One headcanon for each major Stone Ocean character!
First mostly text based post, with random headcanons I have for SO cast! Just something fun and light before I get to AUs and OCs. Hope you will enjoy and if you have own, be free to share, I love seeing people jojo ideas! Anyway, here it goes:
Jolyne Cujoh - She had a interest in Entomology but after deciding to 'straighten up' she dropped it, looking for interests that would be more fitting for a 'well adjusted woman' but she always felt bad about it. Another reason for her dropping it could be that it reminded her about Jotaro too much.
Ermes Costello - She barely knows Spanish, always having trouble learning it and can't speak fluently in it, disappointing her father and Gloria. Although she knows some swears, which she shared with Jolyne of course.
Emporio Alnino - A lot of things in the Ghost Room are gathered from other ghostly spaces inside the prison, like his computer, gun and books on various topics. It was a rare occasion for Emporio to feel joy, when he went on his small treasure hunts, while still being alone inside the prison.
Foo Fighters - As she is the youngest member of the party (in human years at least) whenever she asks a question that is too awkward or others are too tired to answer, they say they will tell her when she gets older, which always makes her pout.
Weather Report - Probably not too groundbreaking, but Weather always uses his Stand, very often subconsciously. Someone in the team mentioned it's too warm and humid, then suddenly a breeze blows through. When it's too cold a sudden blanket of warmth surrounds them. When he doesn't want anyone to approach him, the air around him becomes full of static electricity.
Narciso Anasui - European cars are better. That's what he thinks and he will not change his mind on that, he is quite stubborn about this. Or anything else on that matter.
Enrico Pucci - He dislikes using modern technology and avoids it as much as possible. He types one key at the time, prefers to get stuff printed and would complain more openly about tech in prison, if not for his mask of always friendly priest.
Gwess - She picked up and dropped too many hobbies to count, even before she got sentenced. Usually she gets bored too quickly or something more interesting caught her eye.
Johngalli A. - He had his Stand since birth but didn't realize its true potential until he developed cataract. So in a way he doesn't consider it a hindrance but rather a blessing, allowing him to reach his full potential. Also he was born in New York.
Thunder McQueen - He actually really likes cleaning and his janitor job. He finds it as a simple enough routine and he isn't as easily grossed out.
Mirashon - She knows over 101 bar tricks to scam people and has very nimble fingers. She could pickpocket a guy and they wouldn't notice until they wanted to pay for something and try to find their wallet.
Lang Rangler - He was sentenced for hijacking the tanker AND killing his uni professor, the former was the main reason for him getting arrested and the latter came up during investigation as murder itself happened a while ago by then. Also he was manufacturing drugs as a chemist genius but he covered his tracks well enough that there was not enough proof to connect him to it in court of law. (They probably still suspect Willy Wonka to this day.)
Sports Maxx - He pretends to be Italian-American because someone on his mother's side was of Italian descent. He also sees himself as a modern God Father or Al Capone and wants to become as respected as him, while in heart and soul being a simple thug.
Viviano Westwood - He has a very good training routine and knowledge about muscles. He would scold Sonny for not making warm ups and would criticize some guards for being slobs and not working out enough or at all.
Kenzou - He is so, so SALTY about Scientology. He can't believe this thing is still running and how much people get sucked into it, compared to his cult which had some real values and people really believed in his bullshit preaching, compared to that pyramid scheme.
D an G - He had a whole bucket list of other things he wanted to do before predicted doomsday. Like watching some classic movies (they bored him), trying new cuisine (not as good as burgers anyway), or visiting Disneyland for the first time (kids there annoyed him to no end). Also he got so many loans to spent on random bullshit he didn't need but wanted to feel 'how it is owning them'. If not for murders he certainly would land in prison for fraud or at least be in massive debt.
Guccio - Whatever happened to him - he deserved it.
Miu Miu - She has whole sets of skirts or pants with different phrases printed on their back.
Ungalo - He really loved watching cartoons as a kid, before his life fell apart and he got into drugs. Also his 'friends' kept him around mostly cuz he was so quick to agitate and it was fun to see him beating up random people or getting beat up by them.
Rikiel - His mother that raised him was an adoptive one and when he learned that, it definitely didn't help him with his anxiety.
Donatello Versus - He is surprisingly patriotic about Florida and hates 'Florida man' type jokes. Maybe this state is a shitty hellhole, but it HIS hellhole, dammit.
Gloria Costello - Most of her clothes are just adjusted and re-sized clothes of her mother, as money they earned went mostly on maintaining her restaurant and providing for Ermes.
Sonny Likir - The only reason this guy keeps his job is because A. they are already short staffed and B. Westwood vouches for him. He is extremely obnoxious to work with and seems to have a never ending list of jokes that are offensive, sexist, racist or all three. Although he say it more to fuck with people then really believing what those jokes imply.
This is the "FF -Witness", "Awaken", and "Whitesnake: Pursuer" arcs, continuing the conflict over the mysterious bone, which has now turned into a mysterious plant baby.
Previously, Anasui was still fighting Yo-Yo-Ma, but I'm just gonna skip to the end because his solution is as anticlimactic as it is clever. He can't stop Yo-Yo-Ma from splashing saliva onto him, and he can't stop its targeting sensor from locking onto Jolyne, so instead he uses Diver Down to somehow wire a frog's brain to Yo-Yo-Ma's sensor. So now instead of attacking Jolyne, it just sort of hops around and tries to eat bugs.
Okay, two issues with this.
First: How the hell does this work? Diver Down already tried to go inside Yo-Yo-Ma to recover the Green Baby that it swallowed, and Anasui said that he couldn't do it, because Yo-Yo-Ma's insides were too repulsive for his Stand to interact with. I don't mean that to sound like Anasui was too grossed out to try, I mean he acted like it literally couldn't be done. So how is this frog brain surgery supposed to be easier than plucking a baby out?
Second: Actually, no, it's just the first thing again. How the hell does this work? This manga keeps beating us over the head with the idea that Stands don't have physical bodies, and what the characters see and interact with is merely a manifestation of their psychic powers. The frog shouldn't even be able to touch Yo-Yo-Ma unless Yo-Yo-Ma wants to. Right? More importantly, Yo-Yo-Ma shouldn't have nerves or circuits or whatever that can be connected to a frog's brain. That's like saying you can beat Narancia's Aerosmith by puncturing the fuel tanks on the plane. It's not a real plane!
Maybe long range automated stands are different somehow. As I recall, both Black Sabbath and Sheer Heart Attack could be seen by non-Stand Users, and their durability also implies a more solid physical form than other Stands. So maybe if Anasui had been around for those battles, he could have turned them into frogs too. But I don't know, man.
Anway, Anasui's plan is to just wait for Foo Fighters to kill the user, D&G, which will finish Yo-Yo-Ma for good. Jolyne's eye has melted, but they seem to think that FF can heal this along with the rest of their injuries.
Okay, that's another thing. When Foo Fighters first started tending to characters' injuries, they started with Jolyne's bullet wound from when she got shot during the Savage Garden arc. Foo explained that all they actually did was stuff plankton into the wound, and it was up to Jolyne's body to heal itself. I never understood this, because I'm pretty sure stuffing plankton into a wound would make things worse, but whatever.
Later, around the Dragon's Dream arc, FF began to refer to this technique as healing. I don't know if this means they refined the process to where it actually heals wounds, or maybe this was always the idea and there was a mistranslation early on.
It makes sense that FF could heal people, because their unique physiology allows them to inhabit and manipulate animal flesh. Etroe's been dead for a while, but Foo Fighters can reassemble, control, and reanimate her corpse to keep the body alive. FF's jaw melted off earlier, and now it's mostly been regenerated. If the plankton can do this, then it makes sense that the plankton can repair damage in an ally's body as well.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there's more to it than just stuffing plankton into Jolyne's eye socket. It's very special plankton that can regenerate body parts, although FF seemed to deny this earlier in the story. I should really watch the anime to see if this was addressed in the script.
Here's a profile on D&G. Turns out he was only put in the Punishment Ward for his own protection. D&G used to be a cop, but he bought into the idea of 2012 being the end of the world and decided this meant he could kill people he didn't like.
I guess this ties in with Yo-Yo-Ma in the sense that he pretended to be a public servant, before betraying the public trust and trying to cover it up. Then again, every law enforcement/prison guard character in this story has been a giant asshole, so the only thing that makes D&G's story unusual is that he's the only one that got put into prison for it.
D&G's favorite movie is Showgirls, which...
I have read that Araki does like a character sheet for all of his characters when he's planning a JJBA Part. And part of the form is the character's favorite music and movies, whatever. But sometimes the answers to those questions are so vapid and dumb that I don't know what they say about the characters. The movie Showgirls really only has two noteworthy features to it.
It's this legendarily bad movie, so it's got a reputation for camp value, or people liking it ironically.
It's got naked ladies in it, so if you're into that sort of thing, you could jerk off to it.
I feel like these observations are widely known. The movie came out in 1995. I was a freshman in college, and most of the hype for the film was "We made a movie about strippers, so you know there's gonna be some titties in it!" Also: "The girl from Saved By the Bell's gonna be nude in this! No, not her, the other one." I was doing laundry in my dormitory's basement when the announcement came over the PA that they were doing a group trip to the theater to see it. It was an all-male dorm hall, so you know, it kind of made sense. I didn't want to go because it was basically like admitting to the world that you're a giant horndog with poor taste, and I didn't want that kind of rep following me around.
The movie might have been somewhat forgotten after all these years, so maybe this is all a revelation to some of you. But when Stone Ocean was published, Showgirls was less than a decade old. I have no idea what Japanese audiences thought of the movie.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand what Showgirls says about D&G, except that he likes naked ladies and he doesn't know that pornography exists. Or maybe he's really into "so-bad-it's-good" film experiences. Or he's just a really, really basic bitch who enjoys whatever slop he finds on TV.
I will say that Araki's character profile for D&G encapsulates the US American culture very succinctly, so whatever his methods are, as little as I understand the "Showgirls" choice for favorite movie, I can't dispute that it all works.
Meanwhile, FF has tracked down D&G and is ready to kill him, but Father Pucci is lurking around nearby, and they don't understand what he has to do with any of this.
Pucci finds Guccio still dying slowly in the Ward, but he didn't see what happened with all the prisoners turning into trees and so forth. So Pucci sticks a disc in Guccio's head. This one isn't a Whitesnake disc, but a regular CD featuring Handel's "Messiah". Well, the disc plays music when he sticks it in Guccio's head, so maybe it really is a Whitesnake Disc after all.
Here's the thing: This whole business with Dio's Bone, the prisoners turning into trees, and the Green Baby? It's all part of Pucci's master plan, except he didn't know any of this was going to happen. He's just following a set of instructions Dio wrote before he got killed in Part 3. Jotaro read those instructions, then destroyed the notebook they were in, which is why Pucci stole Jotaro's memories. Now Pucci is doing what those instructions say, but he doesn't know exactly what will happen with each step.
And yet, Pucci seems completely convinced that everything is proceeding as it should. I don't know why he would believe that, since Dio obviously never tried this before himself. Call it faith, call it loyalty. Personally, I feel like Pucci resembles nothing so much as a gambler who's too deep in the hole to cut his losses. He's celebrating all of this because to do anything else would be to admit that this might have all been a waste of time.
Pucci wants to talk to D&G about what happened, so he keeps a close watch as the guards load him up into an ambulance. But then he notices that one of the guards is actually Foo Fighters disguised as a guard! Easily one of Foo's hottest looks. That hat looks adorable on them.
I don't know why I like this so much. Maybe I've seen too many of those scenes in pro wrestling where they load a wrestler in an ambulance, and their enemy is waiting for them inside the ambulance to beat them up even more. Also I'm a huge Ambulance-chan mark, and I insist that this is the same ambulance that appeared in Parts 3, 4, 5, and 8.
FF tries to shoot D&G at pointblank range, but Pucci throws a disc into a nearby guard, which compells the guard to spoil their aim. This is what finally tips FF off: Pucci is Whitesnake's user, and he's been the one behind everything from the start. Pucci asks whether FF would rather kill him or D&G.
The answer is D&G, because Foo Fighters owes their most precious memories to Jolyne. Before throwing in with Jolyne, FF's only memories were of guarding Whitesnake's disc collection without even knowing why. Over time, FF came to understand that Jolyne's selfless devotion to her friends came from the memories shared between them. Memories then, are what give a person courage, and so FF cannot forsake Jolyne. Put simply: Jolyne is the reason Foo Fighters has a soul.
But in the time it takes Foo Fighters to figure this out, Whitesnake manages to close the distance and attack. For Pucci, defeating Foo Fighters is fairly easy, because it was Whitesnake's power that gave FF intelligence in the first place. Just pluck out their disc and they'll revert to ordinary plankton again.
This is probably why FF was tempted to kill Pucci first before dealing with D&G. Anasui and Jolyne could afford to wait, but Foo Fighters doesn't know that right now, and believes every second counts. But FF also knows that Whitesnake can defeat them easily, and they'll never be completely free of him while he lives. This is what makes Foo's decision so courageous.
Cornered, Foo Fighters shoots themself, and splatters plankton goop everywhere. I think the idea was to abandon Etroe's body and take the disc with them so that they could escape. I'm not sure why this would stymie Whitesnake for long, but Pucci seems to care more about protecting D&G than chasing Foo.
I thought D&G was 100% dead, since Yo-Yo-Ma vanishes soon after, but maybe he's just badly wounded, and that's enough to cancel the Stand. Anyway, Foo Fighters needs to find water so they can live long enough to warn Jolyne about Father Pucci.
Once Yo-Yo-Ma is gone, the shell containing the Green Baby falls overboard, and then the Green Baby hatches and crawls onto land. Anasui regards it as an enemy to be destroyed or avoided at all costs, while Jolyne insists on recovering it to keep Whitesnake from using it in his plans.
Anasui tries to convince Jolyne that they need to be more worried about the guards' dogs, which are currently sniffing around for the escaped prisoners. But Jolyne insists that she'll figure that out once she's got the Green Baby. Anasui disagrees, but he can't help but admire Jolyne's knack for focusing on a single thing so intently like this. What Anasui finds so attractive about this is that he hopes one day, she'll focus that intense concentration upon him.
And I guess that sums up Anasui's motivation pretty well. For him, heaven is having someone to pay attention to him. Jolyne's out here getting shit done like a boss, tackling one problem after another, and Anasui looks at what she's focused on and thinks "Gosh, I wish that were me."
And yeah, that does sound really nice. Competence is something I find attractive in women. Maybe this is why I wasn't very interested in seeing "Showgirls" 30 years ago. There's something compelling about a woman who takes a keen interest in something, and you sort of want her to show a similar fascination with you.
Maybe this is why the Anasui/Jolyne relationship feels like a depiction of parasocial interactions online. Anasui desperately wants to be part of Jolyne's world, to be the most important thing in her world, but she barely knows him, and he has nothing to do with her mission. If they got all this bizarre adventure stuff settled, maybe things could be different, but I'm not sure Anasui would find her as interesting before or after this crisis.
Anyway, as they pursue the Green Baby, they get smaller and smaller as they approach it. Anasui explains Zeno's Paradox to Jolyne, and points out that they can never catch up to the baby, because the relative distance they have to travel gets longer as they shrink. Jolyne refuses to give up, and proposes jumping off a nearby blade of grass on top of the baby. This way, she'll approach from above, and no matter how small she gets, she'll have to hit the ground eventually.
To be fair, Jolyne's stubborn pursuit has paid off in the sense that the dogs will never find them at this size. And this "jump down to the baby" plan doesn't quite work, but it does reveal the Green Baby's Stand, which is producing this shrinking effect. It had no name when Part 6 was originally published, but afterward it was retroactively named "The Green, Green Grass of Home." I'm not typing that out every time.
At one point, it grabs Jolyne's leg and it shrivels up so much that her shoe falls off. I'm not sure I understand this. Also, I don't get what happened to Jolyne's right eye. Yo-Yo-Ma melted it earlier, but after D&G was killed, her eye is back to normal, but the iris is gone or something? Like it only halfway recovered, and I don't understand how that's possible.
Well, wait, Jolyne used her string to stitch her own tongue back together, so maybe she could partially reconstruct her eyeball the same way.
The Stand chases Jolyne and Anasui, but Anasui leads them all into a bottle that he had rolled towards the Green Baby earlier. The bottle isn't shrinking because the Green Baby has taken an interest in it, and I guess that cancels its Stand ability. But Jolyne and Anasui are cornered inside the bottle, so Anasui uses Diver Down to get them out and put the cap on.
By now Anasui is convinced that Green Baby is too dangerous to let live, but he never follows through on his threats to kill it. I don't know if that's deference to Jolyne or what.
But even with the Stand trapped, the Green Baby can still roll the bottle on top of Anasui, so Jolyne is forced to break the bottle and free the Stand.
So we're right back where we started, except now the Green Baby has taken an interest in Jolyne and her star birthmark, which matches the one on Green Baby. So everyone is back to normal size, but they still have to get away from the dogs....
Meanwhile, Foo Fighters is still fighting Whitesnake in the ambulance. Whitesnake tries to get Foo Fighters to tell him more about the Green Baby, but Foo just keeps stringing him along, refusing to answer his questions.
This is because Foo Fighters is trying to distract Whitesnake. While the top half of their body talks, the lower half has left the ambulance in search of water. Pretty sneaky, sis.
And the lower half makes it. Notably, Foo Fighters seems only concerned about updating Jolyne than winning this battle, or even surviving it. It's like FF knows that they can't pull this off, even with the water.
And they're correct, because Whitesnake stuffs another Stand Disc into the top half of FF. This stand causes water to boil, which apparently affects the water FF's lower half tried to absorb. This appears to destroy FF completely, but...
Pucci discovers FF had a walkie-talkie from the ambulance, and they used it to contact Weather Report. I'm not sure how, since this would require Weather to have his own radio handy to receive the signal. Anyway, Weather makes it rain, which saves Foo Fighters for a little while longer. I guess the top half with the "boil water" Stand must have died, which would destroy the disc? Weather also produces a thick fog to conceal FF's movements. Then FF somehow sends signals to Weather with Morse Code, informing him that Whitesnake is Father Pucci.
Soon, Jolyne and Anasui link up with FF, who repairs Jolyne's eye. Also Weather Report shows up, and Anasui gets jealous when they embrace. They argue for a bit about what to do with Green Baby, but then...
Weather Report suddenly attacks everybody! What the fuck?
Turns out this was Pucci disguised as Weather Report somehow. He attacks Jolyne too and cuts her arm off, but before he can get at Green Baby she reattaches it and uses her strings to form a pair of handcuffs to chain them both together.
Jolyne tells him she wants three things from Pucci: Her father's memory disc, the disc he took from Foo Fighters, and Pucci's life. Fuck yeah!
So they fight for a bit, but Pucci finds her strategy flawed. Whitesnake is a long-range Stand Ability, but Jolyne is keeping them together at close-quarters, which means he can bring his full abilities to bear. In particular, he can use Whitesnake to eject the Stand Disc from Jolyne's head, which will defeat her instantly. So what does she think this is going to accomplish?
The thing is, Jolyne doesn't seem to consider this a problem. She's got her enemy up close and personal, and the Green Baby has wandered off into the grass. I'm not sure she has a plan, necessarily, but she's definitely not going to let Pucci rattle her. Jolyne has come too far for that.
I actually wonder if maybe we're misinterpreting why DIO dismisses Survivor as the weakest stand? It doesn't help that he explains afterwards how he doesn't like it on a general level and considers it useless for his organization, something Pucci disproves years later...
But also, when Pucci first asks DIO about what's the weakest stand power he's come across, DIO initially dismisses the question as too vague, pointing out that every stand has some situation where it's applicable and effective. At which point, Pucci reframes the question by setting more specific guidelines; He compares his question to how kids debate who would win in a fight, such as Stallone or Van Damme.
That's when DIO settles on an answer, Survivor. And I think Pucci's reframing of the question is key to understanding how DIO is declaring Survivor the weakest based on that criteria; The context of one-on-one duels.
Because DIO's answer makes a lot more sense if you're comparing stands that way; In a fight between its user and another stand user, Survivor probably IS the worst stand for a matchup, because all it will do is make the enemy more angry and empower them physically, and in this scenario, they're already trying to brawl to the death with Survivor's user. We aren't told if Survivor's user could apply the stand's power to themselves, but given Guccio's lack of participation during the all-out brawl, possibly not; DIO notes that Survivor can't be controlled, either. At best, Survivor would empower both combatants, essentially leaving the playing field the exact same.
People might bring up a stand like Highway to Hell, but it actually has some pretty defensive capabilities; If the user is attacked, the attacker suffers their wounds, meaning the user can at least take their enemy down with them. But nothing is said to happen if the user attacks their enemy first, as Highway to Hell apparently only transmits harm first inflicted upon the user. Cheap Trick also doesn't count, because it didn't even exist yet, and anyhow, it could at least take the enemy down with them.
Survivor can't do any of these things; It only empowers the enemy and can't even accomplish their death at the cost of the user's life, a Pyrrhic victory but at least a victory of some kind. But that's in a specific one-on-one scenario... Because the reality of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is that stand battles are rarely so straightforward or 'fair', there's many different factors to consider; Such as team-ups, more stand users than just these two, the setup, etc.
Which, as Pucci exemplifies, is where Survivor shines; It can act like a ticking time bomb that turns an entire group of targets against one another, ensuring their demise while the user hides. On an open battlefield where both combatants can see each other and fight directly, Survivor IS fairly useless... But that's what makes stand battles so fun, is how they can be situational and change depending on factors, which avoids the issue of power creep. It's all about the limitations and how they encourage creativity, which leads to more interesting and dynamic arcs.
