thinking about how it makes jotaro so much more of an interesting character to read him as a closeted gay man
like this isn't even me going ha ha jojo is gay i genuinely think that a queer subtextual reading of him makes a lot of his actions make sense for the series. think about it. there's the obvious stuff like him showing literally no interest in any female character for the entire part, but let's lay it out like this.
he's a man of the 1980s, where being gay isn't widely accepted, and would lead to ridicule and harassment, especially in a conservative society like japan. he tries to push away his feelings, so he becomes a hypermasculine man, consciously or subconsciously believing that becoming more of a man will save him from anyone ever even suspecting that he could be anything other than straight. so, he makes it through high school isolating himself from everyone just so that it isn't suspicious that he doesn't like any of the many girls that follow him around. and then he gets married, and he has a kid, but it's still not right so he distances himself on these long trips away from home and eventually it's just all too much for a wife that realizes her husband who can't love her in the way that a husband should, and they get divorced.
jotaro kujo is a gay man like many of the 1980s who fell into hypermasculinity and lived a lie all for it to come back to him as the biggest lie he ever told, severing a relationship from even his own daughter.
but of course this is all 100% jokes, satire, comedy, in minecraft, and not real
adding on to this bc apparently you guys liked it lmao
one part of jotaro's character that i don't think gets touched on enough is how isolated he is from everyone in his life. he's only half japanese and in such a homogenized society, that makes him stand (no pun intended) out. because of this i don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that he could have been bullied as a child, which would have further ostracized him from his peers.
then he hits high school, and he's made himself into the hypermasculine man that he thinks he should be. because of this, he's rewarded by heterosexual society with acceptance and even infatuation from many of his female classmates. he pushes this away, of course, but at the same time i think there's a part of him that's grateful that it's happening because at least then it means that no one has caught on to his act.
adding on to the points i made in my previous post, the 1980s were an especially turbulent time for gay men because of the AIDS epidemic, where stigma was rampant, and lead to the deaths of many gay men. this would make it ever more important to jotaro, who was a teenager at the time, to have cut himself off from any connection to the gay community, lest he be seen as "tainted."
and all of this is before his stand comes in. suddenly there's this part of his soul that no one else can see and, as far as jotaro knows, only he has. sound familiar?
he's scared that it will hurt someone and so he literally locks himself into jail because of it so that no one else can be hurt except for himself. he's only convinced to leave because a group of other people (notably men) who share the similar parts of his soul as him and matures by bonding with them.
to sum it all up, jotaro kujo is a man who grew up isolated from his peers due to factors outside of his control, became hypermasculine to conform to his society, developed a part of his soul that he feared, then learned to accept through connections with people like him, and became all the stronger for it. and maybe this is all a stretch or me reaching, but maybe the story of jotaro kujo can mean a lot to certain people and taking a look even slightly deeper than his surface can reveal something just a bit more important about one of the most influential series in manga.
