Continuing from last time, Josuke has lured Toru's Stand, Wonder of U, into the Locacaca lab in the hospital. But instead of attacking Josuke as expected, Wonder of U deploys a rock insect with bullshit powers. It can hide in flat surfaces, and its poison sting makes asbestos fibers come out of "every hole in your body" whenever you extend your limbs.
This is stupid because Josuke's expereinced this about three or four times, and it doesn't seem to be causing him that much difficulty. Hell, Rai takes a shot from the stinger to protect Josuke, and I can't help but wonder why it matters. It barely seems to bother Josuke at all, and it doesn't slow Rai down much either.
Also, every time the asbestos fibers appear, it looks like they're coming out of the characters' pupils, which sounds really distressing, but they just pull it all away and they're fine. They need to pull it away, or they won't be able to see or breathe. But Wonder of U said "every hole", so I have to assume that Josuke's urethra and anus are just lousy with asbestos fibers right now, and that won't be fun to remove.
Anyway, Josuke's problem with the Rock insect is that he can't attack or defend against it, but Rai manages to slither up to the ceiling and get the drop on the thing while it's setting up another attack on Josuke. He takes it out with a single strike of his body-cord.
And that just so happens to put Rai within striking distance of Wonder of U. We already know how this will go. If thinking about pursuing Wonder of U will get you pulverized with killer rain, how in the hell can this be a good idea? I think Rai's logic is that if he can kill the Stand quickly enough, the calamity effect will be canceled before any reprisal can occur. Or maybe Rai is willing to sacrifice himself just to get off this one shot. Or maybe Wonder of U's description of its ability is just a bluff. Maybe it's only good at repelling people from a certain distance, and once you're close enough you don't have to worry about it.
Wonder of U admits that Rai might be on to something, since this situation is unprecedented. No one's ever managed to get this close before, which I guess is a testament to Josuke's original strategy. Wonder of U can keep its distance from Josuke in this room, but it's still in the room, and there's only so much space to maneuver around. And Rai got this close because he was sneaking up on the Rock Insect, not approaching Wonder of U. It just so happens that they were fairly close together.
Josuke pleads for Rai to back off, but Wonder of U reminds him of his dead father, so Rai takes the shot.... and it doesn't work. This is what I was talking about when I said I misremembered Jobin's death scene. I thought he and Rai both got an "almost-got-'im" moment against Wonder of U, but no, it was just Rai.
Here, the calamity that strikes Rai is the soap bubbles Josuke placed throughout the room. Even though Josuke was controlling them, they still went wild and carved out chunks of Rai's body, leaving him with fatal injuries. How and why did Josuke set up bubbles with such a destructive power? I'm not so sure that he did.
Rai's missing a chunk of his head, but he still lives long enough to encourage Josuke to keep going. He explains something important to Josuke about his Stand ability: The bubbles are made of strings that spin very fast, and this is part of an unseen phenomenon.
Then he opens his.... coat? I don't know. The point is that a bubble carved a hole through Rai's torso, but it did not go through his clothing. It was an invisible bubble, something different from the usual Soft and Wet powers, and that's what Rai desperately needs Josuke to understand.
Now, this whole development bugged me a lot when I first read this part of the story. This is, of course, a callback to "Spin", the power weilded by Gyro Zeppeli in Steel Ball Run. Over the course of Part 7, Gyro taught Johnny Joestar how to do "Spin" himself, and this greatly advanced the abilities of Johnny's Stand, Tusk.
Now, in Part 8, Rai is telling Josuke to apply "Spin" concepts to his own Stand to overcome Wonder of U. Well, not exactly. Rai is actually telling Josuke that he's already using "Spin" all the time. He just needs to become aware of this and use this property to his advantage. But how would Rai know anything about "Spin"? He's not a Neapolitan executioner, he's a Japanese Plant Appraiser. That's what bothered me so much in 2021.
Since then, I've watched a Hamon Beat video about the topic, and it clarified some of the relationship between "Spin" and Stands. The "Spin" relies on the Golden Ratio, which is a fundamental property of life (according to the SBR lore, anyway). "Spin", like the Arrow and Stone Masks from Parts 1-6, are advancements that allow humans to approach the kind off powers found in Stands. This is why Johnny was able to combine his "Spin" techniques so effectively with his Stand ability, and why Gyro eventually developed his own Stand, Ball Breaker, near the end of Part 7.
Hamon Beat's logic, then, is that since Rai's a Stand User and an expert on plants, he would have a keen insight into "Spin", which has ties to both Stand powers and the natural world. We know that's the case, because Rai was observant enough to notice Soft and Wet's bubbles were made of strings way back in Chapter 70, when they finished defeating Urban Guerrilla. He compred the rapidly spinning strings of Soft and Wet to the cords of his own Stand, Doggy Style, so Rai could apply things he knows about his own powers to Josuke's.
So it's not quite so far-fetched after all. The other thing that bugged me about this scene, though, was that Rai explained all of this despite having huge chunks of his body cored out by the bubbles. But Rai's been taking a lot of damage this whole time, and since his Stand lets him unravel his body into cords, he seems to be able to withstand a lot more punishment than the average Stand User. It's kind of like how Jolyne would stitch herself back together, or Bruno Buccellati would use his zippers to disassemble and reassemble himself. Rai is dying, make no mistake, but he's not dying as quickly as his injuries would make it seem.
As far as the whole "unseen power" goes, I think Rai is alluding to the similarities between the "Spin" and Stands. Both are imperceptible to those who aren't familiar with their power. Only other Stand Users can see Stands, and they can become intangible as well. Paisley Park can travel through cell phone signals, so what is it even made of, then? Maybe all Stands are just infinitely thin strands, and the vibrations of those strands is what gives them form.
Meanwhile, at the Higashikata's house, Joshuu has brought the Locacaca plant to Yasuho, because he plans to use the fruit to heal her injuries. He both castigates himself for being so useless in this crisis, and he proclaims that he'll save everyone with the Locacaca fruit. All he knows is that the Locacaca is important, but he doesn't seem to know how to use it. His first step is to save Yasuho, I guess, but he doesn't seem to know what that'll get them.
He also doesn't understand how the fruit works. Well, no one truly does. Nearby, Toru watches this scene unfold, and decides he might as well let them try this, since the branch can always grow more fruit later on. This way, he can see exactly what the new Locacaca can do. Joshuu thinks that it'll fuse his and Yasuho's body together, like how Josuke was made from Kira and Josefumi, but he convinces himself that it'll be like sex, so I guess that's why he wants to do this.
Yasuho is reluctant to try this, because there's so many unknowns to the New Locacaca, but then she realizes the Enemy Stand User is nearby, but the only one who could be here is Toru, whom she called for help a while back. Realizing that Toru is the Stand User, Yasuho suddenly goes for the fruit and takes a bite.
I think the idea here is that Yasuho is all about finding and sharing information, and while she gets stuck in dilemmas sometimes, she gets unstuck when she has important information to pass along. Now that she knows the Head Doctor's true identity, she desperately wants to pass that knowledge along to Josuke, and she can only do that healthy.
Then we flash back to when Toru first met Yasuho. No, I don't mean when they dated in high school, I mean when he just showed up at her first day of summer camp and gave her special rocks to help her light a fire. He tells Yasuho that he's looking for someone important, but he doesn't know his name, only certain parameters that sound more like a database search than an acquaintance. Yasuho manages to track down eight people who match his criteria, and one of them is Satoru Akefu, a 79-year-old doctor in a nursing home.
Of course, Toru's true objective here was to find a human whose identity he could assume using Wonder of U, but Yasuho doesn't realize this, any more than she's aware of her own Stand. By the time they meet again in high school, she doesn't remember him from summer camp.
Yasuho calls him out on this, and asks him how long he's been in her life, stealing from her. I'm not sure what she means by this, but maybe she thinks he sent that hair clip her way, or some other misfortune she may have endured. Toru warns Yasuho that she can be spared the fate he's planned for the Higashikata family, but if she takes any action against him, or even looks at his face, then she'll be the very next one in line to die.
Defiantly, Yasuho looks right at him and holds up Joshuu's cell phone. As she looks for some way to contact Josuke, Joshuu gets upset because his arm was deformed in the equivalent exchange and now he's having buyer's remorse.
In particular, he's upset at the thought of Yasuho using the arm she took from him to give handjobs, or to fondle Josuke's balls. Joshuu's the fucking worst. This was basically the moment where he justified his presence in the story, healing the dueteragonist in her hour of need, but he can't have even a shred of dignity about it. As violent as he's acting here, he doesn't even actually do anything to Yasuho, which kind of makes him even more pathetic.
Guided by Paisley Park, Yasuho calls Kyo Nijimura, alias Kei Kira, I guess. I never knew for sure if "Nijimura" was her real last name or not. She's been absent from the story for a while now, but it's not too surprising to find her taking care of her sick mother, Holly. She's probably doing this all the time when she's not working as the Higashikata family maid.
I've often wondered why Kyo kept up this maid job, since she only did it to infiltrate their house and spy on them for Yoshikage Kira, but hell, she probably needs the money to help pay for Holly's medical care, and the Higashikatas need a maid, so why not? I'm not sure if the Higashikatas ever learned the truth about Kei/Kyo, but it sort of doesn't matter at this point.
Yasuho reaches her on the phone and asks her to find Josuke and give him her cell phone so Yasuho can talk to him. And Kei knows exactly where to find Josuke, because Holly wrote it down on her hand before she went into a coma. This kind of supports my theory that Holly's Stand somehow helps grease the wheels for the good guys.
So Yasuho has made her play, but Toru's warning will come true. High above Morioh, a panel off a jet plane has come loose and its heading for her right now.
Back at the Locacaca lab, Wonder of U still won't approach Josuke, so he starts smashing up the place, destroying vials of Locacaca 6251. That annoys Toru enough for Wonder of U to come closer, but then calamities start attacking Josuke anyway. So I guess breaking Toru's things count as a pursuit? I don't know.
Josuke tries to kick Wonder of U, maybe in desperation, and the calamity turns his soap bubbles against him, just like they hurt Rai earlier, and I think this is what gives Josuke the insight he needs to understand what Rai was saying.
Okay, so causing Stands to backfire is a known effect of Wonder of U. We saw it earlier when Mitsuba tried to use her force arrows to flush Paisley Park down the toilet, only for one of the arrows to go wild and blast a hole in the wall, revealing the Locacaca branch to the rest of the family. I don't think Toru caused that specific thing to happen, but it goes to show that it's not just random cuts or falling objects that get caught in the effect. Even Stands can improbably malfunction. I'd like to think Nut King Call has been kicking Joshuu in the groin whenever he's off-panel.
Like I was saying before, I don't think Josuke made these soap bubbles into deadly cutting weapons. I think that happened from them getting affected by the calamity power, the same way those raindrops hit harder than they should have. In other words, Wonder of U caused the soap bubbles to behave in a way that was possible, however improbable. And it's a way that Josuke had never considered before, which is the unseen property that Rai wanted him to know about.
And I think feeling that effect on his own leg might have helped him understand all of this. He lost control of his bubbles, but he could make them do the same thing deliberately, if he set his mind to it.
Then Born This Way rushes into the room, and it freezes the soap bubbles with the cold wind that it generates. This blows the bubbles directly into Wonde of U, and a few of them actually connect! His cane breaks and everything.
And now Toru's finally beginning to understand what Rai was talking about. Among the bubbles he can see, there's also bubbles that can't bee seen. Wonder of U operates on a logic of cause and effect, but if there's something in Soft and Wet that operates outside of reality, then it wouldn't be bound by the logic of Wonder of U. And if that's true, then Josuke might be able to find a way to hurt him after all.
Meanwhile, Kei has already suffered a fatal calamity. When Wonder of U's cane broke, a chunk of it went flying into her eye as she walked in. As she dies, she tosses her phone to Josuke and says it's for him.
Yasuho quickly sends Paisley Park to Josuke, and fills him in on everything she's just learned. Toru is the Stand User. I don't know how this helps Josuke, but at least everyone's up to date now.
So Toru decides to call off his plans to kill Josuke and withdraws. Whatever's going on, he can't afford to take any chances, and if he can just grab the Locacaca branch and leave, he can disappear the way the Rock Humans always do. He can just start a new identity somewhere else and start over with his plan. This might be why Yasuho told him what she knew, so that Josuke would understand the stakes involved. It's not just a question of whether they can defeat Wonder of U. Now they have to beat him, because if he gets the branch and leaves then they'll never get another chance.
Somehow, Rai encourages Josuke from beyond the grave. This also annoyed me in 2021, but we've seen dead comrades do this in other JoJo parts so I guess it's okay.
Toru advances on Yasuho to get the branch, and when Joshuu tries to defend her a falling leaf cuts off some of his fingers. Serves him right.
Yasuho warns Josuke that Toru has the branch, so there's no time to play it safe now. He has to pursue Wonder of U and try to attack with this unseen power Rai was talking about. And he has to do it now, before it's too late. So Josuke takes aim and fires...
I remember making a joke about this panel in 2017, calling it the origin of Ski soda, because Ski has an orange and lemon slice on the logo. But Ski's manufactured by Double Cola, which is pretty obscure, so I don't know if it lands. I still think it's funny, and I wanted to use it all over again here, but, nah.
Instead, I guess I'll just drop any irony or humor and just say this is probably one of my favorite images from JoJolion. Looks even better in color.
Anyway, this is "Paisley Park and Born This Way", which introduces two new Stands. Oooh.
This arc starts with Josuke doing his laundry at the Higashikata mansion, but he finds one of Joshuu's shirts in his basket, and Joshuu thinks he's stealing money that was in one of the pockets. He hits Josuke twice, completely unprovoked, and almost pulls a knife on him, when Norisuke breaks it up.
But that was kind of unpleasant, so I'm skipping ahead to this shot of Yasuho Hirose vamping down the street. Hubba-hubba! Josuke has snuck out of the mansion and he uses his newly acquired cell phone to arrange a meeting with Yasuho in town. They're looking for Dr. Holly Joestar-Kira, the mother of Yoshikage Kira, whose corpse they discovered a couple of arcs ago. The Higashikatas are up to something, and the Joestar-Kiras are distantly related to them, so they're hoping Holly can shed some light on Josuke's identity.
But Josuke doesn't know his way around town, so Yasuho advises him to use the GPS navigator in Daiya's phone. He tries it, but it gives him nonsensical directions, and then he gets attacked by an enemy Stand. This one looks like a motorcycle with a black rider. It pursues Josuke relentlessly, and whenever it gets close everything gets really cold. Josuke only manages to escape it when he realizes that the GPS is giving him directions to escape the Stand. At one point it tells him to go "up" and he realizes he has to climb up a pole and kick the Stand away.
Meanwhile, Yasuho goes on ahead and finds Holly in the TG University hospital. But she's not part of the staff, she's a patient. Holly seems nice enough, but she seems almost senile, even though she's only 52 years old. When she meets Yasuho, she insists that she looks like a woman in a pornographic magazine she has for some reason. Yasuho is offended, but she's too inquisitive to stay distracted for long.
But Yasuho gets caught by the staff and escorted out of the hospital by security before she can learn anything. Only then does Holly seem to intuit that Holly is an ally who must "investigate the family tree". She also seems aware that Yasuho has a Stand of her own, though Yasuho herself hasn't realized it yet. So Holly seems to know some things, but her condition seems to have made her unable to communicate it to anyone else.
Back to Josuke, most of this arc is him trying to get away from Born This Way. Since the GPS is helping him, he deduces that there's a second Stand involved here, and its feeding him advice through the phone. Unfortunately, it can only tell him which way to run. Josuke has to discover for himself how BTW can track him the way it does, and he eventually figures out that it appears whenever he opens something like a door, a book, or a flip phone.
I like the design of Born This Way, but this arc doesn't have much to it. It's mostly Josuke fleeing from a Stand he can't defend himself against. Then he figures out how it works and gets an assist from the GPS Stand. When he can no longer flee, he asks for an alternative suggestion, so it calls a nearby taxicab and he asks the driver to shut the door, which cancels out Born This Way's attack.
He finally corners the user, which turns out to be the Higashikatas' maid, Kyo Nijimura. Before he can question her, she tosses a pen at him, and the cap falls off as it lands in his hands, which I guess is enough to count.
Born This Way appears right over top of Josuke, but this time he's close enough to the user to just punch her out with his own Stand, and that wraps up the fight. Josuke thinks she's acting on orders from Norisuke, but she's not.
Josuke then discovers she's got a star-shaped birthmark just like his own. Kyo threatens to kill him or die trying if he goes anywhere near Holly, and her desperation to protect Holly impresses Josuke enough that he agrees and promises to find another way.
Meanwhile, Yasuho sneaks back into the hospital and eavesdrops on Holly while the doctors examine her. Again, she's pretty friendly to the doctors but she plants her feet on the back of one of the nurses and seems to think she's a pair of shoes that don't fit right. The doctors are completely baffled by her condition, and they look at an MRI of her brain and it has big holes in it like someone cut pieces out. As Yasuho wonders what happened to Holly, we see her Stand take shape in her shadow.
Just to be clear, this is Paisley Park, and its the same Stand that helped Josuke through the GPS. Its ability is to guide her in the right direction, and it may have unconsciously helped her get to Holly (twice), but it's pretty cute how she used it to guide Josuke in the right direction without even knowing about it. D'awwwwwwwwwww.
Anyway, Paisley Park is probably in my Top Five favorite Stands. I like her blank face with the one eye. It's both charming and weird at the same time.
While I'm at it, here's Born This Way. The write-up says it targeted Josuke because the user must have touched him at some point, and now that we know it's Kyo's Stand, it's a safe bet she did this when she tried to take his hat back when he first arrived at the mansion.
Like I said, I like the design, but this is pretty much it for Kyo and Born This Way until the very tail end of the manga. Seems like a missed opportunity to me.
Back to Kyo and Josuke, she decides to trust him when she sees his star birthmark. See, everyone in her family had the same mark. She has it, and so does her mother Holly, and so did her brother Yoshikage Kira. She explains that she's trying to investigate the Higashikatas' secrets as well, which is why she infiltrated their home as a maid. When Josuke read the family tree in the upstairs study, Kyo noticed the bookmark had been moved later on, and concluded that Josuke was going to seek out Holly, so Kyo thought she needed to protect her mother.
But now that she's seen his birthmark, she understands what he is. To explain, she leads Josuke back to the spot where Yasuho first found him, and buries a lemon and a tangerine in the dirt.
Well, I already used this image, but like I said, it's a classic, so here it is again. Kyo digs up the fruit and cuts it open, and now some of the lemon flesh is inside the tangerines, and some of the tangerine flesh is inside the lemons.
This is a secret she discovered only a few days ago, but the Higashikatas have known about it for decades. There's something strange in this land that can combine things together, and she reasons that Kira and someone else got buried under the same dirt, and somehow they got their bodies recombined with each other just like the lemon and the tangerine.
This is why Yasuho's DNA test showed Kira's corpse and Josuke were genetically the same man. Both of them have the same blend of genes from two people. One ended up dead, with zero testicles, and a greater resemblance to Kira. The other is alive, has four testicles, and he looks more like... someone else.
Kyo knew Kira, and she also knew he had a Stand of his own. Like Josuke's Soft and Wet, it made bubbles, but they just exploded on contact with something. Kyo believes that the fusion that created Josuke affected the Stand as well, producing Soft and Wet.
Josuke is horrified by this revelation. He now knows what he is and how he came to be, and he sort of knows who he is, but only partially. Who was the guy Kira combined with? Kyo tells him that's what they need to find out next...
Finished Jojolion in four days... That's not much compared to my previous record of doing Stone Ocean over one night, but still! I was in such a Jojo mood and state of mind thanks to Steel Ball Run, I was able to get into that necessary mindset to blitz it out of need.
If there's a one true complaint about Jojolion... It's how criminally underused Kei Nijimura is. You're telling me she's Yoshikage Kira's sister, basically Josuke's sister, and nothing was done with this??? And she's known this since he showed up, no less!
Like, how does Josuke feel about that? Is he not gonna inquire with her about what Kira was like, in order to get a better sense of who half of him was? And maybe a clue as to what Kira was up to before he died? She doesn't have memory issues like Holly, that's a pretty huge lead to work off, especially with Yasuho's Paisley Park. And Josuke basically adopted Holly as a mother figure... Obviously also because of what she did for Josefumi, but that's still a big connection there!
And how does Kei feel? That's her brother, he's died, and she's losing her mom soon. That's half of her family... Half of half of her family, in Josuke. Does she mourn Kira? Wonder if any of his memories are still alive in Josuke, if he's technically still Kira? Did she not know about Kira's relationship with Josefumi? If she doesn't consider Josuke her brother, at least address that she doesn't.
It's weird because she's the AU counterpart to Okuyasu, just as Yasuho is to Koichi... So you'd think Kei would have a huge amount of prominence as a Jobro (Or Josis), but after her stand battle she basically disappears as an unacknowledged background character, only to suddenly come back and be killed by Wonder of U. It was a sacrifice that led to victory of course, but c'mon... With how the Wonder of U arc had been going up until that point, I was wondering if Kei's absence was just gonna be unaddressed.
When Kira blew out that motorcycle tire during the Locacaca branch heist, I wondered for a moment if that was actually Kei's Born This Way masquerading as a regular driver... Alas, no. If only Araki did more with Kei, gave some emotional interactions afterwards; Like Josuke AND Kei visiting their mutual mother together.
Given Holly is her mom too, you'd think she'd also be super motivated to attain the Locacaca fruit, so she could've turned the iconic duo of Jojolion into an iconic trio. Even if Kei wasn't a major protagonist due to Born This Way seeming lacking in utility for stand battles, just exploring that familial bond more throughout the part would've made her death feel so much more impactful.
