#tonpetti

[straiz-oaf]

Happy Pride Month. Here’s my Three from a Faraway Land headcanons.

Tonpetty - agender, transmasculine. Celibate, so sexuality labels aren’t relevant.

Dire - gay trans man.

Straizo - asexual, biromantic, with a heavy preference for men

[duhragonball]

Phantom Blood Liveblog JJBA ch.42-44

Well, that’s enough phantom blood for one week.  Let’s wrap this up.

Several weeks after the battle with Dio, everyone returns home, and Jonathan marries Erina Pendleton.  I’m not sure where Jonathan’s been living since his home was destroyed, but that might be why he and Erina planned a honeymoon in the United States. I’m not sure they planned to stay in the U.S., but Jonathan doesn’t have much tying him down to Britain now that his entire family is dead. 

Speedwagon is so excited to see them off that he forgets to pay for his lunch.  Still wearing Zeppeli’s hat, Speedwagon vows to always be there for the Joestars.  “I’ll come no matter where it is, though I might just get in the way.” 

Sniff... You were never in the way, Speedwagon ol’ pal. 

Right before the steam liner launches for the voyage, some guys load one last piece of cargo on board.  They have no idea what it is, but they were paid handsomely to put it on the ship.  Sure are a lot of WRRYYYYYs coming out of that box though.

Once they’re underway, Erina sees a bird get separated from its flock, then another bird joins it on the deck, and she gets all choked up over it.  She recalls how Jonathan knew he’d get beat up when he stood up for Erina as a child, and how he’d get beaten up even more by revealing who he was, but he dropped that hankerchief anyway.  And Jonathan reminds her that she was there for him at his lowest points, like when Dio turned all his friends against him, and then later when Dio killed his dad and the house burned down. Erina wishes this time could last forever.  Don’t we all?

They go below for dinner, when Jonathan notices... Wang Chung?!  He immediately realizes that this must mean Dio survived their battle, and he rushes off to chase Wang Chung.  He warns Erina to return to their cabin and lock the door. 

Meanwhile, a drunken priest accidentally loses his cross in the... cargo hold?  Engine room?  Anyway, he retrieves it and then notices the padlock on the box is undone, but apparently the box is locked from the inside.

Also there’s a gem on there which suddenly shoots out and blows this guy’s head apart.  Not sure if that’s a booby trap rigged into the case or Dio launched that with vampire power. Either way...

Wang Chung arrives in the hold soon after the priest is killed, and Jonathan shows up a few steps behind, just in time to see... Dio......’s head.  The rest of him couldn’t be here.

Why is Dio’s head in a glas case?  He looks ridiculous in that thing.  I assume he asked for this, but why?

Then Erina shows up, just in time to see Dio shoot eyebeams at Jonathan.  His intent was to decapitate Jonathan in one shot, a painless death as a sign of respect.  Dio has decided that he must admire Jonathan as a worthy adversary, and he now sees that their fates are hopelessly intertwined.  The only way Dio can fulfill his ambitions is through Jonathan, so he plans to graft his head onto Jonathan’s corpse and use it as his new body. 

But Jonathan’s too defiant to just stand still and let himself be killed, so he tries to dodge the beams.  Instead of dying, he just gets badly hurt, and now he can’t breathe well enough to use Hamon power to defend himself.

Then a bunch of zombies appear, killing a man and then his wife, who dies trying to protect a baby.  Wang Chung explains that he’s been converting crew and passengers into zombies, so it’s only a matter of time before Dio takes the entire ship.  This is all a terrible shock to Erina, who I’m pretty sure hasn’t heard about any of this vampire business at all. 

Without the Ripple, Jonathan’s no match for Wang Chung, let alone all the other zombies.  Wang Chung wants to make Jonathan suffer, but Dio scolds him for being disrespectful to his honored rival.  Instead, Dio orders him to kill Jonathan quickly and painlessly.  But Wang Chung doesn’t listen.  He’s still made at Jonathan for giving him a nasty scar after their last encounter, and that craving for revenge gives Jonathan enough time to devise one last counterattack.

Jonathan can’t breathe well enough to use Hamon well, but he can still deploy the Hamon already present from his own life force, and use it to decapitate Wang Chung and manipulate his body.  He sends Wang Chung to the engine, where he grabs hold of the screwshaft. 

As Dio helpfully explains, the screwshaft is responsible for releasing the pressure built up in the engine.  With the mechanism jammed, the pressure will keep building up until the engine explodes, which will destroy the ship. 

Erina doesn’t fully understand, but Jonathan tells her that he wants her to get off the ship before is explodes, and she resolves to die with him.  But Jonathan points out the baby, whose mother was killed earlier.  He wants her to take the child and escape.  The baby’s mother died protecting her, just as Jonathan’s mother did for him. So it’s fitting that Jonathan would make this is dying request.  Wotta guy.  What a selfless, beefy, polite guy.

But Dio isn’t finished yet.  He orders his zombies to get Wang Chung off the screwshaft while he tries to attach himself to Jonathan’s body.  Now that he can’t use the Ripple anymore, it should be easy enough, except Jonathan stabs his neck with a chunk of metal.  I’m... not sure why that matters.  It’s not like Dio’s neck is a vital area.  He’s missing all the stuff below it and he’s doing pretty well for himself.  But somehow, Jonathan manages to subdue Dio’s head and basically holds him so he won’t do anymore mischief.  He admits to Dio that their fates might be intertwined after all, and so he’s willing to end it here, with both of them being destroyed.

As for the zombies, they’re too late.  The engine is already starting to blow up. Erina takes the baby and leaves Jonathan and Dio to their fate.   Dio pleads with Jonathan to let him go, even making wild promises you know he would never keep, but it’s too late for any of that.

Jonathan’s already dead, and there’s nothing Dio can do but wait for the ship to sink. 

The next time we see Erina, she’s with the baby, floating on top of Dio’s box.  I always assumed she hid inside of it to protect her and the baby from the explosion, but I guess she could have gotten clear of the ship, then found it in the water.  As she reflects on this ordeal, she notes that she has a “new life inside her body”, which will turn out to be Jonathan’s son, George Joestar II. 

Two days later, Erina would be rescued in the Canary Islands, and the narration promises that this would be the beginning of a whole new era of adventure.  Boy, you’re not kidding. 

And that’s it for Part 1.  Like I was saying towards the beginning, people dismiss this one as too “boring” or whatever else, and that’s dumb.  At worst, Part 1 can be criticized for being too short, and kind of primitive compared to the more complex plots in the sequels.  But that’s like complaining about Action Comics #1 being the worst Superman story.  This literally sets the stage for everything that follows.  

Erina and the baby she rescued show up in Part 2. Dio’s desperate scheme to transplant his head onto Jonathan’s body gets paid off in Part 3.   The legacies of Jonathan and Dio reverberate well into Parts 4, 5, and 6.  Part 7 features an alternate version of Jonathan Joestar who became a jockey instead of an archaeologist. 

Here, let me show you my favorite sequence from Part 8.

Josuke Higashikata feels completely alone and devoid of purpose through much of JoJolion.  “Josuke Higashikata” isn’t even his real name; it’s given to him by the people he meets when he first emerges from the soil.  He has no connections to anyone or anything, and as he despairs over this, he suddenly comes across a memorial statue of Part 7′s Johnny Joestar, who died in Morioh 110 years earlier.  It’s a powerful moment, because even though Josuke feels isolated and alone, he still has a connection to the other JoJo’s, even though he doesn’t know it.

It’s like poetry.  It rhymes.

There’s this devotion to justice that connects all of the JoJo’s together, so that no matter how alone or defeated they may feel, they each find it within themselves to oppose evil, no matter the odds.  The villains in every Part follow in Dio’s path, each of them trying to deny fate and the justice that fate inevitably brings.  Dio’s immortality, Kars’ invincible body, Killer Queen, King Crimson, Made in Heaven, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Wonder of U, each of these represents an attempt to short circuit the consequences of evil.  “Well, I’m being a huge asshole, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m too powerful to be stopped!” That’s the motto of all the bad guys.  And the JoJo’s each show up to bring them to justice. 

And it all starts here, in Phantom Blood.  I dare you to read this thing and not find a few call-forwards to your favorite JoJo Part. I mean, my favorite is Part 2, so it’s not very hard for me.  Speedwagon’s right there. But I forgot all about Jonathan setting himself on fire to hit Dio, like Jolyne in Part 6.  And Jonathan dropping that anvil on Doobie kind of reminded me of Giorno’s dismissive attitude toward Ciocolata in Part 5. And so on.  

Sure, Josuke might have cooler hair and Jotaro might be more badass, and Jolyne might be prettier, but the themes that make their stories work all stem from here.  Part-skippers, you at owe it to yourself to at least check this out at some point. 

Anyway, that’s all I have.  So I’ll leave you with this picture of Speedwagon withdrawing cooly.

[straiz-oaf]

Hi. Want to see more about my Tonpetty and my OC Kieran? Of course you do.

(that’s little Lisa Lisa there.)

Awwww.

vulturepetty + 3fafl and walruspetty

thanks

[duhragonball]

Phantom Blood Liveblog JJBA ch.39-41

Yep! We'll never have to worry about bizarre adventures again! From now on, it's smooth sailing!

One thing I forgot about was that Tonpetti and Straitz were there during the climactic Jonathan vs. Dio battle. Why didn't they get involved? Well they were too busy fighting Dio's zombies. Here, we see four of them---Page, Jones, Plant, and Bonham, who all look like weird bug creatures. I hae no idea how Dio managed to alter their corpses to achieve this look, but they're really gross.

They try to quadruple-team Straitz with an attack that involves using their own blood vessels like tentacles, but Straitz just leaps clear and drops a chandalier on them before finishing them off with Hamon. I mostly point this scene out because this is the first time we see this blood vessel thing, and it'll come up again later.

So Jonathan's on his own, but that's no problem, because Dire's trick with that Hamon-charged rose showed him how to get past Dio's freezing power. He gets the sword he received from Bruford and plans to send Hamon through the blade. That way he can strike Dio without getting his own flesh too frozen to produce the Ripple. But he also manages to pick up a bunch of roses and throws them at Dio to distract him. This is like foreshadowing to Part 3, where Dio threw a bunch of knives at Jotaro to overwhelm him. I suppose this moment with the roses was when the tide turned against Dio, and as we'll soon see, he'll have plenty of time to think over that mistake.

Jonathan manages to cut at Dio's flank, then when Dio tries to strike back with his right hand, Jonathan chops off his entire arm! And before Dio can deal with that, Jonathan brings the sword down on Dio's head! Fuck yeah!

So Dio's defeated, right? Wrong, because even getting (nearly) chopped in half like this isn't enough to kill him. Jonathan has to deploy the Ripple, but he can't because...

... Dio managed to flash freeze the sword and Jonathan's hands. I guess this worked because so much of the sword is in Dio right now, that Jonathan's hands are too close. The whole point of the sword was to increase Jonathan's range, but he still came in close to attack. And now Dio's going to stick his fingers in Jonathan and turn him into a zombie.

What about Jonathan's legs? He can send Hamon through those too, right? Yeah, but Dio makes sure to freeze Jonathan's feet too. I'm... pretty sure you can't freeze this much stuff just by rapidly evaporating the moisture in your own body. The idea that Dio can rapidly evaporate the water in his body is kind of sketchy to begin with, but now he's just being Iceman. It would have been simpler to just say the Stone Mask gives you Iceman powers on top of the rest of it. It doesn't surprise me at all that Araki came up with Stands and never looked back. As much as I enjoy Parts 1 and 2, both stories practically cry out for a concept like Stands to neatly explain a lot of these bullshit powers the characters use.

But Jonathan has actually outsmarted Dio here. The sword was intended to give Jonathan a longer reach, but not to keep Dio at a distance. No, he wanted Dio up close, while the sword reached for one of the torches on the balcony.

Basically, Jonathan knew Dio would find some way to freeze him, so rather than looking for a way to avoid it, he looked for a way to warm himself up after it happened. If Dio had just frozen Jonathan completely, this would be over, but he left part of Jonathan unfrozen in order to take his blood. And that, plus Dio's gloating, allowed time for Jonathan's sword to heat up in the torch and thaw out Jonathan's hands. And that...

... doesn't accomplish much, actually. Jonathan manages to free himself and land a blow, but Dio manages to freeze Jonathan's hand again just from the brief contact of the punch.

This gives time for Dio to put himself back together, and we see that blood vessel thing again, as he fetches his severed arm. So Jonathan's back to square one. All he's accomplished so far is to earn Dio's respect.

But no, Jonthan doesn't see it like that at all. Dio goes on about how humans are too limited to overcome the kind of powers he has, but Jonathan argues that humans can evolve to overcome problems. Having experienced Dio's freezing technique and survived, Jonathan can come up with a counter for it. And that counter is lighting his own hand on fire. I'd call this an example of Part One-y mayhem, but Part 6 topped this when Jolyne lit her own everything on fire. It runs in the family.

And it works. Jonathan goes for a double punch, and the fire is too hot for Dio to freeze his hands, so when the punch connects, Dio gets a full dose of Hamon through his chest. Cool!

The best he can muster is to shoot a high-pressure burst of fluid from his eyeballs, which is so powerful that it rips through Jonathan's hand and forearm. "Joke's on you, stupid," Jonathan says, "I already set my hands on fire, so they hurt too much for me to notice!"

This power is probably the most potent weapon Dio had at the time, so it's kind of odd that he waited so long to use it. I mean, it continued on past Jonathan, through at least two zombies, and through a stone column. Joseph Joestar came up with a way to block it, but that won't happen for another fifty years. I'm pretty sure Dio could have sniped Jonathan's entire group before they ever got into this building.

But that's not Dio's style. I'd even suggest that Dio might not have even come up with this eyebeam thing until that very moment, when he wanted to hurt Jonathan but couldn't do anything else with his body. Up to that point, he was content to watch his enemies struggle against the zombies, or to freeze them.

And that kind of sums up the way Dio fights. He's not interested in going on the offensive. He'd rather send a bunch of henchmen to fight in his place, and if anyone manages to confront him directly, he'll let them make a move just to demonstrate how utterly useless it is. The freezing power is perfect for him, because it only works if you touch him, and you can't really fight him without touching him. The World's power is baiscally the natural extension of that idea, where you're supposed to figure out that Dio's power is unstoppable, and despair at the thought of getting close enough to him to experience it.

Dio wants to be this absolute force in the world, an obstacle no human can possibly overcome. As a human, he tried to achieve this by accumulating money and using poison to snuff out his victims. As a vampire, he surrounds himself with lackeys and protects himself with a seemingly unassailable power. But he just assumes that if that works once, it will work every time. He doesn't reckon with the human ability to adapt and overcome. Why would he? Dio never adapted or overcame anything. He just took shortcuts, like using the Stone Mask. To him, the idea that an enemy might get better at fighting him while they fight is inconceivable.

Dio falls over the balcony, and everyone is pretty much satisfied that he's done for. Jonathan collapases with exhaustion, and Speedwagon explains to Poco that Jonathan feels somewhat sad about killing Dio, since they grew up together. "But I didn't grow up with that motherfucker," Speedwagon adds, "so I couldn't be happier! Rest in piss, Dio!"

Of course, there's still all of Dio's zombies to deal with, but Tonpetti and Straitz take care of them. Except for that one zombie that kills George Joestar in 1920. Annnnnd...

... Dio himself, who manages to cut off his own head before the Hamon attack can destroy it. This way his body is consumed by the ripple, while his head can survive. But big deal. His head can't do much on its own, and the sun will be up in a few hours. Except for...

Wang Chung, who just happened to be lurking around at the base of the cliff. He recovers Dios head and runs off with it. So, yeah, Tonpetti and Straitz really left a lot of loose ends on this night. To be fair, Straitz would make even worse mistakes later on...

But for now at least, the crisis is over and the Stone Mask is found and destroyed, and Dio is defeated. Or is he?

No. No he is not. Look, Wang Chung's running off with his severed head. This is very bad.

[duhragonball]

Phantom Blood Liveblog JJBA ch.36-38

This is Tonpetti's first trip to England, and he just couldn't resist picking up a Sherlock Holmes pipe at the gift shop.

Last time, Zeppeli sacrificed himself to help Jonathan survive Tarkus and proceed on their quest to defeat Dio and destroy the Stone Mask. Now, his group arrives in Windknights Lot, and it turns out the whole town has already been turned into zombies. So when a guy tries to attack Jonathan, they just assume he's a zombie too, except he's actually a new ally who just wanted to test Jonathan's abilities.

This is Dire, one of Zeppeli's fellow disciples under the Hamon master, Tonpetti. Real quick, let me explain the Thunder Cross Split Attack. The idea is that Dire looks like he's going to fight his opponent hand to hand, but then he suddenly leaps up and kicks his opponents' hands away, leaving him wide open to a strike to the head. This time, Jonathan defends it with a good offense: he simply headbutts Dire, because he's wide open too. And Dire is impressed, but he has a different version of the attack which we'll see later.

Dire introduces himself, Tonpetti, and his fellow disciple Straitz, and explains how and why they're here. Zeppeli sent them a letter a while back, and they came to England to help him destroy the Stone Mask.

And that's all well and good, but it's a little too convenient, isn't it? Zeppeli must have written the letter after he made contact with Jonathan, since they knew Zeppeli was training him. How long has it been since then? Long enough for Tonpetti to get the letter and come all the way from India? And if Zeppeli expected them to join the battle, why didn't he just wait for them to catch up?

The bigger issue I have is that this seems to go against the lore established in Part 2, where the Hamon adepts have been around for thousands of years, and their primary purpose has been to resist the machinations of the Pillar Men, who created the Stone Masks in the first place. But in Part 1, it seems unclear that Tonpetti knew anything about the Stone Mask until Zeppeli told him about it. I dunno, maybe I'm misremembering something from Part 2.

I guess what I'm driving at here is that Zeppeli joined the Hamon school for the sole purpose of helping him destroy the Stone Mask, and apparently Tonpetti is so supportive of this quest that he's willing to come over and help out, but not so supportive that he would have been here in England from the start.

Oh, one other continuity flub, while I'm at it:

When Jonathan meets Tonpetti, he offers him a handshake, and Tonpetti leaves him hanging, like he doesn't do handshakes. Except he literally took Zeppeli's hand when they first met in 1860.

To be fair, Tonpetti only did this because he wanted to do a Hamon fortune-telling thing, but it's interesting to me that he was so eager to do that with Zeppeli, but not with Jonathan. Maybe forseeing Zeppeli's death convinced Tonpetti that some things are better off not knowing. He's purposely avoiding any hand contact with his allies, because he knows any of them could die in the next few minutes. Okay, maybe that came all the way around and became a cool storytelling moment.

So what's Dio been up to this whole time? Well, crushing crosses, for one thing.

This is a classic image from Phantom Blood, but I must have missed that what he's holding in his hand is a cross that he bent up in his bare hand. Wotta heel.

I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion earlier this year, and one thing that bugged me about it was the way the show kept peppering Christian symbols and references all over the place, but completely devoid of any context or deeper meaning. The creators of NGE tacitly admitted that they didn't know anything about Christianity, and they only did this to make the show look cool. And that's fine and all, but it did frustrate me to see crosses show up in Evangelion with no particular symbolic purpose.

Compare this to Dio's scene here, where it appears he's set up his base of operations in a church, probably because it's the largest building in a small town like this. He found a golden cross and he's just idly mashing it into a handful of scrap metal. Dio's rejected his humanity, and so he has zero respect for human religion. He's basically taken over God's house for himself, and he's daring heaven to stop him.

And that all works because in this fictional world, all these religious symbols actually represent things, as opposed to Evangelion, where the crosses are mostly there for aesthetics. I don't know how much Hirohiko Araki knows about Christianity (insert SBR joke here) but at least he knew enough to know exactly what it means to show Dio lounging in a church and crushing a cross like a piece of paper.

Also, there's the whole thing where Dracula is repelled by crosses, and that clearly doesn't affect Dio at all, so that's important as well.

I'm not sure what Dio's doing exactly, but it sure looks like he's having villagers brought before him one by one, so he can screw with them before he turns them into zombies. This lady begs Dio to spare her child, and Dio mockingly agrees. He says that he and his zombies won't hurt the baby, but hen he turns the lady into a zombie and she eats the baby herself. What purpose does this serve? I guess this is just how Dio amuses himself now. He's come a long way from kicking dogs and poisoning fathers.

Later, we see him with his next victim, Poco's sister?! Aw, crap! Also, Dio's surrounded by monsters he created by grafting the corpses of animals and humans together before reanimating them.

Dio monologues to Poco's sister, but she's too horrified to care what he's saying. When I first watched the anime, I thought maybe Dio was trying to get a girlfriend or something, but now it seems clear that he's just screwing with her the same way he did with the other lady. He wants her to ask to be a zombie, not because that matters, since he's going to do that anyway, but because he's a sick fuck.

But Poco's sister isn't so scared that she forgot her signature attack. She waits until Dio's close enough and slaps him upside the head! Fuck yeah! Poco's sister rules!

Unfortunately for her, Dio decides to sic one of his zombies on her. This one is named Doobie, and... well I think you get the general idea of what he's trying to do here. But suddenly....

SURPRISE ANVIL ATTACK! Who could possibly be BEEFY enough, PLUCKY enough, and POLITE enough to carry a damn anvil all the way up to the roof of a church and drop it through the skylight?

STAND NAME: A Fucking Anvil. STAND MASTER: There's no need to share my prideful name with a zombie. POWER: Yes SPEED: 32 feet per second per second RANGE: Close enough STAMINA: Anvils don't feel pain. PRECISION: He hit him, didn't he? DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL: Jodio needs to drop an anvil on a guy in Part 9, is all I'm saying.

Jonathan heads down to kick Doobie's ass, but wait! Doobie has a secret of his own!

HIS HEAD IS COVERED WITH POISONOUS SNAKES!!!!!!

PART ONE IS INSANE!

WHY DOES TONPETTI LOOK SO AMUSED BY THIS?

Some of the snakes bite Jonathan, but it doesn't matter, because he uses Hamon power to squirt the venom back out of the bite holes. I am not making that up. He then uses a small Ripple to "drive the snakes crazy" and they start eating Doobie alive. Well, not "alive", since he's a zombie, but you get the idea.

"What are you doing, my snakes? They're eating me! No way..." might be the most fucked up last words ever recorded.

Finally Dio shows up again and he's like "Yeah, I didn't want to kill you myself out of sentimentality. Remember how we grew up together and I set your dog on fire? Anyway, where's that guy with the hat?"

Jonathan's all set to fight Dio but then Dire shows up and he wants to take Dio on first. After all, he trained with Zeppeli, and they were good friends, so it's only fitting that he try to avenge him. Dire goes for the Thunder Cross Split Attack, but this time he crosses his arms in front of his face, which would protect him from the kind of headbutt Jonathan used on him earlier. See? It all comes back around.

But Dire doesn't know about Dio's freezy powers, so this silly attack does no good. Kicking Dio's hands away just means Dio can grab Dire's ankles and freeze him from there. And this time, Dio freezes his entire body and breaks him like the T-1000 in liquid nitrogen.

But Dire's head is still in tact, and he manages to take one parting shot before he dies. He spits a rose into Dio's eye, and charges it with Hamon to make it hurt more. Then his head freezes and shatters along with the rest of him. I'm pretty sure cold doesn't work this way, which is a tradition Araki would continue with White Album in Part 5.

So yeah, this is a crazy twist. It turns out this new character who just showed up out of nowhere can't beat Dio after all, and it's all up to the title character we've been invested in since the start.