Diamond is Unbreakable Liveblog: JJBA ch.294-302
I mean, you could read more under the cut, but this one panel pretty much sums it up.
This is the Yukako Yamagishi arc, and it thankfully reverses the trend of weak villains in Part 4. Ironically, Yukako isn't exactly a villain per se, but she's so effective in the role that she runs rings around some of the actual villains in this Part.
For example, Hazamada started off as a spooky-looking dude, then got more and more pathetic until he finally got his ass kicked. Technically, I'd say he got his ass kicked twice, because those motorcycle dudes beat him up, then Josuke beat up his Stand, which should mean all the damage got transferred to Hazamada, on top of the in-person beating he received.
The one notable thing about Hazamada is that he's the guy who first introduces the rule about "Stand Users Attracting Other Stand Users". This isn't something he came up with himself. Jotaro and Josuke questioned him in the hospital to find out what he knows about the "Electricity Guy" who killed Keicho and stole the bow and arrow, but Hazamada knows very little about him. If he did know anything useful, "Electricity Guy" would have killed him.
So apparently, "Electricity Guy" is the one who told Hazamada that Stand Users are bound by fate to meet other Stand Users. For all we know, someone else told "Electricity Guy" this pearl of wisdom, or he figured it out himself. But this is why he wanted Jotaro to leave town, because there's already a lot of Stand Users in Morioh, and sooner or later they're all going to find each other. "Electricity Guy" doesn't want to be found, at least not until he's ready for a confrontation.
Anyway, this notion of Stand Users being inexorably drawn to one another is a major theme in JoJo from Part 4 onward. It also explains how Dio found all those henchmen for Part 3, and how Joseph Joestar and Avdol linked up. When you think about it, Dio probably would have been better off not having a Stand, since he wanted to keep a low profile, but he probably couldn't resist the lure of greater power.
But I'd say Part 4 is the one where everything depends on this rule. Most of the antagonists in Part 4 are just people who got Stands and want to do as they please, only to run afoul of the good guys. Some, like Tamami Kobayashi, get drunk with power, then immediately turn good once someone like Koichi defeats them in battle. The ones who can behave start to bond as a community, and the ones that won't behave get turned into rocks and books and corpses. And Yukako is very exemplary of the Part 4 story engine.
So she enters the story by meeting up with Koichi at a cafe. Koichi genuinely doesn't understand what she wants, and figures it must have something to do with schoolwork or she wants a loan, or something like that. When she confesses her romantic attraction to him, he's gobsmacked, and can't believe it. At first he thinks this is great, but when she asks him if he likes her, he can't give her an answer because it's too much too soon. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even know her that well, and now she's dropping all of this in his lap.
And Yukako is too impatient to wait for him to catch up. She wants him to love her back right the hell now. Yukako starts freaking the fuck out, then she suddenly calms down and apologizes...
...Then she asks him to see her again. Koichi doesn't know what to think, and neither do Josuke and Okayasu, who have been watching this scene play out nearby. Then Koichi finds tons of hair in his beverage, and Josuke wonders if Yukako might be a Stand User herself. She's attracted to Koichi romantically, but she might also be attracted to him literally, by the fate that binds Stand Users together.
Later, she stops by to see Koichi while he's cleaning the chemistry lab. She apologizes for her past behavior and asks if they can be friends, then she reveals she knitted him an entire sweater last night and made him lunch. Koichi is horrified, because she's still into him, and he doesn't know what to do. If he plays along, she'll get even more attached to him, and if he refuses her advances she'll flip her shit again.
Fortunately, the class president comes in to help Koichi clean, and this gives him a way out. Yukako stares holes in whatsername, but she responds in a mature and rational way.
Ha ha! Just kidding, she sets her hair on fire. I'm not clear on how she did this, but Yukako's Stand has to do with her hair, and I guess she weaved her own hair into this girl's, and somehow ran strands of hair to the incinerator... or something. I'm not sure how this doesn't burn Yukako's own hair, but she uses hers to cover this girl's eyes and bind her tongue so she can't find water or call for help. The tongue business seems a little too kinky for a scene like this. Plus, I think you can still scream even if you can't move your tongue.
Fortunately, Josuke and Okayasu are there to save her. Okayasu erases the flames and most of the girl's hair with The Hand. Josuke would fix her hair with Crazy Diamond, except he can't, because it's been erased from existence. Personally, I think this girl's new look rocks. The boys are now convinced that Yukako is a Stand User and she's absolutely bonkers, but they don't know what to do about it. If he doesn't reject her, she'll keep doing crazy shit, and if he rejects her, she'll go totally apeshit.
Later, they suggest that Koichi should try to make himself less appealing to Yukako. That way she'll simply lose interest in him, which will spare him from the dilemma. For example, he could blow off his grades, except Koichi's grades are already slipping, because he's been too distracted by this problem to concentrate on his schoolwork. Josuke and Okayasu pretend to spread rumors about Koichi while Yukako is in earshot, but this backfires spectacularly.
Basically, Yukako kidnaps Koichi and takes him to some house on the coast. The owner only comes to live her in the summer, and no one else knows they're here, so he's completely at her mercy. Yukako's plan is to tutor him and get him on the right track again. She cooks him a bunch of food, and then forces him to answer test questions before he can eat. If he gets the answer wrong he has to eat crazy stuff like a bar of soap, or an eraser.
Koichi's strategy in this predicament is to play along until he can find an opportunity to escape, but she notices that he's just reading her expressions to get the questions right, and punishes him with "wrong answer" dishes like asparagus wrapped in dictionary pages, or flash cards dunked in milk.
Later, Koichi tries to use the bathroom, but Yukako put a combination lock on the door, and the combination is the year Columbus sailed to the Bahamas. Koichi can't remember the answer, so he pees his pants. Humiliated, he begs Yukako to let him go, thinking she couldn't possibly still like him after this, but she isn't deterred at all. She's convinced he has some "trump card" he hasn't used yet, and she's anxious to see it. It's like she's daring him to fight back? Anyway, she's been building an electric chair to torture Koichi during dinner.
Yukako mentions ordering olive oil from the store, which leads Koichi to deduce that there must be a public phone in the area, since Yukako took care to cut all the phone lines in the house. He deploys Echoes to find the nearest phone, but he doesn't have a ten yen coin to make the call. And Yukako expected him to try all of this anyway. She purposely mentioned ordering olive oil to make him think about finding a pay phone, only to crush his hopes of actually calling for help.
But she doesn't know about his Stand yet. When she goes to place her own call, she finds that Echoes has left one of its sound effect words on her, which hijacks the phone? Somehow? And calls Josuke. But he can't actually speak to Josuke this way, so he's counting on Josuke to hear the ocean in the background and figure out where to look for him.
So now Yukako knows Koichi has his own Stand, and you might be wondering why he didn't use it to fight her before. Well, Echoes doesn't have much offensive power. It just makes you hear things, whereas Yukako's Love Deluxe can reach out and grab Koichi, wrap him up, dangle him around like a puppet, and so on. She's like Medusa from the Inhumans, except batshit crazy.
Koichi tries to use Echoes to force her to hear him saying he hates her over and over again. This is kind of like how he forced Tamami Kobayshi to surrender before, except this time it doesn't work, because Yukako is so stubborn and delusional that she seems to be incapable of hearing the words. Koichi barricades himself in one room, but Yukako forces her way in.
Koichi becomes more and more desperate, only to find that Echoes has suddenly shut down? It looks like it's in a cocoon, and Koichi becomes convinced that his Stand is dead now.
But he needn't have worried because Echoes is fine. Turns out, Koichi's Stand evolves like a Pokemon, and when it hatches from the coccoon, it gets different powers. This time it makes sound effect words that produce the effects of the noise. Like, it puts the word "whoosh" on a door and that produces a gust of wind that blows Yukako out of the house, all because Koichi wished that the door would somehow blast her away from him.
So now they start having something more like a Stand Battle. By the time Yukako gets back to the house, Koichi cuts his hair, presumably to remove whatever strands Yukako had on him. He's also laid traps on the entrance. When she tries to go up the stairs, she touches a sound effect on the handrail and it burns her.
That's something I just noticed about Koichi. He's pretty passive in general. He doesn't attack so much as he waits for the enemy to come at him. He didn't want to burn Yukako, but she made the choice to advance towards him despite his warnings.
Koichi tries to put new sound effects on Yukako's hair as she attacks, but he can't land a hit because she can separate the strands.
She finally surrounds him on all sides and demands that he admit that he likes her, but he definatly tells her that he already told her he hates her, and he's only in this mess because she wouldn't listen. She tries to kill him in her rage, but this springs another trap. Koichi couldn't put the sound effect word on her hair, so he put it on himself, knowing the hair would touch it when it attacked him. This blasts Yukako out of the house again, and sends her to a nearby cliff.
Somehow this turns her hair white? I think this is a better look for her anyway. Koichi goes to check on her, but she was playing possum and attacks Echoes again.
She seems to have Echoes at her mercy, but Koichi warns her to stop because while he was checking to see if she was still alive, Echoes noticed that the cliff was giving way. But Yukako thinks this is a bluff and ends up falling to her death............... until...
Turns out, Koichi planted one more sound effect on the rocks underneath Yukako. This makes the rock all bouncy, so it launches Yukako harmlessly back onto solid ground.
And that's the end of the fight. Koichi reminds her that he tried to warn her about the cliff giving way, but she wouldn't listen. She never listens to him. He leaves Yukako to contemplate what just happened. In her mad love for Koichi, she threatened to kill him, but all the while, Koichi was determined to save her life, even though he hated her.
And this forces Yukako to accept defeat. Koichi didn't just defeat her Stand, he didn't just outmaneuver her strategically. Koichi proved to her that she never should have pulled any of this nonsense in the first place. And in realizing this, she adores him even more than ever.
Koichi doesn't care, though, because Josuke and Okayasu have finally found him, and he can put this whole ordeal behind him. Later, Koichi scores a perfect 100 on his next test, but he seems conflicted about this, almost like he missed the distraction that Yukako's unwanted affection had been causing him before.
We'll come back to this in a later arc, but it is kind of buck wild that there's anything to come back to after this. Yukako literally kidnapped him, then abused him physically and emotionally. Koichi's only crime here was that he was too timid to reject her outright, and she made it plain that she wouldn't have taken no for an answer no matter what he did.
And yet, this whole arc is... still kind of romantic. When Koichi first developed Echoes Act 1, he got this surge of self-confidence that left a big impression on Kobayashi. Days later, Yukako could tell that he'd changed and that's what attracted her in the first place. This whole conflict between them had a lot to do with Yukako trying to bring out even more of that same inner fire that Koichi had. And she got it.
There's something kind of primal about it, where she got Stand powers and, like all the other antagonists so far, she got high on her own power, and was practically begging someone to challenge her to a fight. So when she finally lost that fight, she felt even more enamored than before. Koichi's big gripe with Yukako was that she wouldn't calm down and listen to him, and her answer to that was "Well, make me calm down. Make me listen to you."
And he cared enough to do it. A less sympathetic opponent would have simply killed Yukako outright, or at least knocked her out. Instead, Koichi did this whole song and dance with her. They forced each other to change their hair. It's weird but it works.
And it's that passion that makes Yukako such a great foil in this arc. Angelo, Keicho, and the others we've seen so far have been okay, but none of them have any particular grudge with the heroes. I mean, Angelo was mad at Josuke, but he he doesn't need much provokation for that. Yukako and Koichi have a very strong connection in this arc, and it fuels their whole conflict. I guess what I'm trying to say is that "Electric Guy" should try to make out with Jotaro.
