sure, but he thinks it's the only chance they have against Valentine.
Johnny remembers all of that talk, but he doesn't know how to do it. Gyro tells him that he just tried it.
He then shows Johnny the Steel Ball he threw at Valentine, and it picked up some of his hair. So even though he was protected by Love Train, Gyro still managed to touch him.
This small detail, which Gyro still cannot fully explain, is enough to bolster Johnny's spirit. Together, they mount up and advance on the passenger car. All Gyro knows for sure was that his Medieval ancestors must have used a special rotation. He's never seen it, but he believes it's possible, and he has hairy balls to prove it's possible.
And that small hope is enough to keep Johnny going. It was the Steel Ball that drove Johnny to follow Gyro and enter the SBR race. It was the miracles of the Saint Corpse that drove him to seek out the Corpse Parts. Johnny can get spiral into despair very easily, but it only takes a little to get him back in the game, and Gyro has always been able to provide it.
Inside the car, Valentine watches them approach, and wonders why they're on horseback. The car is stationary now, so they could just walk up to it.
More importantly, Valentine wonders why they don't simply run away. This could be their only chance to get out of this alive. At first I wrote this off as supervillain monologue-ing, but Valentine's no dummy. He thinks they should be running, but the fact that they aren't means they must think they have some trick up their sleeves. The horses are a clue, he just hasn't worked it out yet.
He is distracted by Lucy, who falls out of the chair she's in and says she can't breathe. Valentine says that she'll soon die, and "become" the Holy Corpse. A "goddess" will be born in her place. I'm not sure how he would know this, but whatever.
Valentine gets off the train car to face them. Johnny and Gyro charge forward. The plan is to get their horses running in accordance with the Golden Rectangle. Once they pull that off, they'll be able to attack.
But Valentine switches tactics on them. He uses D4C to go under the railroad tracks. I guess that gap he's been using can be horizontal instead of vertical. Johnny fires prematurely, but his horse isn't Golden Rectangly enough, so it doesn't work.
Valentine herds Johnny towards the trees. I don't quite follow this, but there's a treeline that seems to get closer to Johnny no matter which way he goes. I think the idea is that the Love Train power that draws the environment closer to Lucy is also bringing the forest towards the train car. So every time Johnny has trouble fighting he notices he's getting close to the trees, but he says "the trees are coming closer" to him. That might just be a figure of speech.
But Johnny powers through the trees anyway, since the alternative is to get caught, and as he does this, the horse gets into the perfect gait to achieve the Golden Rectangle they needed. I guess all the rectangles needs to be lined up with one another?
Gyro's like "Holy shit, you did it!" and I don't know if Johnny can hear him or if he already worked that out himself. At any rate, he prepares to fire, but he gets caught on a tree branch.
And D4C chops off his left hand as he fires. D'oh!
Valentine goes to finish Johnny off, but a couple of things distract him. First, Gyro throws a Steel Ball, but this appears to have no effect, as usual. It lands harmlessly on the ground, and Love Train transfers the misfortune of the impact to someone else in another part of the world.
Second, a white mouse runs by, and that seems to annoy Valentine more than it probably should. I mean we know that white mice pop up in this story as a callback to Danny, and maybe "Fate" is causing that somehow to help Johnny along in his story, but Valentine wouldn't be aware of any of that. Maybe he's just jumpy.
Finally, Valentine tries to kill Johnny and discovers he can no longer reach him. He was in range before, but something has changed, and he realizes that Lucy must be moving further away from him. But how?
It's Stephen Steel! Despite being shot by Magenta Magenta in chapter...60? And despite receiving zero medical attention for his injuries, Stephen Steel has managed to get up and carry Lucy off the train. He doesn't get very far, but it's enough to save Johnny's life.
Okay, I wasn't too far off with the whole "wooden robot" description. Look at Lucy's elbows and knees. They're like puppet joints. I thought the idea was that her flesh was becoming corpse-like, but clearly her body has become something neither human nor cadaver.
With the last of his strength, Stephen begs Gyro to take Lucy away from this place. Gyro barely makes it, and once he gets far enough from Valentine the Love Train power wears off. This leaves Johnny in a lurch, but I think Gyro is counting on Valentine to pursue. Besides, there's a very strong chance Johnny could take Valentine in a fight right now, without the Saint Corpse in the picture.
Also, I just want to point out that Gyro has broken his vow against allowing women to ride his horse. Remember? He made Lucy ride with Johnny back in Kansas. So whether it's out of concern for Johnny or concern for Lucy, or respect for Stephen, or just Gyro getting over himself, that's growth.
Valentine takes out his frustrations on Stephen, but there's not much he can do to him. He insists that he'll honor the promise he made to Lucy and spare Stephen's life, and he even assures Stephen that he'll get his wounds treated, but he also stomps on the guy too.
I suppose he figures he can catch up to Gyro easily enough, since the Atlantic ocean is drawing closer , so Gyro will run out of road pretty soon.
Johnny wakes up to find the wound on his wrist is moving up his arm, similar to the way Gyro's scratch moved towards his heart. Fortunately, Johnny can stop this by using his Tusk powers to move the hole to a nearby tree, so it breaks in half instead of Johnny's heart.
Johnny's first thought is of Gyro. He's leading Valentine away from Johnny and towards the ocean, but he left one of his Steel Balls behind and Johnny isn't sure Gyro can beat him with only one shot. He picks up the ball and finds...
Valentine's ear? Gross! So apparently Gyro's rotational technique works. It seemed like the impact was redirected away from Valentine and killed some poor guy somewhere else in the world. But at least enough impact made it onto Valentine to achieve a grazing blow. Only this time Gyro got more than hair. Weirder still, Gyro lopped off Valentine's entire ear, and Valentine still hasn't noticed.
What I want to know is: Why do things keep sticking to the Steel Ball when Gyro uses this trick?
So Johnny gets back on the horse and follows Valentine, who is following Gyro, who rides all the way into the Atlantic ocean, which recedes around him. Or... wait. The ocean has come up onto dry land, surrounding all these trees. But the water has parted around Gyro's horse, presumably because of the Corpse's powers. Gyro notices that Lucy's skin and respiration are returning to normal the further away they get from Valentine, so apparently this was part of the Love Train power too? Shouldn't Gyro be getting some kind of fancy power now that he's got Lucy in his arms?
Gyro's plan is fairly simple. He doesn't understand why the ocean is behaving like this, but he knows Valentine will follow him into the water to get Lucy back. He'll have to attack Gyro at some point, meaning he'll have to move his arm out of the Love Train effect. In that moment, Gyro can attack, and if Valentine tries to restore his body by traveling to another universe, he'll end up in the Atlantic Ocean, where he'll drown. Or he can just stay in this narrow corridor of dry land, but that means Gyro will see him coming.
Then, just as they prepare for this showdown, Valentine finally notices his left ear is missing, and puts it all together. One of Gyro's attacks ripped his ear off, and however he achieved this, he used his horse to do it, which is why Gyro has forced this confrontation here, while mounted.
And that's bad, because Gyro's plan didn't factor in that Valentine would see this coming. As Johnny realizes, once Valentine knows the horse is part of the technique, he'll just kill the horse! Well, too late to do anything about that now...
Last time... well, I'll let Johnny tell it. What matters right now is that Lucy is being held captive by President Valentine's goons at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. She has suddenly become pregnant, although this is apparently just the result of having the Corpse Parts in her body.
Also at Independence Hall: Stephen Steel, the SBR Race organizer and Lucy's husband. Stephen was shot not too long ago, and Valentine had him brought here, but not for treatment. He gave standing orders not to help or hurt Stephen. As for Lucy, she's expected to give birth imminently, and the goons watching her want to keep her sedated.
Lucy is upset for her husband, and she keeps hearing a voice telling her to "Don't cry... cut." Eventually she figures out that she can peel the tears from her face and slash at her enemies with them. This doesn't hurt anyone, but it does cause them to experience misfortunes. The blonde guy keeps slipping on the same foot, and the grey-haired guy keeps getting hurt around his left eye.
This culminates in the blonde guy slipping and injecting his tranq into an armed guard, who then shoots the grey-haired guy in the left side of the head. Lucy can now escape, though not exactly by her own power.
Meanwhile, Gyro finds Johnny in a manhole and Johnny frantically explains the D4C arc to him. We spent the last several chapters trying to sort out who shot Johnny Joestar, and now we get it from the man himself: All of the above. Valentine's Stand, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, was able to bring alternate versions of Wekapipo and Diego from other parallel worlds to this world. Then he manipulated them both into fighting the native versions of Wekapipo and Diego, and Johnny wound up getting shot.
Johnny also got a good enough look at how D4C works to understand it about as well as Diego did. Gyro tries to calm him down and tend to his wounds. It's not that he doesn't believe any of this, but Gyro doesn't think they can do anything about it. Valentine has all of the Corpse Parts now, so he's won. All that's left is to heal Johnny up and this is the end of his journey. Gyro tries to give him a speech about how it takes courage to give up sometiimes, but...
Johnny won't hear it. His legs moved as he escaped from all the guys shooting him. He can't stand up, but he comes close.
Johnny doesn't care about good or evil, or whether the Corpse belongs to a saint or not, or anything else. He got into this to chase after hope. And now, after coming all this way, he's regained some use of his legs, but not enough. He can't stop now. As he puts it, he's made some gains, but he's still "in the negative". If he can get his hands on the Corpse again, then he might manage to reach "zero."
And this is what sets Johnny apart from the other Corpse-chasers in this story. Diego sees is as a path to personal power. Valentine seems to have loftier designs for it, but it amounts to the same thing. Gyro isn't terribly interested in the Corpse itself, but sees the quest for it as a path to personal growth. Hot Pants believes that recovering it for the Vatican will redeem her from her past sins.
But Johnny? He's not trying to gain anything. He only wants the Corpse so he can claw back some of what he's lost in life. For him, the big dream is to break even.
This impresses Gyro enough to bring up the history of the stirrup. You know, the things on the saddle that you put your feet in.
According to Gyro, the stirrup was invented in the 11th Century, which is surprisingly recent when you think about how humans have been riding horses for thousands of years. It just never occurred to anyone before that. The reason, he explains, is that it became necessary for combat. With stirrups, a knight on a horse could add the horse's power to his own, and fight more effectively from the mount.
Gyro's point is that this principle could amplify the Golden Rotation he and Johnny use. The Zeppeli family's Steel Ball technique is not "all in the wrist". The rotation is achieved with the entire body, and in theory, if you could add a horse's body to that process, you could do more with it. So even though Johnny can't stand up, he can use his legs well enough to ride with the stirrups, something he hasn't done since the race began. And maybe that will give him the power he needs to tip the scales against Valentine.
Maybe. Gyro doesn't know any of this for certain, because it's never been put into practice. The Zeppelis are doctors and executioners, not mounted soldiers. Johnny replies that the Joestars are all about horses.
And this is kind of where their relationship crystalizes. This hasn't just been Gyro taking Johnny under his wing, mentoring him in the Steel Ball techniques. Gyro has also been learning some things from Johnny as well. But more importantly, this collaboration between them has allowed them to discover something new. For all that Gyro can do with the Steel Ball, he doesn't have Johnny's Stand, or his experience as a jockey. By passing on his secrets to Johnny, Gyro has combined his own techniques with Johnny Joestar's unique skillset to produce something different, something that Gyro can learn from as well.
And, perhaps more importantly, this is the quality that gets passed down to Josuke Higashikata in Part 8, and presumably Jodio Joestar in Part 9.
Back to Lucy, she manages to hijack a carriage and follows the voice as it directs her to a ship. Little does she realize that the voice she's hearing is President Valentine. He's monitoring her and guiding her through the Corpse Eyes, which... I guess this is a thing you can do with them? This is the first time we've ever seen anyone with both eyes at the same time. The question is, why bother with any of this? He already had her and the Corpse secured in Independence Hall.
Lucy arrives at the ship, the Blue Hawaii, and finds Valentine waiting for her. He disposes of the coach driver, takes Stephen aboard, and promises not to harm him. Lucy tries to attack him with her "tear cutter", but Valentine has that scouted. He was, after all, the one who told her how to do it.
Valentine considers the Corpse to be his "ally", and he can tell that it seeks to complete the route on the map Jesus drew for Joseph of Arimathea back in the day. Valentine doesn't seem to understand it, but he's willing to play along, so he's going to take the ship up the Delware River, then a train to New York.
At some point, Lucy wrote a note on a strip of her skirt and tried to leave it where someone might find it and help her. Valentine spots it and throws it in the river, but what he fails to realize is that Lucy used her "tear cutter" on that note. Various animals interact with it in the water, eventually bringing it onto land and back to the exact spot where she tried to leave it in the first place. So despite Valentine having the upper hand, he's not in complete control of the Corpse's powers.
Back in Philly, Diego runs into Hot Pants, who wants to cut a deal. She tries to incapacitate him first, because... Well, it just makes sense to incapacitate Dio in general, but also, Hot Pants is just extremely direct. She'd probably do this to almost anyone.
But Diego's pretty good at figuring out how Stand abilities work. Hot Pants's powers let her smother Diego in goopy flesh, so he just pulls Hot Pants into the goop so they can suffocate together. And this is it, folks, this is how the Dinopants ship got started. I mean, they're kissing through this whole scene. Hot Pants has to make a mouth somewhere nearby so she can explain her deal before they both pass out.
Okay, so this is how it works. She knows Diego wants to kill Valentine and take the Corpse Parts, but he doesn't know how to find him. His Stand lets him travel between universes, so apparently this prevents his dinosaur senses from being able to pick up his scent. Hot Pants wants to recover the Corpse, and she knows that Lucy Steel is with Valentine. Diego can find Valentine by tracking Lucy... if he had her scent. Well, Hot Pants has it because... well, it's got something to do with Hot Pants using Cream Starter on Lucy back in Chicago. I guess Cream Starter can record what people's flesh smells like?
So they can take down Valentine together, but only if Diego agrees to let Hot Pants take the Corpse. In exchange, Hot Pants will let Diego have all of Valentine's other power and resources. Uh... how? He's the President of the United States. You don't just win his authority by killing him. This isn't Highlander. Maybe Hot Pants means that she'll assist him in whatever plans Diego has for empowering himself in the wake of Valentine's death? Or the Pope will grease some wheels for him?
Hot Pants also sweetens the pot by telling him that she knows the identity of his father, who abandoned him and his mother. She also knows Dario Brando is still alive, and she can help him find him.
So Diego's on board. They separate and take a deep, post-kiss breath, and maybe make out some more before mounting up and chasing down Lucy Steel. They find the note she left about the ship they're on, and follow Blue Hawaii to a train, possibly the same train Valentine has been using to follow the race.
But as the train starts rolling, Valentine launches his deadliest weapons.
... A second Hot Pants and a second Diego Brando. Uh-oh.
We then flash back to the POV of the alternate Dinopants team. These two made it onto the train, where they found Valentine waiting for them. They seem to be expecting some sort of Stand Ability from Valentine, but they're not prepared for D4C. Only "our" Valentine has D4C, because "our" universe, the one Part 7 is set in, is the "base" reality. In this alternate reality, all the major characters are fighting over diamonds instead of the Saint Corpse.
The "base" Valentine came to this alternate universe to "borrow" its Diego and Hot Pants for his own battle. The alt-Valentine of this alternate world is completely supportive of his plan, as he seems to implicitly understand that the "base" Valentine's plan is more important than this diamonds business.
There's some confusion when the two Dinopants couples meet. Our Diego tries to warn everyone, but they're too confused to listen. He throws money at the others, which is then drawn to the money in their own pockets, which hurts them as it self-destructs. The two Hot Pants attack each other with Cream Starter and nearly get themselves killed, but not quite. Diego tells Hot Pants to board the train on foot, and Hot Pants wonders why they'd leave the horses, since their counterparts will easily catch up. But Diego wanted them to catch up so he could send them back where they belong.
Yeah, turns out the whole trick D4C uses, sending people to alternate universes when they're between two surfaces? Anyone can use it while it's active. This was how Diego returned from the other universe back in Philadelphia. You don't need Valentine's cooperation. Likewise, if he brings an alt-Dinopants into our reality, anyone can send them back if they know how.
Diego considers this to be D4C's biggest weakness. If Valentine's control over the universe hopping were absolute, and no one else could affect it, then he might be unstoppable. He could keep sending doppelgangers after Dinopants until one pair finally annihilated them. But as long as Diego has a door he can swing into a wall, he can shut that down.
The other tip Diego brings up is that they have to keep their distance. From what I understand, D4C has high stats, except for range. He's sort of like King Crimson in that respect, where Valentine can fight effectively up close, but he can't do much of anything at a distance.
Anyway, as they close in on their quarry, Hot Pants contemplates her motives. She wants the Corpse for the sake of the righteous people of the world, and recovering it will cleanser her of her sins. That's not how Christianity works, Hot Pants, but I've already gone over that. You're a terrible nun, but that's okay, because you're one foxy, foxy lady.
Diego just wants the Corpse for the power it'll give him. So it's obvious that he has no intention of honoring his deal with Hot Pants. He'll try to take the Corpse for himself no matter what. Diego compares humanity to a flock of pigeons, stupidly doing whatever one of them happens to do. The power he craves will enable him to stand above the flock and control them. Sort of like how he uses Scary Monsters to control his dinosaurs... which is what pigeons evolved from. It all comes full circle.
It's also kind of poetic how Diego's motives are founded on punishing society for killing his mother, and Hot Pants' motives are based on making amends for her own failure to protect her little brother.
As for the object of their search, the Corpse is in Lucy's body, and she's not pregnant anymore. Instead of giving birth, she's transforming into some sort of Corpse/Human creature? I guess? Valentine observes that Lucy was the "head part". He says this like she's had the Corpse Skull all along, but I thought she only discovered it in Independence Hall, and it merged with her there? Well, it doesn't matter much now.
Dinopants launches their attack on Valentine, and this is probably the best fight in Part 7. Diego knows that Valentine can heal himself by shunting to another universe, so his strategy is to hit Valentine hard and fast, and avoid any attacks that might put him between two surfaces. In Philly, he made the mistake of slamming Valentine into a wall, which put Valentine between the wall and Diego's body.
This time, he tries to slash at Valentine, injuring him without pushing him into anything. If he gets too close to a second surface, like that curtain, well that's where Hot Pants comes in. She can use Cream Starter to send her limbs wherever they need to be to keep things from getting too close to Valentine.
But they keep underestimating what allows Valentine to make the jump. Water falls on him, and even that is enough to let him escape, since he has the floor beneath him. I now realize that this was how Valentine survived that Wrecking Ball hit from Weakapipo. He threw it right into his left eye, but as soon as it made contact, it probably provided a surface for D4C to take effect. I'm not sure what the other surface was, but oh well.
Hot Pants is confused because she thought Diego kicked his ass really well, but Diego explains that it doesn't count if he escapes to a parallel world. Once he does that, he simply switches bodies with the healthy Valentine he finds in that other world, and then that Valentine returns no worse for wear.
I should point out that Diego's Stand power must be pretty great to be able to hang with D4C like this. I don't know how strong D4C is supposed to be, but the general rule is that the close range Stands have the greatest physical strength and speed. Diego can attack Valentine at will, and he's fast enough and tough enough to survive, so maybe Scary Monsters is on par with the World. I guess that's not too crazy, since both the World and D4C are final boss Stands.
But the point is that Diego doesn't have much to show for his efforts. For all his speed and power, he's only done as much as Lucy did when she stabbed Valentine in the neck.
Valentine then whips out a new trick, bringing two more alternate Valentines to help him fight. Remember, if other people meet their alternate universe selves, they'll die, but when Valentine does it, it's okay. And they all seem pretty cool with each other, so they make a good team.
What I don't understand is how the two spares can fight effectively. Maybe they have Stands of their own, but it doesn't seem to come up in the fight. It looks like Diego is fighting multiple D4C's, but that might just be an effect to show how fast D4C is moving. Or the alt-Valentines have lookalike Stands without the universe-hopping ability.
Anyway, Diego counters by having Hot Pants disguise him as a fourth Valentine, and he uses the confusing among the others to kill the two duplicates.
Diego presses his advantage, and scores a fatal wound on Valentine as they crash through a window. Diego makes sure to keep the shards of glass from touching Valentine as he falls, but he fails to stop some of Valentine's hair from falling onto the railroad track as the wheels go over it.
This is apparently enough for Valentine to make D4C work. He takes Diego with him, and when Diego emerges, he ends up bisected by the train. There's no sign of Valentine, and Diego wastes his last breath declaring himself the victor.
Nearby, Johnny and Gyro are monitoring the battle through binoculars, and they realize the odds are going to be against them. If Valentine can beat Diego that easily, they'll be hard pressed to save Lucy, and there's one fewer ally on the train now.
Gyro suggests they tell each other secrets before they ride into action. It's like he knows they might not survive this. He reveals his true name, Iulius Caesar Zeppeli. "Gyro" is just a nickname, and not even his brothers know that. Johnny counters by revealing he has a fetish for "bug bites". I thought this was made up, or it was some kind of euphemism for really small boobs. But no, Johnny just likes it when girls have mosquito bites on their arms.
Funnily enough, I read that this is Araki's own fetish. I guess he figured he might as well give Johnny the same secret? This is the exact opposite of "The Author's Barely Disguised Fetish", because Araki basically tipped his hand on this page for everyone to see, and yet I don't think I've ever seen any character with bug bites. Maybe it has to be in real life. Like if he draws Yasuho Hirose with bug bites it isn't the same.
Anyway, Johnny mounts up and puts his feet in the stirrups, and you can tell he's getting all charged up with shonen protagonist power. The power of stirrups! And the Golden Ratio! And fingernails!
Then we see how Valentine survived the fight with Diego. Actually, he didn't survive, there's just another Valentine who takes over where the dead one leaves off. I'm not entirely clear on how this works. The upshot is that Valentine is one character with a near infinite supply of backup bodies. It's possible that all of them share the D4C ability, and when they meet, the Stand automatically links up with the healthiest one. That Valentine then seems to receive all the knowledge and memories of the "base" Valentine. This probably accounts for the changes in Valentine's appearance over the course of Part 7.
As Johnny and Gyro chase after the train, they notice that a posted warning about bears is always behind them, no matter how far they travel. It turns out the land itself is following them as they ride, like everything is closing up around the train. Inside the train, various objects converge on Hot Pants, eventually embedding themselves in he flesh.
Hot Pants dies rather unceremoniously. There's just nothing she can do about this, and no time for her to figure it out. Valentine explains that this is not some other Stand User helping him. Gyro suspected an engineer at the controls of the train, but if there is one, he's not doing this.
Instead, it's the Saint Corpse inside of Lucy Steel that's causing everything to converge. Okay, but if that's the case, why didn't those objects converge on Lucy's body instead of Hot Pants? And why isn't the rest of the train collapsing in on itself? Valentine insists that this must be to his advantage, because the Corpse is his ally. Well, we'll see about that.
So yeah, that's it for Dinopants. I don't ship it myself, but I suppose if I did, I'd set it in a world where they defeated Valentine and Hot Pants agreed to serve Diego's agenda in exchange for his surrendering the Corpse Parts. Or maybe he only tolerates her assistance because she knows where the Corpse is being kept, and he plans to take it back in the future once he gets her to tell him where it is.
The D4C arc begins here! Good luck figuring any of this shit out...
Last time, Johnny and Gyro were searching for Diego Brando in Philadelphia, when they ran into some trouble. Johnny saw President Valentine approaching Gyro from behind, and called out to warn him but then he got shot instead. Before Gyro could do anything about that, he got attacked by another Stand User who was approaching him from the other direction.
This is DI-S-CO, also spelled "D-I-S-C-O". His Stand is called.... Chocolate Disco. Swell.
His Stand Ability lays out this grid on the ground, and he can select coordinates on the grid, so that any attack upon himself is redirected to that spot on the grid. Usually, he chooses coordinates where his enemy is located. At least, I think that's the general idea.
It's a really, really poor Stand concept. Basically, Chocolate Disco can defend attacks and choose where its attacks go. Most Stands already do this simply by punching things. Chocolate Disco overcomplicates this by redirecting attacks away from the User. So DI-S-CO can't just punch Gyro, he has to pour bottles of acid or something at his feet, so Chocolate Disco will send that attack onto whichever square Gyro is standing on. Also he has to input the coordinates each time. So it's just a more inconvenient version of Star Platinum.
DI-S-CO is a man of few words, introducing himself and then refusing to say anything more. An interesting personality might have redeemed this guy, but no, he sucks.
Gyro beating him quickly might at least make Gyro look cooler, but his solution to this problem is to use his Steel Balls to warp the air around him into a lens. This distorts DI-S-CO's vision, so he can't tell how far away Gyro is from him, or which square he's on. That's kind of clever, but if Gyro's always had a technique like this, you'd think he would have used it earlier in this story. I guess he did use something like this to trick Urmd Avdol, but it probably would have come in handy against Diego, or Ringo Roadagain.
DI-S-CO pulls a gun because his Stand is useless if he can't tell which part of the grid Gyro is standing on. Gyro uses his Steel Ball to make him shoot himself in the foot. See he used that trick before, but it hasn't really come up again. He wants to interrogate DI-S-CO but decides he probably doesn't know anything anyway.
It seems like the sole purpose of DI-S-CO's presence in this story is to keep Gyro busy for just long enough that he couldn't see who shot Johnny. He goes to ask some kids if Diego did it, because that makes sense. Instead, some kids insist that it was not Diego, but Wekapipo. It just so happens Gyro has a photo of him lying out where they can see it.
Why does Gyro have photos of either of them? At least he needs the picture of Diego because that's his main suspect here, but why would he carry around a photo of Wekapipo? Where did he even get it? He only met him recently. Is Gyro really into scrapbooking?
Anyway, the kids argue whether Diego shot Johnny or Wekapipo did it. Then an artist tells Gyro he saw the shooting too and he drew a picture of the guy who did it and it's Funny Valentine. The kids are indignant that he would accuse the President of the United States of murder, but he didn't know who the guy was. He's just saying this was what he looked like.
Gyro is completely confused, because all of these witnesses saw Johnny's shooter, but they can't agree on the shooter's identity. I sympathize, Gyro, because I've read this before and I'm still confused.
But let's table that mystery and get the origin story of the Saint Corpse. Araki continues to play coy about the Corpse's identity, but Johnny already guessed it was Jesus Christ, and now this flashback quotes Bible Verses about Jesus and shows his crucifxion.
Araki expresses some incredulity over Jesus' resurrection three days later. Oh, I'm sorry, Araki, does this story not make sense? Are you confused because he recovered from fatal wounds, defying all medical knowledge? Now you know how I felt when I read the Urban Guerrilla arc in Part 8.
So far this is a fairly brisk summary of the Gospel, until Araki explains that Jesus' resurrection was first discovered by Joseph of Arimathea, who prepared Jesus' body for burial. And no, that's bullshit. Joseph of Arimathea did not go back to the tomb three days later to find Jesus alive inside. Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" went to the tomb and found it empty. Jesus had already left.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus appears before the women outside the tomb, then later he appears before two other followers on their way to Emmaus. They reported this to the eleven disciples, and then Jesus appeared before them as well. Jesus remained with his followers for forty days, after which he was ascended into Heaven.
This is all in the Bible, for goodness' sake! I don't understand why Araki would go to all the trouble to write Jesus Christ into Part 7 and then bungle key details about the most noteworthy thing Jesus is known for.
But in Araki's version, Jesus did not ascend into heaven, and I guess he didn't bother to tell his disciples that he was okay. Instead he just thanked Joseph of Arimathea for letting him crash in Joseph's tomb over the weekend, then drew a map of where he planned to go next. This version of Jesus traveled eastward, crossing Asia and then building a boat to travel to North America. This version of Jesus then lived out the rest of his days among the American Indians. Upon his (second) death, there was an earthquake and a storm, and his corpse was scattered across the continent.
Flash forward to the 19th Century, when a troop of soldiers died during a training mission in the desert near San Diego, California. Only one survived, having accidentally stumbled upon the Corpse's heart. This was Funny Valentine, and the incident gave him his Stand Ability. Later, Valentine resolved the find the rest of the Corpse to increase his powers. He discovered Joseph of Arimathea's copy of the map, became the U.S. President, and manipulated the Steel Ball Run race to help him find the other parts.
Okay, so that explains where the Saint Corpse comes from and how Valentine found out about it. I'm not sure why we're going over this now, in the middle of Gyro trying to solve the mystery of Johnny's shooting. But there it is.
This is the problem I have with the Saint Corpse: There's no real point to it. It's just a magical macguffin for the characters to fight over. It's like the Dragon Balls, or the Chaos Emeralds, or the Red Stone of Aja from Part 2, or the Stand Arrow from Part 5.
And yet Araki chose to make it the dead body of Jesus Christ.
Why?
I think this all stems from the idea of Holy Relics. Way back in Arizona, Gyro speculated that the Corpse Part Johnny found might have belonged to a Saint, because it had already done some miraculous things. It gave Johnny his Stand ability, for example. Gyro compared the Left Arm to the relics kept by various other countries. The people believed the remains of dead Saints had special powers, and could bless whichever nation possessed them.
So I think Araki was interested in that idea, and wanted to use a Holy Relic in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. But he wanted this to be an extra-special Relic, which meant that it couldn't just be the corpse of any old Saint. So he chose the most important figure in the Christian religion and decided it would be that guy's corpse. Jesus Christ.
And this makes some sense. If it was St. Peter's remains, there would be this expectation that a rival could counter that power with other relics. A more potent Saint, or maybe a collection of relics from multiple Saints. So Araki went straight to the top of the food chain. Jesus Christ, the Saint with the highest power level of all.
Except Jesus Christ isn't a Saint, he's literally God.
Let me be clear here: I'm not saying you or Araki have to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, part of the Holy Trinity, etc. If you don't want to believe that Christ was crucified for the sins of humanity, that he rose from the dead three days later, and ascended to heaven, that's your business.
What I'm driving at is that this story is basically saying that, within the fiction, large parts of Christian mythology are 100% real. If you live in the SBR-verse, then Jesus Christ was an actual person who performed actual miracles and who actually rose from the dead. Because if he didn't, then the Saint Corpse wouldn't have any special powers.
Which means the discovery of Jesus' dead body in North America is a huge deal. Not because it proves Christianity is the one true religion. Oh no. It might disprove some other religions, I suppose, but the central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus rose from the dead and still lives. Jesus didn't leave any relics behind because he never died a second time. At least that's what the Christians in the SBR-verse believe.
The existence of Jesus' corpse breaks the entire religion. Suddenly everything we know about Jesus from the Bible is thrown into doubt. We have a supernatural man who performed miracles and rose from the dead, but then he did not ascend into heaven. Instead he somehow ended up in North America, where he died again. Why did he go there? What did he do? Why was this second ministry never documented.
It's kind of a frightening proposition, like finding out one of your parents is a bigamist with a second family in a different town. The Bible describes the purpose of Jesus's ministry in Judea. It gives readers a context for God's Plan for humanity. There is this tacit understanding that everything is laid out in the text. The idea of Jesus going off and doing stuff in secret, then dying for keeps, that's kind of spooky. It's almost Lovecraftian, in the sense that your God might be real, but not entirely trustworthy. Only some of what God has told you is true. What does that mean? How does a Saint Corpse fit into God's Plan? And why lie about it and say Jesus ascended into heaven when he didn't?
And if you're not a Christian, you might not care about any of this. What's the difference? After all, the Saint Corpse is no different from the Infinity Gauntlet or Thor's Hammer. And that's true, up to a certain point. For characters like Hot Pants, this should be very troubling. She became a nun to find absolution. She wants Jesus to forgive her for killing her brother. But Jesus is dead. He's been dead the whole time, since before she was born. How can he forgive her? The Vatican seems to already know about this, and they sent her to collect the remains, but why? Are they trying to cover this up, or do they know the truth about Jesus' time in North America?
I want to stress that, while I'm a Christian, I don't find the Saint Corpse concept offensive. I mean, it's heretical, but that only bugs me in the same way it bugs me when they get the colors wrong on Superman's costume. The idea of a Jesus Christ who doesn't quite resemble the one in the Bible could make for an intriguing story.
The problem is that Araki refuses to tell that story. A lot of groundwork is laid to set up the Saint Corpse belonging to Jesus Christ. But then Araki doesn't actually do anything with that. Johnny Joestar is astonished when he finally figures it out, but he has no reaction afterward. Gyro was so skeptical of it that he wouldn't say it out loud. Hot Pants seems to know exactly whose corpse it is, but she never tells anyone nor discusses her feelings.
What I'm trying to say here is: What's the point of putting Jesus' dead body in your story if you've got nothing to say about it? The way Part 7 is constructed, the Saint Corpse might as well be the Chaos Emeralds or pieces of the Triforce. Except Araki clearly knows what he's got, because he writes the story with this reverential tone towards the Saint Corpse's identity. The characters, artwork, and even the narration are reluctant to just say the words, because of how sacred the image of Jesus is for people.
Let me use a different example. In 2008 there was a Family Guy episode called "I Dream of Jesus". The first half of it involves Peter Griffin rediscovering the song "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen, and playing a record of it over and over. Brian and Stewie finally get fed up with this, and they steal the record and destroy it. Peter goes to a record store to find another copy, and the guy at the cash register is... Jesus Christ.
Why is Jesus working at a record store? Peter asks the same thing, and convinces Jesus to go public. This is where the episode falls of a cliff, because it just turns into a bunch of weak gags involving Jesus. He makes Lois' boobs bigger, which I'm pretty sure they ripped off of Bruce Almighty. He scolds George W. Bush on live television. At some point he lets the fame go to his head and then he ends up partying too hard and gets arrested.
It's not terrible, but it feels unworthy of the premise. You have Jesus Christ in your show for one episode, and this was all they could think to do with him? There are several JoJo characters who can make people's boobs bigger.
The best defense I can give to the second half of the episode is that maybe it sucked on purpose. I say this because after Jesus leaves, Peter tells his family that Jesus gave him something before he went, and it was... a new copy of Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen. So in that sense the Jesus stuff was just an extra-long, elaborate setup to another Surfin' Bird gag. I can respect that. The episode is basically one big shitpost.
Steel Ball Run has a similar problem, without the Surfin' Bird to offset it. Araki put Jesus Christ's body in the story, but never dares to explore the consequences of this. At best, Steel Ball Run might be some sort of commentary on Christianity in the USA. The religion has been completely distorted into something unrecognizable, with greedy opportunists worshiping a dead god and wielding the cadaver like a weapon.
I mean, all of this hits very differently in 2026, what with the President being an amoral child predator. Maybe this was obvious to Araki in the 2000's, or maybe history has warped the real world into something similar to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
Well, I need to get back to what I was doing. The point is, I think Chapter 67 is the last time it really gets discussed that the Saint Corpse is Jesus Christ, and after this, it's just a magic doohickey and it kind of doesn't matter where it came from, so why bother working Jesus into it at all?
Okay, so moving on, who shot Johnny? To answer this question, Araki repeats the events leading up to the shooting, through the perspectives of Wekapipo and Diego Brando. We'll start with Wekapipo.
So he's trailing Johnny and Gyro as they trail Diego. Wekapipo isn't sure which side he wants to be on. If he turns against Valentine, he'll be an outcast in the USA, just as he was exiled from Naples. So he doesn't want to side with a loser. He thinks Johnny and Gyro don't have much of a chance, which leaves Diego as the best ally in this situation.
While closing in on Diego, Wekapipo loses him in an allyway, and finds a loaded revolver on the ground near a flag. Not sure why it's only got 13 stars. It looks suitably old-timey, but it's 1890, not 1776.
Then a figure attacks Wekapipo from behind the flag. We see the left arm of his Stand, but that's it. Wekapipo does his Wrecking Ball attack to give the guy Left-Side Ataxia, but this only slows him down long enough for Wekapipo to use the gun. He shoots, only to find Johnny Joestar lying on the ground riddled with bullets.
Johnny fights back, then escapes into the sewer with his Tusk powers. Then Dio shows up and says "Everything is going as planned. Johnny Joestar is better left alive. Right, Wekapipo?"
Wekapipo is confused, and deduces that Dio must have known he was tracking him, and lured him here. But why?
Okay, now we start over with Diego. He rides into the area, and infiltrates the building where Valentine is staying while he's in Philadelphia. He learned that Lucy is impersonating the First Lady... from Magenta Magenta? He knew Lucy was important, but I don't think he ever understood why, so I don't know how he would have explained that to Diego.
Anyway, Diego disguises himself as a guard and sees Lucy being carted around on a stretcher, so he knows her impersonation of Scarlet Valentine has been exposed. Then he sees Valentine leaving the building alone. He follows him, hoping to get a chance to assassinate him, but it's too risky. Valentine must be a Stand User, but Diego has no idea what his ability is.
So Diego decides to use Wekapipo, since he knows that he's following him. He lures him into the alley with that flag, then turns his horse into a dinosaur and leaps up to the top of a building to watch from above.
Okay, now it's starting to make a little more sense. This was why Wekapipo lost Diego in this alley. Diego was above him and he didn't think to look up. Diego expects Valentine to cross paths with Wekapipo around here, so he can watch them and try to observe Valentine's powers.
However, in this version of events, Wekapipo looks up, sees Diego, and shoots the revolver at him. This is completely different from the way things played out in the earlier version. Wekapipo found the gun on the ground, and looked up, as if wondering if someone had dropped it, and found no one.
In this version, Diego jumps down onto Wekapipo, who Left Side Ataxia-fies him, and Diego desperately grabs the revolver and shoots at Wekapipo.
Except he suddenly notices Wekapipo coming from behind him, and in front of him he finds Johnny Joestar riddled with bullets. Johnny escapes as before, and his legs move, which Diego notices just like Wekapipo did in his version. Diego also picks up Valentine's scent with his dinosaur senses, so he knows he's nearby but he can't find the guy.
Diego retreats to the roof of the building to think it over, then he goes back down an approaches Wekapipo. He says "Johnny Joestar is best left alive. On the verge of death, but not beyond... Right, Wekapipo." They discuss Magenta briefly, and then Diego asks if he saw him shoot Johnny.
They talk in circles for a bit, mainly because Wekapipo is confused by the question. He thinks he shot Johnny, so he doesn't understand why Diego is asking. While they talk, Diego makes a bunch of little dinosaurs to scout around for Valentine. He knows Valentine is in the area and is hoping to understand his powers better before fighting him. Valentine remains unseen, but he picks off the dinosaurs one by one.
Suddenly Valentine attacks from above, and Wekapipo nails him with his Wrecking Ball. This seems to blast a hole through Valentine's face, but he attacks anyway. Diego tries to slam him into a wall, but Valentine disappears, then re-emerges from Diego's back?
At last Valentine says the name of his Stand: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. That's what D4C stands for. Honestly, I don't know why Araki would even use this as a Stand name in the first place. It's way too long, and if you're going to abbreviate it half the time anyway, what's the point? At least it's not "Chocolate Disco". What the hell was that, anyway? The user's name is Di-S-Co and he named the Stand "Chocolate Disco." That's just confusing. If the Stand had Chocolate powers, maybe I could see it.
Anyway, Valentine attacks, Wekapipo scores another Left Side Ataxia hit, and Diego does a dinosaur attack, but Valentine is covered up by the flag and vanishes.
We saw something similar happen when Lucy stabbed Valentine in the neck a while back. He fell down and a chair fell on top of him, and then he disappeared and came back. Diego looks under the flag to see if he can figure out what's going on and attack him again before the ataxia wears off, but....
Valentine drags him through the flag into a whole other world, one with a second Valentine, Wekapipo, and Diego in it.
Everyone is confused, except the Valentine who produced this effect with his Stand. He has brought Diego into this other reality, but only part way. His legs are still stuck on the other side, so he can't move, or stop Valentine from taking the Corpse Eye from Diego's head.
This appears to have been Valentine's entire plan: Lure Diego into the open, ambush him in the most confusing way possible, then pull him partway into another universe and get the Coprse Eye without much of a fight. Now he has the Entire Saint Corpse, but Diego can't afford to worry about that now. He has three things on his mind now:
He's stuck in this flag and can't get out.
Valentine is partially merged with the other Valentine of this alternate reality. What's that about?
As the alt-Diego approaches him, our Diego's body begins to disintegrate.
So with that established, we get a third version of Johnny's shooting. This time we follow Valentine, who leaves his building, notices Diego following him, and sneaks up on Johnny to shoot him. No one saw him approach Johnny because he used his Stand power to hide between two surfaces. The artist in the park sees him shoot Johnny, just as some of the kids saw Wekapipo do it, and some other kids saw Diego do it. Valentine also notices Johnny's legs moving.
Then... I don't really understand this part. I think the idea here is that all three versions of the shooting are simultaneously true. Valentine can travel to alternate realities, so it makes sense that there could be three realities with three different versions of the shooting: One where Valentine does it himself, one where he manipulates Wekapipo into doing it, and one where Diego does it.
What I don't understand is how D4C somehow combined all three scenarios into one reality. But the JoJo wiki appears to confirm that this is what happened, so oh well.
Back to Diego's predicament, he's stuck in the flag, and Valentine explains that when you meet your alternate universe counterpart, you both get pulled together and disintegrate. Only Valentine is able to survive this process. Instead of dying like the others, he gets to combine with his alternate selves. This is how he can recover from injuries like when Lucy stabbed him in the neck.
Valentine clobbers Wekapipo, but then a manhole cover opens and Johnny Joestar comes out. Turns out Diego sent dinosaur scouts to find Johnny Joestar and lure him out, where he attacks Valentine.
Johnny seems to kill Valentine, who drops the Corpse Eye and some kind of diamond. Then he flees to a door and hides behind it. Alt-Wekapipo thinks Valentine is dead, but Diego knows better.
There is a Valentine corpse lying there, but that's the Valentine native to this alternate reality. "Our" Valentine simply used D4C to go back to "our" universe. He took the eyeball and abandoned his alternate self. Diego then realizes that he has to hide between things to travel to other worlds, so that's why he's stuck in the flag. He needs a second surface so he can be between them.
So Diego uses Wekapipo. Both of them. His top half lures the alt-Wekapipo to come closer so he can explain Valentine's Stand ability. Meanwhile, Dio uses his legs to write a message with his spurs, asking "our" Wekapipo to pull on his legs.
Being between the two Wekapipos seems to do the trick, but they're drawn to one another and die immedaitely. Diego thanks Wekapipo, but I'm pretty sure he's just being ironic.
So in the aftermath of this whole skirmish, Diego is left all alone. Johnny's in the sewer somewhere, Gyro is off trying to figure out who shot him, Valentine has probably run off to assemble the completed Corpse, and Wekapipo's dead. This gives Diego a chance to figure some stuff out about D4C.
While the parallel universes all seem to be mostly the same, there are some key differences. Only "our" Valentine has the D4C Stand. I think the others have no Stand ability at all. When injured, "our" Valentine can switch places with one of his healthy counterparts, and abandons the injured self.
As for the Saint Corpse, only "our" universe appears to have one. The alt-Valentine dropped a diamond instead of another Corpse eye. So Diego reasons that in that world, the Steel Ball Run race involves a plot to collect some kind of diamonds instead of Corpse Parts. Ergo, the Saint Corpse is unique in "our" universe. Diego believes this means his own universe is the basis for all of the others. Well, that's not necessarily true, but it makes enough sense that we might as well go with it. Maybe those diamonds are just as potent as the Saint Corpse. We didn't spend enough time there to really find out.
So Diego concludes that he has a decent working knowledge of Valentine's powers, and he thinks he should be able to defeat him. Meanwhile, Gyro is looking for Johnny instead of Diego or Valentine, because he's certain that Johnny saw "Something". Well, we'll have to get into that next time. I've been dealing with too many mysteries for one day...
These chapters are kind of a potpourri between the "Civil War" and "D4C" arcs. For my own reference, I'm going to note here that this part of the story takes place around December 28, 1890. I thought we were into 1891 already, but no.
Let's start with a picturesque shot of Gyro and Johnny on a horsey ride through the outskirts of Philadelphia.
Previously, Gyro enlisted Wekapipo to go to the aid of Lucy Steel. Gyro assumed she was in trouble by now, and he has no idea how bad it is. Wekapipo found out that Lucy's body was discovered in Chicago, but Gyro informed him that Hot Pants disguised Lucy and Scarlet Valentine as one another. So Scarlet's dead, while Lucy is posing as Scarlet as she travels with Funny Valentine.
So I guess Hot Pants explained all of this to Gyro after the Civil War arc ended? Apparently she still hasn't explained to Gyro that she's a woman, because Gyro still refers to her as "he". Maybe she prefers this? We never really got a clear answer on that.
Anyway, Wekapipo decides to touch base with Stephen Steel, but he just happens to show up at his carriage while he's getting shot. Turns out Magenta Magenta is back, and he wants revenge on Wekapipo for leaving him to die in Michigan. And since he overheard Gyro asking Wekapipo to protect Lucy, he knew going after the Steels would flush out his quarry.
So we've got Wekapipo vs. Magenta Magenta on the roof of a moving carriage. Well, Philadelphia is the land of Extreme, boys, so you're off to a promising start.
Meanwhile, here's Lucy's origin story. Her dad took out a loan to pay for his farm, and then his wife died and he went to pieces, the farm lost money and it turns out the loan was from the mafia. Lucy's dad could either give them the farm or one of his kids so he picked Lucy.
Then Stephen Steel intervened, offering to pay off the Pendelton family's debts. This was because Lucy happened to say some kind words to him when he most needed to hear them, and he feels indebted to her. When he finds out the mob has already taken Lucy, he reasons that they intend to use her for prostitution. But if he informs them that Lucy is already married, they'll lose interest in her and just take Stephen Steel's money.
And that's why Stephen and Lucy got married. I should point out that Lucy's dad hates the idea, and Stephen hates it even more, because he has zero intention of doing anything improper with Lucy, but he has to keep up the pretense of the marriage for the next several years anyway. Lucy even floats the idea of someday becoming his wife for real, and Steel is like "Absolutely not." He wants her to go to school, and if she finds love in the future, she's more than welcome to leave their home and marry someone else.
Apparently that scenario never played out, because we see a little of Lucy's adult life in Part 8, and she's still using the last name "Steel". But she did seem to have a life for herself in the 20th Century, and it was because of Stephen Steel helping her out of a jam in the 19th.
And this explains the relationship we see between them. They're not in love, but they are a team. Steel has all these big ideas, like the transcontinental race, and she supports him and reassures him and calms him down. When the race began, Lucy had a funny feeling about the President's involvement, and began to investigate for his sake. And apparently she explained much of this to Johnny and Gyro when they rode back to Kansas City together. I think she just wanted them to know why she was going to so much trouble for Stephen, and that she felt he was worth it.
In the present, Lucy is stuck with Funny Valentine, who finds her behavior odd, but not unpleasant. The Corpse Eye she's been carrying falls out of her pocket, apparently drawn to the other Corpse Parts Valentine has been storing here. She manages to keep him distracted by getting him to monologue about his plans.
I'm a big fan of the Napkin Speech in Part 7. I think it's a great way to sum up a bad guy's plan. A lot of supervillains will say generic shit like "I'm going to rule the world!", or "I love killing people, lol!" Valentine has dreams of power, but it's not as simple as mere conquest.
It goes like this: When you sit at a table, you can take the napkin on your left or the one on your right? Which on do you choose? Trick question, because it all depends on what the person sitting next to you chose. Ultimately, the first person to choose a napkin decides for everyone else whether they realize it or not.
Now substitute napkins for global hegemony. Valentine doesn't just want to make all the important decisions. He wants to make the first decisions from which all subsequent decisions are made. He wants everyone else to cope with the outcome of his choices. That's how he sees true power.
This is sort of comparable to Dio and Kars, who seemed content to just be almighty beings in the world, without necessarily running everything. But Valentine seems to have a more nationalist view of it. He might plan to use the Corpse's power for his personal benefit, but in the long run he seems to be doing this for the United States.
Anyway, he decides to have sex with his wife on the same table, and when she resists he takes this as confirmation that she is the mysterious traitor who foiled his plans in Kansas City and Chicago. He still wants to rape her anyway, though.
This whole part of the story is pretty rough. I don't think Valentine gets very far with this, but Lucy is nearly naked for much of this. There's a few shots of her uncensored boobs too, which I'm not a big fan of. My understanding is that JoJo's Bizarre Adventure moved from Shonen Jump to Ultra Jump around the time Part 7 began, which allowed Araki to produce more mature content than before. I think Part 8 strikes a better balance with that, because the only envelope Araki seems to have pushed in Part 7 is abusing Lucy Steel.
Anyway, she can't fight Valentine off, but then suddenly her Cream Starter disguise just ejects itself from her body all at once and gets on Valentine instead. I don't know if Lucy caused this somehow or the disguise had some sort of failsafe built in or what. What I do know is that Lucy takes advantage of Valentine's confusion and stabs him in the neck with a steak knife.
E-C-W! E-C-W! E-C-W!
Valentine stumbles around for a bit and then collapses next to a chair on the floor. It falls on him, and he disappears. Then he reappears, with no sign of his injuries. Lucy manages to hide from him for a little while, but she ends up trapping herself in a room with steel barricdes on the windows. There's a chimney, but she'd never be able to climb up it.
To her surprise, Lucy discovers the Corpse Parts in the fireplace, I guess? There's a big bright light, and then Valentine breaks into the room.
Apparently he'd already found the Corpse Skull, which is the last piece, and it has now merged with Lucy's body, giving her a pregnant belly. Maybe Valentine didn't know it was in this building until now? Anyway, this seems to suit his gross plans for Lucy, the Corpse, and the rest of the world.
Back to the Wekapipo vs. Magenta fight. Uh.... nothing happens, because Magenta's Stand makes him indestructible, but he can't move while he's using it. Wekapipo's plan is to just wait him out. Thrilling.
Then a little dinosaur leaps away from Magenta and Wekapipo doesn't understand what that's all about. Turns out Magenta had sticks of dynamite under his coat, and I guess the dinosaur was there to light the fuses for him.
It doesn't really matter, because Wekapipo uses his left-side ataxia technique to make the horses to a sharp turn, which launches them into the water, so the explosion doesn't hurt anyone. Well, Wekapipo takes some damage, but when Magenta tries to finish him off, he tangles him up in cables tied to one of the axles from the carriage. Magenta sinks to the bottom of the river while Wekapipo realizes that Diego must have been working with Magenta on this caper.
At the bottom of the river, Magenta confirms this. He can't untangle the cable before he drowns, so his only choice is to keep using his Stand to protect him until help arrives. Except Magenta absolutely sucks so no one would bother helping him, even if they knew where he was. He figures Diego will help him, though, because Diego's the one who rescued him back in Michigan. Yeah, If there's one thing I've noticed reading JJBA comics, it's that Dio is a really trustworthy guy.
Anyway, Stephen Steel is hurt but he's apparently going to live. As for Magenta, he's doing a Kars tribute at the bottom of the Delaware River. Well, I gotta hand it to Magenta. I still don't like him, but I have to respect his appreciation for Battle Tendency.
Meanwhile, whatever this is. Chapter 63 is very short, and features Gyro doing a comedy skit for Johnny. I think the joke is some sort of wordplay that depends upon me understanding Japanese, or Italian, or both.
Pretty sure the anime will just skip this entirely. Either that, or there would have to be a wall of text to explain the joke in the subtitles.
Johnny says he enjoys the gag, but fuck you, Johnny. This was awful. Either you have awful taste or you're enabling Gyro's cringey performances. Not cool either way.
Next, Gyro eats actual shit to track Diego's horse. I feel like there should be an easier way to go about this. They're all going to New Jersey, aren't they?
The boys are kind of pissed about Valentine taking all the Corpse Parts, so their plan in the 8th Stage is to find Diego and take that one Corpse eye from him, since it's the only one they can use to track down the rest of the parts now. Also they still owe him for that bullshit with Sandman back in Missouri.
Johnny wants to be clear on just what they're going to do to Diego when they find his ass. Johnny is prepared to shoot the motherfucker.
Gyro's like "Wait, we don't want to kill him?" and Johnny gets all weird, sort of like when he was prepared to destroy the Corpse to keep Axl Ro from getting ahold of it. It's very Part One-y of Johnny. Killing Dio is in his nature, whether he understands it or not. Gyro might as well ask fish to quit swimming.
But Gyro is firm on this point. He doesn't like Diego either, but he's not looking to kill a man in cold blood. Surprisingly, Johnny backs down, although he still has doubts about how they can take Diego's Corpse Eye without a serious fight. If necessary, Johnny seems fully prepared to chop Diego in half with a sword, scalp to groin.
Man, Part 1 was so good...
All right, so this is where things get confusing, because Gyro is standing at a street corner, and from the other side Johnny notices President Valentine just moseying up behind him, Also, there's another guy approaching Gyro from the other side.
Johnny keeps screaming warnings to Gyro, but it's like he can't hear him.
Then some mysterious assailant shoots Johnny. I think he survives this thanks to his Stand powers, but this gets Gyro's attention. Valentine disappears entirely, and I'm pretty sure Gyro didn't even know he was there.
So Gyro ends up fighting this guy, who has some bullshit Stand ability that doesn't get explained until the D4C arc starts. He has a bottle of what I suspect is acid, and that thing on his arm looks like one of those things they use in Yugi-Oh. Well, we'll have to find out more next time...
When Gyro has two big dates on the same night, HP disguises Johnny so Gyro can be at two places at once! Saddle up for laughs with an all new Steel Ball tonight after Friends, on NBC Must-See TV Thursday!
See the title page looks waaaayyyy better when Hot Pants is the lady in the group with Johnny and Gyro. Nothing against Lucy Steel, she's a great character, but she's way to young to be the hot chick. I don't know why this even needs to be said when your story has Hot Pants in it.
Speaking of Lucy, her corpse was discovered in Chicago last month. Stephen Steel is distraught, until he gets a closer look and realizes it's not Lucy Steel. The face is the same but it looks like her head on an adult woman's body, which is ridiculous. We, of course, know that this is actually Scarlet Valentine's corpse, and Hot Pants disposed of it after disguising Lucy and Scarlet as one another.
Wait, Stephen should know about this too, since Hot Pants said she would inform him of the switch later on. Anyway, the real Lucy is still with Funny Valentine, who continues to follow the Steel Ball Run race.
This is kind of superfluous, but I always enjoyed this scene of Johnny and Gyro just chilling out by the campfire. they're playing cards, Johnny's ordering a new knife via mail-order catalogue, they got a pot of coffee brewing. I just noticed they're using their saddles as pillows. That's adorable. Just two special boys having a fun night.
Gyro's teddy bear is looking kind of shopworn, so he orders a new one.
Unfortunately, this peaceful scene is interrupted when Johnny spots Hot Pants riding by. They decide to follow her and take back all the Corpse Parts she took from them back at the Mississippi River. I was going to say "Illinois," but I think they were still on the Missouri bank when she mugged them.
They follow HP into Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She goes in this building, which looks like it ought to be kind of important, but apparently this is just where the townsfolk go to dump their trash. That seems really inefficient. You're just going to have to clean out the building when it gets full, and put it all someplace else. I don't know how they handled garbage in 1891, but I don't think this makes sense.
Anyway, Gyro wants to beat the shit out of Hot Pants and find out what "he" is up to. Johnny knows Hot Pants is a woman but he hasn't told Gyro yet. Even he isn't sure why he hasn't told Gyro, but I'm pretty sure it's because Hot Pants is the hottest woman alive in this story, and he sort of assumed Gyro would figure it out himself a long time ago, so it'd be kind of awkward to explain it now.
So they go inside and find this nun. Johnny recognizes her as Hot Pants immediately, but Gyro is like "Sorry to bother you, sister, but we're looking for a man who ducked into this building. You'd remember him. He was about your height and build. Wore pink lipstick like the kind you have on. Kind of an hourglass figure. Funny thing about his chest, his pecs are really round, not in a bad way. Hell, it's kind of pleasant to look at if you know what I mean. He had a fantastic butt, too. The kind you dream about during long winter nights by the campfire."
Gyro goes to look in the back, and Johnny questions her alone. "Are you a nun? Do you live as a woman in normal life? Have you ever fallen in love?" I'm not sure if Johnny is just confused or he's trying to ask Hot Pants out on a date. Can't blame him there.
Then her clothes open up to reveal a small boy partially merged with her own body. He keeps calling her "sister" and she pleads for Johnny to escape and find the Corpse Parts while he still can. As for herself, she believes she's doomed.
Now, this might be a shock to some of you reading this, but it turns out the strange business going on in this building is because of an Enemy Stand. I know, I was flabbergasted when I found out too. This is "Civil War", and it takes a while to understand what it does, but suffice to say that it's causing Hot Pants to hallucinate her dead brother. Probably the nun outfit too.
The Stand User has assembled most of the Corpse already. Wait, I thought Hot Pants left some of these with Lucy back in Chicago because she couldn't escape with all of them. Oh well.
What's missing are the Skull (hasn't turned up yet), the eyes (Diego and Lucy each have one), the legs (currently inside Johnny's body) and one of the vertebrae (also still inside Johnny).
Let's take a look at the race results so far. The 7th Stage ends at Philadelphia, and the 8th and 9th Stages are considerably shorter. So this is an important Stage to win, because whoever's in the lead in Philly has a strong chance of taking the lead in the final two stages as well. For the race leaders, this could be an opportunity to secure an insurmountable lead in points, but for the guys in the back, this is a chance to come back from behind and win the whole thing.
I've never understood the way the points system works. I think the idea is that even if Baba Yaga crosses the finish line of the last stage before anyone else, he might still lose the race because Pocoloco has more points. And yet, the race time seems to be important as well, which is why the winner of each stage receives a one-hour time bonus. But it kind of doesn't matter. This arc features Hot Pants, who retired from the race during the 6th Stage. Meanwhile, Sloop John B has been slowly working his way up the top ten and I'm pretty sure he hasn't appeared in this manga at all.
What I find more fascinating is that there were something like 3800 contestants back in Sandiego, and now we're down to just 61. Part of what's kept Sloop John B in the hunt is that 98% of the competition is just gone. He doesn't have to outride the others, he just has to outlast them.
Let's get back to Hot Pants. As a child, she took her little brother out to gather nuts when they were attacked by a bear. I guess this confirms that Hot Pants really is from the U.S., since I'm pretty sure they don't have bears in Italy. Anyway Hot Pants didn't even know there were bears in the area, so she had no idea that she needed to bring a pic-a-nic basket to distract any hungry woodland-type forest creatures.
Hot Pants survived, but her brother did not. What only she knows was that she pushed her brother toward the bear, sacrificing him to save herself. I... kind of don't believe that. Even if Hot Pants really did this, I'd chalk it up to an act of extreme panic, and it's hard to imagine anyone holding her responsible for her actions.
But I'd say it's more likely that she created this memory in her mind to process the trauma of it all. She saw her little brother mauled by a bear. That's messed up. The survivors' guilt must have been tremendous, and it's possible that Hot Pants couldn't come to grips with the bear killing him and sparing her, so her subconscious invented an simple explanation for it all: "I pushed him."
She never told her family this, and no one would have suspected in the first place, because they were all so supportive of her after what she went through. But Hot Pants lived with the guilt, and became a nun in an attempt to find absolution. That's why she sought out the Corpse Parts for the Vatican during this race. She thought if she succeeded in this mission and recovered "his" corpse, then "he" would forgive her.
Okay, I'm really saving this for Chapter 67, but.... Arrgh, I don't like how this is laid out. The survivors guilt is fine. HP becoming a cool secret-agent/nun is also cool. HP being a fine foxy lady is very cool, thank you very much.
What I don't like is that she clearly has thrown herself into the Christian faith to assuage her guilt, but no one in the convent ever bothered to explain to her how Christ's forgiveness works. You don't go on a fetch quest like some JRPG character. You confess your sins and receive absolution. This is like Christianity 101. The reader might not be expected to know this, but Hot Pants should have had this conversation with at least four or five clergymen by now.
I can appreciate that Hot Pants' guilt runs so deep that she might not be able to accept such a simple arrangement. It feels "too easy" at times, and that's the point. Christ did the hard part when he died on the cross. His grace is vastly greater than our sins. And yet, Hot Pants might not be able to handle this, and she feels like she needs to go on some sort of mission to "earn" forgiveness. Fair enough. That's good character work.
The problem I have is that the mission Hot Pants has undertaken is to recover the dead body of Jesus Christ. This is a wild idea in its own right, which I'll get into when we get to Chapter 67. Right now, I just want to focus on these two contradictory ideas that Hot Pants seems to be clinging to.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who died on the cross and was resurrected, will forgive me for feeding my little brother from a bear.
This same Jesus Christ has been dead for centuries, and his corpse has been scattered across North America.
How is Jesus going to forgive you, Sister Hot Pants, when he's dead? She seems to think that there's a still living Jesus somewhere out there, who is still capable of forgiving Hot Pants. And yet, this still-living Jesus apparently cares a lot about the Corpse he discarded over 1800 years ago?
I gotta get back on track. My point is that a nun should have a very, very strong reaction to the idea of Jesus Christ leaving a corpse behind, and Hot Pants doesn't come anywhere close to that. She's not even in the same ballpark. She's not even on the same state as the ballpark. This is like "I picked the wrong religion," stuff, and she just feels bad that she failed to complete her mission.
As for Gyro, he's being plagued by similar memories of his past, like botched executions he performed while training in Naples. Apparently when he would screw up, he'd discard the Steel Ball he was using at the time. So now he sees all these discarded Steel Balls, which he got rid of a long time ago, but they're definitely here, and he's sure they're all his.
So it should come as no surprise that Civil War would have similar effects on Johnny, because we already know he's got guilt from the death of his older brother Nicholas. Johnny believes the mouse that startled Nicholas' horse into throwing him was the same mouse that Johnny released into the woods. Later, he and his dad had a fight over Nicholas's old boots, and his dad disowned him.
Johnny is also haunted by his pet mouse, Danny, the one he thinks caused the accident that started it all. Johnny tries to shoot it, but then he hears a voice speaking in red-letter text. This is "strongly implied" to be Jesus, the same way Hot Pants' breasts and nun outfit strongly imply that she's a woman.
I for one am kind of offended that Araki, a man known to have visited Italy more than once in his life, a man with an appreciation for religious art produced during the Rennaissance, has depicted Jesus without a full beard. Did he run out of ink on this page? Does Araki think the Romans gave him a shave before the crucifixion? He was up there for hours. The stubble would have grown back anyway.
I hope the anime fixes this. None of this mustache crap.
Oh, right. So Jesus tells Johnny that if his hear wavers, he shouldn't shoot. This is repeated a few more times during the arc.
Johnny thinks it's another one of Civil War's hallucinations, and yet this one is different. Jesus promises that a new path will be opened for him if he refrains from shooting.
You know, the other thing I don't like is how the nail holes in Jesus' hands are like cartoon holes an inch-wide. I will give Araki some credit for depicting the lean, rangy physique seen in religious artwork. I can't quite find the spot in his side where the Roman soldier pierced him with his spear. But it might be obscured by the shadow. But I can see plenty of clean-shaven skin on his jawline. This is really annoying.
All right, so Johnny finally pulls himself together and draws a bead on his true target, which is Axel Ro, the Stand User. Unfortunately, this plays right into his hands. The only way to escape the power of Civil War is to wash away the illusions with water, or to sacrifice something. Johnny choosing to sacrifice Axel Ro himself might seem like a clever solution, but it actually just moves the problem. Now Axel is the one who is freed, and Johnny has to assume the burden of Axel's own sins.
What sins, you ask? Well Axel Ro served in the US American Civil War. He was assigned to serve as a lookout, but he quickly turned to drinking to cope with the isolation and dread. When the Confederate troops arrived, he overslept during his watch, and he also failed to light his lantern to alert the nearby town. So lots of soldiers and civilians were killed because the Union Army didn't find out about the attack until later.
Some issues with this tale: I think Axel is describing the Battle of Gettysburg, since this arc takes place in the town itself, and it would just make sense. I'm not a Civil War buff or anything, but I'm looking over the Wikipedia article and I'm not finding anything about a civilian massacre in the town. Then again, the SBR-verse is clearly different from the real world, so maybe in the real world some other Union soldier stayed sober during his watch.
Also, it's goofy how Axel Ro is wearing a World War II helmet. Whatever, man.
Anyway, the point is that by killing Axel Ro, Johnny has only doomed himself to be torn to shreds by the ghosts of the people who died because of Axel's negligence. Axel himself is restored to life, and now he's finally free of his curse, and can sieze the Corpse Legs from Johnny's body.
Johnny desperately prepares another nail bullet, and Jesus appears again, warning him not to shoot if his heart is wavering. Johnny replies that his heart is not wavering, and he knows exactly what to do and whom to shoot.
That's right, he shoots himself. It's a bold choice, but let's see how it works for him.
Surprisingly, this works out pretty well. Remember, Johnny recently upgraded his Stand powers to move the holes created by the things that he shoots. By shooting himself, he has now gained the ability to move through the hole. This is Tusk Act III, as evidenced by how much bigger and beefier the Stand has gotten.
Johnny shoots down Axel again, then makes short work mowing down all of the ghosts. But that doesn't matter. Axel comes to life again and congratulates Johnny for evolving his Stand Ability, but he's still in the same trap. He's still burdened by Axel's sins, and Axel is free to leave with the Corpse Parts.
Except not quite, because Johnny uses his portable hole power to reach through the Civil War dimension and out of the building. He drags the Saint Corpse back through, and Axel can't stop him.
Even Gyro is worried about this. No one is sure if the Corpse will survive in tact if Johnny pulls it through the hole. Gyro thinks he should just let it go, but Johnny is sure of himself and he's locked into this course of action. He'll destroy the Coprse before letting Axel Ro have it.
Desperate, Axel pulls out a knife and stabs through the hole, getting Johnny right in the neck. Axel loses an arm this way, perhaps because the hole collapsed upon Johnny's death?
Turns out this was exactly what Johnny wanted. By killing Johnny, Axel brought the curse of Civil War back upon himself, and now Johnny is the one restored to life. So I guess they're just gonna keep doing this all night, huh?
Well, no. Someone shoots Axel from the doorway, and that takes the fight out of him.
Turns out it's President Valentine himself. He learned of Johnny and Gyro heading off the race course, so he knew they were closing on a new Corpse Part, so he's come to collect them all for himself. It seems like he shot Axel just to eliminate him as a potential threat. He purposely aimed away from his vital organs to as not to kill him right away. And he shot Axel to stop him from attacking Johnny, so there's no sin in that. This means Valentine won't fall under the influence of Civil War, allowing him to flee with the Corpse Parts before Johnny can stop him.
So now Valentine has most of the Corpse. All he's missing is the skull, which hasn't been located yet, and the eyes. Diego Brando has one, and since neither Hot Pants nor Gyro had the other, Valentine deduces that it must be in the possession of the mysterious traitor that he hasn't been able to find. We know it's Lucy, but what happens when Valentine figures that out?
Despite any critiques I may have of the story, you just can't beat Part 7 when it comes to the scenic landscapes. Anyway, this is the "Wrecking Ball" arc.
This arc introduces two new enemies who are out to get Johnny and Gyro. The first is Wekapipo, a Neapolitan exile who once served in the royal guard. Years ago, his sister married into a wealthy and influential family, and he thought she was set for life, until he discovered that her husband was beating her so badly that she had lost her sight. Wekapipo appealed to the Pope to get the marriage anulled, but his ex-brother-in-law challenged him to a duel to save face.
So they had their duel, using Steel Balls instead of swords, and Wekapipo won... a free trip out of Naples, because even though he killed the rat bastard, his father was too big a wheel in the kingdom, so Wekapipo was exiled by the other Steel Ball guys, I guess. Among these was Gregorio Zeppeli, Gyro's father.
It should be noted that Wekapipo's main concern in this was not for his own welfare, but his blind sister, who had no other family to care for her. Later, when President Valentine recruited Wekapipo to kill Johnny and Gyro, he offered U.S. citizenship for Wekapipo and any family members he wanted to bring into the country. But Wekapipo told him that he had no surviving family, as his sister had died in Naples.
Also, it doesn't look like Wekapipo has any personal stake in this mission. He's accepted the job of killing Gyro, but he doesn't seem to hate him, nor does he mention wanting revenge against Gyro's father. It seems more likely that Valentine learned enough about Gyro's Steel Ball techniques that he decided he needed to fight fire with fire. And Wekapipo fits the bill. He has similar training, and he's an outcast, so there's no pesky loyalty to the king to stay his hand.
Meanwhile, Johnny and Gyro are somewhere on the Straits of Mackinac, which connect Lakes Michigan and Huron. They have to cross the frozen waters to get from the Upper Penninsula to the Lower Penninsula of Michigan. The problem is that the ice isn't quite thick enough for the horses to safely cross. At the same time, they don't want to linger for too long, or they'll fall behind the other racers.
While they try to make up their minds, a wolf keeps following them around, and Gyro says it's because Johnny gave him scraps from breakfast.
Johnny spots Pocoloco and some other racers crossing the strait, which kind of forces their hand. They decide to risk following Pocoloco, and hope he found a safe way across. Gyro suspects that he must have located a "Native Path", referring to an American Indian custom of leaving logs in the water so they become frozen in the ice. This reinforces the ice along a path that's safe enough to travel. Gyro was hoping to find this himself, but if Pocoloco is already crossing then it can't be helped.
I haven't really discussed the race standings in a while, because quite frankly they don't really matter anymore. Sandman was a top contender for a while, but he's dead now. I was confused why this page showed Diego winning the 1st stages but I'm pretty sure it's because he got bumped up a spot after Sandman failed to show up at Chicago. Mountain Tim was doing well at first, but he's dead too. Hot Pants emerged to fill the void, but she's made it clear that she's only participating in the race as a cover for her mission to capture the Corpse Parts. And Johnny only entered this thing because Gyro was entered.
So the only serious racers in the lead are Gyro, Pocoloco, Diego Brando, and Norisuke Higashikata. Diego still wants to win, but he's been taking it easy for the past few stages while his horse recovers from injuries sustained in Kansas. And Pocoloco and Norisuke are... barely in this story.
Initially, it seemed like the narrative flow of Steel Ball Run would see supporting characters show up throughout the course of the race, then drop out and be replaced by new characters. Mountain Tim was a key player for a while, then he's out and Hot Pants is in. But no one's really showing up to take Sandman's spot in the cast. Dot Han seemed like he might become important, and then he died almost immediately. Norisuke Higashikata has been around a while, but he never does anything to impact the plot.
On the other hand, Pocoloco is still doing really well, but he's become a virtual afterthought in this story. He seemed to be an important player when the story began, but now he's just a name near the top of the rankings. Gyro wants to beat him in the 7th Stage, but not for any personal reasons or to settle a rivalry. He just needs to score some points to stay in the game.
But before Gyro and Johnny can begin their crossing, they get attacked on the ice by Wekapipo and his ally. Gyro recognizes Wekapipo, but he never knew him all that well.
We get a flashback to when Wekapipo's sister was brought into the hospital after breaking her shoulder in an accident. Gyro realizes that she's blind from optic nerve damage, and he determines that his father had treated her before, but did not perform the surgery that could restore her sight. Gyro wants to do it now, but his mom, who is assisting him in surgery, warns him against this.
So let's talk about Wekapipo's powers. His Steel Ball is like Gyro's excpet it's orange and it has fourteen smaller balls built into it. These "satellites" pop out during his attacks, and when they hit Johnny and Gyro, they suffer several seconds of "left side ataxia". This is a condition where you can't see the left side of your body. I think this is a real-world thing, but Araki has expanded it to include the awareness of one's left side as well. Like, even if Johnny grabbed his left arm with his right, he wouldn't be able to tell he was doing it.
This leads to the other bad guy in this arc, Magenta Magenta. He has a Stand named "20th Century Boy", which basically makes him indestructible while he uses it. The Stand disperses the impact of any attack down to the ground, in this battle, the ice. The drawback is that he can't move while the Stand defends him. His sole purpose in this battle is to stay on the left side of Johnny and Gyro and shoot them with a gun. Magenta Magenta kind of sucks.
Here, we see Johnny's nail bullets have no effect on Magenta Magenta, although the dispersed attack does direct the force into one of his guns. It doesn't matter, though, since Magenta Magenta has more than one.
What Johnny and Gyro don't pick up on right away is that the wolf that's been following them around out here is in possession of the next Corpse Part. Wekapipo knows, however, because when whatsisface took the Corpse Parts from Johnny in Milwaukee, he observed a map of Lake Michigan that appeared in the snow. ANd there was an image of a wolf on the map too.
So when the wolf shows up, Wekapipo and Magenta Magenta make sure to shoot it so they can take the Corpse Parts later.
Despite Wekapipo's skill, he insists that Gyro is not to be taken lightly, as the Zeppeli Family knows the secret of enhancing their Spin with the Golden Rectangle. The implication is that Wekapipo doesn't know how to do this, which is why he chose this particular battlefield. Gyro taught Johnny to seek out the Golden Rectangle in nature to use as a reference for spinning his nails, but here on the Mackinac Straits, there's just ice in all directions. Johnny can't find anything to use as a reference, because he usually relies on plants and animals. Gyro can still use things like his hands and Johnny's eyes, but that's about it. Also, one of his hands got messed up during the fight, so his options are rapidly dwindling.
We see another flashback to Gyro being a doctor in Naples. He attempted to perform the surgery that his father wouldn't, but he failed. This was because of a sudden burst of steam from a nearby teapot just as he was preparing his Steel Ball for the procedure. This somehow threw him just enough off his game that it didn't work, although he's certain his father could have done it.
For what it's worth, his patient, Wekapipo's sister, doesn't take this very hard, since she's been blind for a while, and she's just grateful that Gyro was able to treat her other injuries.
In the present, Gyro's other hand has gotten hurt during the battle, and now he can't find any Golden Rectangles either. I really like the distorted, incomplete rectangles in the art here. It's a great way to showcase Gyro's abilities failing him. Now Wekapipo has the advantage, because his techniques still work perfectly, while Gyro's best skills are unavailable to him.
At one point they seem to be cornered, as Gyro has lost his Steel Balls, but he uses one of Magenta's bullets as a projectile and launches that at him instead. It just ricochets straight up into the air.
Magenta taunts them as he approaches, and Wekapipo warns him to finish them off now while he has the change, but then the bullet Gyro used comes back down and goes straight through Magenta's head. His Stand wasn't there to protect him because he was unaware of the danger.
I'm not sure how Gyro made the bullet autotrack Magenta like this, but earlier we saw him use the Steel Ball to take an X-ray of that blind woman's head, so whatever. Magenta's out of this fight.
But that still leaves Wekapipo to deal with. Gyro does his best, and even manages to score what looks like a clean hit, except Wekapipo repels Gyro's bullshit Steel Ball powers with some bullshit Steel Ball counter.
They go again, and this time Wekapipo's sattellite balls hit the ice where the dead wolf is. It falls into the water, which is bad news for Johnny and Gyro, because they were counting on using the wolf's body to find a reference for the Golden Rectangle. Wekapipo anticipated this and cut them off.
So Gyro is screwed, right? Well, it sure seems that way, but...
As Wekapipo prepares to finish Gyro off, he reflects on his failure to win the race or do anything else with his young life. Then he things back to what his dad said after he failed to save that woman's eyesight. Once more he uses the analogy of the tennis ball that hits the net. The Zeppelis cannot interfere with the outcome of certain things, because they're in God's domain. Something like that anyway.
But the Zeppelis can, and do, believe in miracles. So at the very least, Gyro can pray for the ball to fall on the other side of the net.
And that's what happens in this battle. Snow suddenly appears, and Gyro can use the snowflakes to find his Golden Rectangle.
Armed with this, Gyro launches his Steel Balls with greater power than before, and this shatters Wekapipo's Steel Ball with ease.
Wekapipo's mistake was to sink the wolf's body. Doing that caused water to splash up into the air, where it froze and came back down as snowflakes. In his effort to deny Gyro the Golden Rectangle, he ended up handing it to him on a platter.
Johnny pieces together the rest of it. The wolf only had anyone's attention because Johnny surrendered the Corpse Parts to Valentine's goon, who saw the map with the wolf on it, then reported it to Valentine, who passed the information to Wekapipo. So this was all one huge coincidence, or... perhaps, a miracle.
In the flashback, Gregorio explains to Zeppeli that the reason he didn't save the woman's eyesight was because her ex-father-in-law would surely have her killed if she weren't blind. Ironically, the blindness saved her from a much worse fate. And so, Gyro reveals to Wekapipo that his sister is still alive. Gyro's dad put her up somewhere in the country, so whatever reports Wekapipo had about her death were untrue.
Also, the wolf is still alive? Maybe?
Gyro spots a piece of wood in the ice and discovers the Path he was looking for earlier. So Pocoloco didn't find it after all, which means they can cross it themselves and probably do it faster, since it's a sturdier way.
After losing, Weakapipo tried to kill himself, but Gyro stopped him. He wanted to tell Wekapipo about his sister, but also, he asks him to look after Lucy Steel, since she's probably in danger right now.
Moving on, Chapter 55 does a brief retrospective on how Gyro and Zeppeli have traveled. They can only cover 50-70km per day. Anyone going faster than that is written off as a threat, because sooner or later they'll wear out their horse or end up dead. In the north, they would camp out and rest whenever the wind was blowing against them.
Then we see the final stretch of the 6th Stage, and all the riders go all out. We see Pocoloco and his Stand, Hey Ya, one more time, and I think this might be their final appearance in Part 7. This always bugged me, because I really enjoyed Pocoloco when I read SBR for the first time in 2017. But the more I think about it, the more sense this makes. What else can you do with a guy who always wins? Even defeating Pocoloco is kind of cheap, because it undermines his incredible luck power.
Johnny has a dim view of Pocoloco as a jockey, but Gyro doesn't buy that. If he's a third-rate horse rider, why is he so far ahead in the race? The answer is that he's got one-in-5-billion luck right now, but they don't know that.
Anyway, Hey Ya leads Pocoloco to a more favorable course, which leaves Johnny and Gyro on a path that leads to a crevasse. Except Gyro throws his Steel Ball, which somehow unwinds itself into a length of wire, and their horses run across it.
So that's how you beat Pocoloco's luck. You just have to whip out a skill so profound that no amount of luck could overcome it. Gyro wins the 6th Stage, putting him back in contention to win the whole thing.
Meanwhile, Magenta Magenta is still alive, and he wants revenge on Wekapipo. He recalls hearing them talk about Lucy Steel, so that gives him an idea. Well, I forget what he ended up doing from here, but I hope it was better than his presence in this arc, because all he did was shoot guns and get wounded.
