Meta | Deconstructing Dio [JJBA]
In which I subject Dio Brando, his history and relationships to a detailed analysis.
Bring a snack. I really mean that.
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He retains the same features - large, narrowed eyes, dark and heavily arched brows, a narrow, sharp jaw, high cheekbones, even that lock of hair that falls into his face above his left eye (same pouty lips, too, although it’s not as evident in the shots from PB I chose), but because of Araki’s changing style, those features are increasingly nuanced and “real.” That doesn’t mean that I think the Dio of Stone Ocean’s personality is precisely like the Dio of Phantom Blood - Stone Ocean’s Dio is older and has developed in various ways. But I still see them as a single character who has changed through experiences and whose portrayal has grown more nuanced, rather than seeing one or the other as ooc, flat or disconnected from the previous/later portrayals.
Also, Araki has said that he doesn’t like to reveal the full extent of the suffering in his villains’ backstories because he doesn’t want the reader to sympathize too much with someone the hero is supposed to defeat… so, he leaves clues and lets the reader pick it up or not. To me, this meant it was time to look below the surface for understanding.
And, I write/rp Dio. I’m putting this out there because one bias is “trying to put together a realistic psychological profile.” I’m definitely filling in blanks/extrapolating/etc. I try to stick to things that can be fairly extrapolated from canon evidence, but interpretations and mileage vary, and this is just mine.
Next, I’m ignoring Over Heaven. It’s noncanonical and I haven’t heard anything good about it anyway, but regardless of quality, I can’t use it without reading it and most of it is untranslated.
Finally, expect a fair amount of discussion of homoerotic subtext - as is appropriate for a canonically pansexual vampire whose formative relationships were all with men. I do think of him as pansexual (or bisexual, whatever) as per Araki’s statement, but there’s not much to say about him and women since there isn’t much on the subject in the manga outside of his tendency to leave breads under his sofa or on the steps.
Now that context is out of the way, it’s time to show teeth.
DECONSTRUCTING DIO BRANDO.
“Born Bad?” Nature vs. Nurture.
The thing about Dio is, it’s very easy to just see him as sort of a Big Evil with very little motivation. And why not - as a human he’s smacking Erina, BBQing dogs and poisoning his kind-hearted guardian… nevermind what comes after that he becomes a vampire, or after he obtains the World. Speedwagon even explicitly blows off his history as a motivating factor and declares him to be “born bad.” And all this without any major exploration of what his problem is.
Actually, this was my initial problem with him - how could a character be portrayed as such a dark soul for seemingly no reason at all? But, in retrospect, I think that sells him rather short. In fact, I do think his motivation is present within the series, it’s just obscured (or rather, not highlighted), as is the case with many JoJo villains.
Let me explain.
Okay, let’s say Speedwagon is right and there’s something fundamentally flawed about Dio from the beginning - he was born with something “off,” something that made him “worse” than other people. This is probably true and arguably self-evident - most people would come out of a background like that somewhat traumatized and dysfunctional but most don’t become murderers (In fact, all you have to do for in-world evidence of this is look at Dio’s own son, Giorno, who had a similar background but came out of it a much less destructive person - which is attributed in the story to his Joestar lineage).
The problem is, it’s possible to look at things from the opposite end, as well - there are many people born with an “off” in nature, but most of them don’t become murderers, either. In fact, even people with antisocial personality disorder are often “harmless” in the sense that they don’t go around actively harming people. They lack empathy, but they’re often nonviolent, and are sometimes quite successful (mostly due to their ability to act in accordance with goals without hesitation or conscience). It is often the interaction of this personality type with other factors (e.g. abuse, neglect, physical or emotional trauma, brain damage) that triggers someone to turn from a person who is “off” to a person who is truly dangerous. (This isn’t to say Dio necessarily has ASPD, it’s just an example of how natural inclinations interact with environmental factors to determine a personality).
So, on the question of nature vs. nurture, modern psychology most often takes the position that this is a question that isn’t a question, because it’s both. One way to look at it is, the genetic inheritance of a person provides them with a range of traits into which their personality may ultimately fall: say, 3 to 6 on an emotionality scale that runs from 1 to 10. But what happens in their life - how they’re raised, how they interact with the world, how the world interacts with them - is what determines whether they land at a 3 or a 6 or somewhere in between.
Anyway what I’m saying is, Dio was born with the potential to be the man (monster, whatever) he became, but that doesn’t mean it was inevitable.
Dario, the Joestars and Internal Warzones
From there, the question obviously becomes, okay, so what is his deal? Why is he like that instead of just sort of weird like a lot of people with a higher-than-average predisposition toward antisocial behavior?
A lot of it seems to be rage - it’s the weakness he, himself, points out early on in Phantom Blood, and it plagues him for the rest of his life regardless of how cool he tries to be. As for the source of his rage, the obvious place to start looking is his background. For example… the fact that he’s the son of an abusive alcoholic.
We don’t know the details of Dario’s everyday treatment of his wife and son, but we know he’s the sort of person who abandons an an infant to die. We know he was a nasty drunk who punched and threw bottles at his 12 year old son, not to mention demanded Dio’s earnings for booze, referred to him as a bastard and an idiot and called his late wife a dead bitch while demanding Dio sell one of the few remaining keepsakes he had from the mother he’d loved.
In fact, Dio displays many of the signs of emotional and physical abuse victims, e.g. inappropriate aggression, destructiveness, low empathy, cruelty, inability to trust (more on that later), etc. It’s likely that living with that man, especially after his mother died and he lost his sole source of support, put Dio under constant stress and wore him down both mentally and emotionally.
Beyond that, he’s a poor kid from a shitty family in a classist country during a classist time. It’s likely that he’s spent much of his life being looked down on by the rich, or even by other poor people considering his father’s pathetic state. From that perspective it makes sense that he’s angry at life - at the rich people who look down on him for being poor even though they didn’t even do anything to earn their good fortunate. At the poor people who think they’re better than him, too. At his father for being abusive and a loser and ruining his life and killing his mother (at least Dio thought he did).
The abuse, the situation around his family, the anger… all of this puts him into survival mode. He develops his pride and his arrogance - initially part bluster, as a form of ego-defense. And in the end, he’s willing to take the ultimate step and kill his father to get free of him. But it’s more than that, too, because it carries on into his relationship with the Joestars.
(What’s this about, anyway? Frankly, I figure that, on an instinctual level, he doesn’t trust other people with his things - -notice that he initially reacts almost as though he thinks Jonathon’s trying to steal his stuff.)
It’s hard to figure out why Dio dislikes them so much when they haven’t even done anything… or at least, it was hard for me to figure out. In retrospect, I’d say the Joestars represent the pampered and unworthy aristocracy. I normally don’t like to talk about the SBR-world counterparts when working out the original world’s characters, but… Diego is more like Dio than pretty much any other counterpart, so I feel like he’s more relevant than most, and I’ll note that these themes, always present in the background on Dio, are specifically spelled out with Diego when he more or less vows to beat the aristocracy and grind their pride into the ground just like they did to him and his mother.
And speaking of pride, I suspect that’s a factor as well: George and Jonathon may not have thought of him as a charity case, but no doubt Dio himself can’t quite break out of that mold in his own head, especially as he’s used to people looking down on him, which he can’t tolerate:
Long story short, he’s determined to spit in the face of his lowly origins and in the face of his loser of a father and the rich people who think they’re so cool because they deign to give him handouts, and he’s going to be a self-made man and he won’t let people look down on him, and he’ll prove that he was the best the whole time.
This fixation, and his inability to let others in/trust people and therefore to see himself as an isolated entity at war with his surroundings, sours what should be an opportunity for a fresh start - George and Jonathon are ready to embrace him, but Dio comes in still carrying his wounds and his rage. One look at Jonathon and he’s already written him off as a soft, pampered kid - exactly the kind of entitled brat he dislikes, and as such he approaches JoJo like a combatant instead of a potential friend, ally or even just a peer. Of course, this leads to him acting like a crazy person - burning animals and assaulting JoJo’s girlfriend, and all for no apparent reason. It also blows up in his face when JoJo finally loses it and gives him a beatdown… which is a pretty major turning point in Dio’s personality.
In fact…
I’ve said it before, but this scene is what originally made me think that a great deal of Dio’s initial arrogance was actually a lot of bluster/a defense mechanism to make himself seem stronger than he actually was. Because he’s a swaggering bully right up until someone actually fights back, and then he just crumbles.
Anyway, at this point he realizes that acting like a lunatic isn’t going to achieve his goals, and dedicates himself to cooling his temper… with mixed success.
Dio and The Joestars: In Which I Talk About Phantom Blood. A Lot.
One of the side effects of that project is that his relationship with Jonathon changes. That dynamic is actually too big to address right now (and has its own section later), though. For now it’s enough to say, on the surface they become friends while below the surface they appear to actually dislike one another. But on the other hand, Dio himself later admits that his attachment to Jonathon is his primary weakness. This is important because it tells us that, yes, even back in Phantom Blood Dio really was capable of forming attachments to people. Which makes the fact that Dio completely failed to emotionally connect to George Joestar really notable.
Think about it - George raised him as his son, and favored Dio over his own son in many ways. And yet, Dio was no more fond of him after seven years than he was the day they met - he even ultimately gave him the same he’d given Dario. We can’t say it’s because he just doesn’t care about anyone because we already know he came to care about Jonathon on some level due to his admitting it, himself. So, why?
I’d suggest that there are two primary reasons, aside from the basic “we don’t get attached to people we intend to prey on” rule of people who intend to bilk others for cash.
The first goes back to Dio’s pride and his inability to trust in others - as I mentioned before, Dio seems to believe that George and Jonathon will regard him as a burden and a charity case even though they are actually intent on accepting him as part of the family. I would suggest that even seven years later, that feeling persists in him. Take this scene, for example:
…doesn’t react well. If anything, his response seems to be thinly veiled sarcasm. And Dio, who just a few pages ago called George “Father,” suddenly takes on a formal tone and thanks him for giving handouts to a poor graduate like him. Jonathon even appears to pick up that something strange just happened.
What I’m getting at is this: while George is trying to assure him that he’s still part of the family and can still expect to be supported and to have a safety net just like Jonathon, all Dio hears is a reminder that he’s not really one of them, that he’s a charity case, that George’s generosity is a handout that can be taken away at any time if George doesn’t think he’s “worked hard” enough. George doesn’t mean anything by it but ultimately he’s reinforcing Dio’s perception of himself as “outside” the family, because of course if he were really one of them, no one would need to say that, it would just be a given.
If we assume, as is likely, that George has said similar things and been perceived in a similar way multiple times in the past, then we can begin to unlock the secret of Dio’s dislike of George Joestar. As for the second reason….
…the thing is, it’s easy to write off what George does - the way he behaves to Dio and Jonathon - as simply cluelessness as to Dio’s true nature, but it isn’t, really. He doesn’t just fail to notice that Dio is… dodgy, to say the least, he also whacks Jonathon with a switch, verbally berates him, and starves him for having poor table manners. It actually ends up sending Jonathon into a depression even before Dio really gets started on him.
Now, I’ll be honest here: I think George Joestar was a terrible father. But certainly, he meant well and didn’t actually intend either Jonathon or Dio any real harm. Certainly he never meant to make Dio feel like an outsider, or to hurt his son. Either son. But Dio is still living with ghosts and they plague him.
Aside from that, Dio is - as much as he hates it - Dario’s son. Whether genetically or through the environment in which he was raised before his father’s death, Dio has inherited Dario’s bad temper, his cruelty, his violence, his selfishness, even his tendency toward alcoholism.
In fact, one could even say that, if fate hadn’t intervened, Dio would have ended up just like his father after all: a criminal and alcoholic who had blown the opportunity for a better life that George Joestar had given him. He even recognizes that he’s following that path, but that just makes him more angry - this time at himself.
Of course, fate does intervene in the form of that Stone Mask.
Now, up to this point, Dio’s been self-justifying - he’s told himself that his problems stem entirely from his background and that anyone who isn’t a pushover courting a life in the gutter would be just as angry, just as focused. He perceives the gentility and trusting nature of a person like Jonathon as a flaw, but worse as a symptom of their privilege - they can be kind and trusting and generous because they’ve never faced a hardship in their lives - and so their kindness just makes him resent them even more for what he went through himself. And he believes that the only reasonable thing to do when you’re born so low and suffer so much is to claw your way out of that pit through whatever means are necessary. If that means stepping over others then that’s fine - they’d do the same thing in his position. He doesn’t yet think of himself as a bad person. And at this point, he doesn’t intend to renounce his humanity - despite having seen the effects of the mask. Even when he confronts JoJo at the mansion, he’s frustrated that Jonathon is back and realizes that now he’ll have to kill him to turn the tide back in his favor, but he doesn’t have any thoughts about using the mask.
Yes, he rejects his humanity. In this moment, his choices seem to be imprisonment as a man or freedom as a monster, and he chooses freedom as a monster without hesitation, and never looks back.
What follows (not just in the scene of his rebirth as a vampire but for much of the rest of Phantom Blood itself) is “acting out” - Dio has spent much of his life cowering from his father and sucking up to Lord Joestar and pretending to be friendly and swallowing his anger and living in a state that he perceived as helplessness… and now he’s indestructible and immortal. The most powerful thing in the world, as far as he knows. So he throws off his shackles and does whatever the hell he wants… which is mostly demonstrating his superiority just like he’d always wanted. He also pursues his original goal (to stand at the top of the world) through other means (zombies and power rather than money).
He’s also been “freed” from his attempts to maintain his image of himself as, more or less, a normal human being. He was “born evil,” after all, and now he’s not even a human being, so why not indulge every whim? Why not look down on everyone else? It must feel good, for someone who felt so looked down on. In any case, the next time someone accuses him of being “evil,” far from offended or thrown off, he just declares it to be a compliment and moves on.
Dio and Jonathon: Destiny and The End of Dio’s First Era
All right, let’s take a moment to talk about Dio and Jonathon.
It seems obvious that Dio’s relationship with Jonathon is one of the major cornerstones of his character - I’d personally call it the relationship that defines not only Dio but the JoJo’s word, itself. (I would say the only challenger is Dio and Pucci, for reasons).
And one of the things that comes up sometimes when discussing Stone Ocean is the idea that Dio is shown to be positive emotional attachments for the first time, which I guess some people consider out of character. But actually, Dio was always able to form positive emotional attachments… it’s just a question of circumstances what, if anything, he expresses it. Dio’s relationships with Jonathon and Pucci are perfect examples of this, mostly because I’d suggest those two relationships have an essentially similar core on Dio’s end - which is to say, Dio has a positive emotional attachment to both men. I’m not being euphemistic or squirrelly here, more on specifics later - right now what’s important is that he actually likes both of them, but of course the expression is different: with Jonathon he’s destructive, and with Pucci he’s pretty laid back - almost “normal.” Almost. More on Pucci later, God knows, but for now it’s enough to note that, in my view, the difference arises from circumstance.
The thing is, Jonathon is an “enemy.” Even before they meet, Dio sees him as an obstacle - the person standing between himself and the Joestar fortune. As such, Dio approaches him as a rival to be ground into the dirt. Initially, this isn’t a problem because Dio sees Jonathon as pathetic and writes him off. But eventually, Jonathon proves to be intelligent, capable, strong (both physically and mentally), and driven in his own right. He is, in the end, competent and deserving of respect. True, Dio doesn’t put JoJo on his own level (at that time), but he doesn’t put him on the level of your average man, either. And despite his reassurances to himself that their friendship is just an act, actions speak louder than words, and by the time the 7 year time skip passes, it’s debatable whether Dio even intended to get rid of Jonathon anymore. If he still intended to be George’s sole heir, it wouldn’t make much sense to poison George without first removing JoJo from the picture. Yet, there’s no hint whatsoever that Dio intends to do anything to Jonathon. That is, not until after he knows his plan was discovered.
Well, Dio is essentially self-oriented - he’s not going to leave any threats to himself unaddressed. Once JoJo is on to him, his hand is more or less forced. Still, he’s reluctant to handle Jonathon himself: even before becoming a vampire, he hopes Ogre Street will take care of JoJo without his having to become involved, and after JoJo takes up the ripple, Dio throws minions at him instead of simply stepping in. I’ve seen this described as hubris, but Dio himself described it as a weakness on his part:
JoJo, speaking frankly… before, I didn’t want to kill you with my own hands. We grew up in the same house as childhood friends. Turning you into undead didn’t seem any fun. That’s why I sent those knights to kill you. But it looks like I was being too nice. Seeing you alive makes me realize my inner weakness as an emperor. So now, I will rip you to shreds with no hesitation.
The fact that Dio regards Jonathon differently than others is also evident in his reaction to Dire injuring him (he’s offended that someone so lowly would have the nerve to strike him) vs. JoJo injuring him (his respect and admiration grows). Ultimately, Jonathon’s repeated defeats of Dio leads to Jonathon’s becoming, as Dio puts it, the only man Dio admires… culminating in the confrontation belowdeck, where Dio declares that he ‘reveres’ Jonathon’s strength and courage, calls Jonathon his other half, etc:
While I underestimated you before, now I admire you! Your courage! Your spirit! Your power! I revere you, because I realized… JoJo, without you, this Dio would not have gained the power of the sotne mask. But because of you, the world isn’t mine yet. If God exists and is controlling destiny, there’s never been a relationship as calculated as ours. The two of us… are two that make one. Basically. I will gain the body of the one man I admire and live gorgeously forever!
Now, I’m going to be honest here: I’ve always thought there was an element of homoeroticism in Dio’s fixation on Jonathon. I’m personally not of the belief that there was anything actively romantic or sexual between them - for one thing, Jonathon was apparently unable to feel any warmth toward Dio even when they were growing up together (much to his own chagrin), and ultimately I don’t think he ever loved anyone but Erina. Mostly, the feeling I get is that those 7 years were full of Jonathon trying to make himself like Dio more and Dio trying to make himself like Jonathon less.
But whatever was going on in Jonathon’s head, Dio’s obsession with Jonathon - the way he shows off his powers for him, the way he avoids personally injuring him, the way he reacts when Jonathon fights/injures/defeats him (with reverence and admiration instead of rage) and, later on, his defensiveness when Jonathon is insulted, his description of their relationship (“two who make one!”), etc all painted a pretty clear picture for me. He even indirectly states that he considers Jonathon to be attractive - how could he live gorgeously forever with Jonathon’s body if Jonathon’s body weren’t, well, gorgeous? For that matter, just the idea that he admires Jonathon so much that he wants to knock Jon’s head off and merge with him forever strikes me as a bit psychotically 'romantic.“ There’s no real reason that he needs to use Jonathon’s body in particular, after all. He just wants to.
He also seems a bit shocked and stricken when he realizes that their long rivalry really is definitively over, and seemingly mourns Jonathon briefly (before stealing his body, ha).
(…a minor digression, but I often feel like Dio’s a little on the… emotionally immature side. He plays around with his power like a kid with a big cosmic-level toy - he even uses timestop to prank Polnareff on the stairs, and the other crusaders in his coffin room. I think of that here because, even though Dio’s the one who killed Jonathon, he’s still a little surprised when Jonathon actually dies from being killed. It’s not that surprising, though - if you think about it, they’ve been killing each other over and over and yet until this moment neither of them actually died.)
I guess I’d call it a one-sided obsession that culminates in Dio’s decision to literally become one with the man he considered his other half. In the end, they did seem to reach a mutual understanding and even Jonathon came to perceive them as inextricably linked - two who share a single destiny.
This may seem like a shipper tangent, but it’s actually pretty important to my understanding of Dio post-Phantom Blood… plus it foreshadows the homoeroticism of his relationships with Vanilla Ice and, especially, Pucci.
In the meantime, though, there’s 100 years of water.
Living in Jonathon’s Body Okay, fast forward 100 years, and Dio has changed in various ways. Some of this is general personality shifts, which I’ll get into after I wrap this Jonathon stuff. But some of it appears to be directly related to his acquisition of Jonathon’s body.
For example… back in Phantom Blood, Dio was a conservative dresser. Suddenly, now, he’s seen lounging around half-naked all the time, and when he is dressed, it’s often in flesh-baring, skintight things designed to show off Jonathon’s physique. He stares into mirrors, frequently touches the star birthmark. His body language shifts - becomes even more confident, more brazen. Lara once said it’s as though Dio is more comfortable in Jonathon’s skin then he was in his own - which may not be surprising considering he thought of his original body as tainted by his father’s blood.
And, of course, there’s the sex. In the few years he spent above-ground after Phantom Blood, he apparently became quite promiscuous: he sires four children even while apparently killing most of his dalliances (as implied in Vento Aureo, since the narrator states that it’s somewhat mysterious that Giorno’s mother wasn’t killed by him). This is quite a turn for someone who, in Phantom Blood, was really almost entirely about power. It’s almost fetishistic.
Furthermore, Dio’s focus on Jonathon himself continues even beyond the latter’s death - he refers to the Joestars mostly as Jonathon’s family, or Jonathon’s descendents… and when he explains to Enya why he fears them (or rather, why he can’t leave them be), he speaks in terms of his experiences with Jonathon: he wants to handle them personally, because his experiences with Jonathon have taught him that their family is not to be ignored or underestimated.
In short, he considered the family itself to be his archenemy, yes, but if asked who the Joestars were, he would likely have defined them as Jonathon’s descendents. Dio’s battle with the Joestars is, to him, a battle with Jonathon’s legacy… much the same way the battle with Pucci was in many ways a fight against Dio’s legacy.
Water Dreams and Heaven: Dio after the Sea.
Prolonged isolation is known to induce a host of psychological and physical symptoms such as, just to start off… hallucinations, depression, anxiety, claustrophobia, impaired thought processes, concentration and memories, tinnitus, aggression and suicidal tendencies.
Dio spends around a century underwater but it’s really barely touched on, at least not explicitly. It seems strange - that much isolation could not possibly have left him unchanged. Now, part of this is that we don’t see much of his time above - especially the time immediately after his release, when any symptoms would have been strongest. But even so, he does seem… different even during the periods depicted in SDC and SO.
For one thing, let’s take a look at this scene:
The World, whose appearance reflects Dio’s body and mind (e.g. the pharoah-like helm to reflect his ambition) - is wearing stylized diving equipment, complete with two oxygen tanks and tubes.
(I looked for a better picture, sorry about the undies girl, but notice the straps and the belt!)
And when, after traveling the world in search of Stand users and a trustworthy companion, he finally settles down? He settles in the middle of a desert. Long story short, I’d say the ocean certainly left its mark, even if it isn’t explored explicitly.
There are also some behavioral changes.
Dio has always been a man who surrounds himself with followers. Going back as far as the beginning of Phantom Blood, the first thing he did once settled at the Joestar Mansion was establish a group of followers, and that’s the first thing he did when he became a vampire as well. He does this in Stardust Crusaders too, with Stand users (and a handful of vampires)… but it’s not quite the same.
In Phantom Blood, he’s constantly surrounded by minions - the mancats crawl all over him and chatter at him, he has servants catering to his whims. In SDC and Stone Ocean, on the other hand, for the most part he’s seen shut away in dark rooms, and he’s rarely in the company of more than one person at a time (usually Enya). He keeps himself distant, and spends his time on quiet hobbies like model ships and reading (and the reading thing is, in itself, interesting - see below about his intellectual curiosity).
He’s also full of questions.
During Phantom Blood, Dio is intelligent and arrogant and a planner, but I wouldn’t say he seemed especially introspective. Originally (pre-vampire), he wasn’t even especially intellectually curious - he outright dismisses the usefulness of research that doesn’t have a monetary payoff. After he becomes a vampire, his priorities shift away from human concerns like money to larger-but-equivalent concerns like power, but overall he’s still fairly focused on achievement. It’s not until after he emerges from his hibernation that he develops the tendency to slow down and question - to ask the meaning of survival, or to try to determine just what it is that he’s seeking in more than worldly terms. It’s something that seems to have been set in motion by his initial defeat by Jonathon - he shows up on that ship talking about God and destiny, and he never stops talking about destiny from then on.
Now… before I go any farther, let me be clear: I’m not trying to woobify him. I feel the need to note this because of previous fandom reasons, but anyway, I don’t think his unfortunate history is a justification for murder, assault, animal cruelty, bullying, etc. I’m looking at his reasons, but I don’t excuse his behavior.
With that out of the way… what is it that he wants, exactly? Apparently, the answer is "happiness.”
Some might think this is too simple or sympathetic a motivation. Well, it is pretty simple, really, but it’s also the hardest motivation in the world to successfully fulfill, especially for someone who looks outside themselves for it. As for it being too sympathetic, eh, it doesn’t change the things he does.
It also makes sense for him, IMO. He grew up unhappy - abused and poverty-stricken - and watched his mother die an unhappy death being worn down by life and her bastard of a husband. He watched unhappiness destroy his father, for that matter - I’m assuming Dario Brando didn’t start drinking himself into a violent stupor because he was satisfied with life. Dio’s childhood unhappiness even drove him to commit murder in order to escape his situation (here I’m talking about Dario), and ever since then he’s been seeking remedies to the things that made him miserable. Grow up poor? Then become rich. Grow up physically abused? Then become physically invincible. Grow up in the dregs of society? Then place yourself at the top of the world. Indeed, those things - the very things he lists off as unable to bring a person happiness - are the very things he sought to achieve during Phantom Blood.
I doubt he was conscious of this at the time - he was probably just going with what felt right Most people aren’t hyper-aware of their own deeper motivations. But most people don’t spend 100 years with nothing but their thoughts to keep them company, so by the time he emerges, 100 years after the collapse of his ambitions, he’s come to recognize what it was he was doing as an attempt to make himself happy, and that everything he tried not only failed but wouldn’t have worked anyway. Going to Heaven is, in essence, the latest in a line of things he has thought would achieve this for him.
It’s not initially clear what he means by Heaven, but it’s clear that it isn’t traditional Christian heaven - he actually says that outright. So what is it that he means? Well we find out five thousand years after it first comes up, when Pucci explains what it is he’s done to the world (because, remember, Pucci’s goal is Dio’s goal):
After a full revolution of time, a new world appeared! Destiny will repeat itself! When a human meets another human, it is due to gravity! It happens because it was fated to be that way! And now, humanity has experienced the future and has now arrived at this world. For example, five years from now, what could happen? Everybody knows what will happen, now. During the accelerated time, they experienced when every accident, every illness, when their life would end… they already experienced it before arriving here. […] The spirit, not the mind or the body, has already experienced and memorized those facts. And that is happiness. Not just one person but everyone will be able to face their destiny. Ones who will be able to face this are the ones who will be happy.
You might think knowing the ill fortunes fo the future is despair, but… it’s the opposite! Even if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, it is that resolution that makes one happy! One’s resolution eradicates despair! Humanity will change! This is what I strived for!“
So basically, to Dio, the definition of happiness is to know what’s coming - to be able to anticipate, prepare for and accept even the worst turns of destiny with resolution and without fear. This makes absolute sense for Dio, who grew up in a state of constant anxiety due to his father’s abusive behavior, and then saw his attempts to achieve various goals repeatedly fail right when they were about to come to fruition. It also makes sense for Pucci, but that’s another story. As for Dio, it makes even more sense when we consider the existence of one… exception to this "everyone knows the future forever” rule. Specifically this:
The possessor of the stand is free to act regardless of what is “meant” to happen.
So, if Dio had achieved his goal and turned The World into Made in Heaven, he would have created a world where he constantly knows what he’s meant to experience, and what is meant to happen to those around him, but he always has the option of changing something to change an outcome, while everyone else remains tethered to their fates… unless he does something to change their future.
I buy it. I absolutely buy this as something he’d pursue. Dio was obsessed with destiny and conquering his… and this addresses his primary source of stress and frustration throughout the series.
Furthermore, it also hits on one of the other consistent themes of Dio’s life: the drive to constantly transcend himself. First, he tries to transcend his father and his class background, then his species when he turns into a vampire. Once he finds himself in need of a body, not just any body will do. No, he has to pick the perfect physical specimen that is Jonathon - the only person he’s ever accepted as an equal and definitely the only one he ever claimed to revere or admire. Once The World appears, he spends his time pushing its limits, lengthening its time stop ability, and even then - even knowing he’s probably the single most powerful person in the world at that point, he still fights to go beyond that and attain Made in Heaven.
Dio is never really satisfied, is only ever hungry. Even if he’d achieved his goal of switching The World with Made in Heaven, I wouldn’t be shocked if he tried to seek greater vistas, still. If any even exist. But in any case, from that perspective, it’s not difficult to imagine why he considered the described outcome the equivalent of “going to Heaven.”
Long story… long, here’s what I’m getting at: Dio seems to be deeply affected by his repeated losses and a feeling that, regardless of his strength, he’s still ultimately powerless (not against earthly beings like the Joestars but rather, against destiny itself). He constantly strives to overcome that, as well as striving to overcome himself and his own limitations. Furthermore, he seems to carry unspoken scars from his time in the ocean - it’s a good bet that, when he dreams, he dreams of water.
The Devil and the Priest
I’m not one to define a character by their relationships. However, if I were going to divide Dio’s life on a personal level (instead of on a plot level), I would probably separate him into the Jonathon era and the Enrico Pucci era. It’s an interesting thing, considering Pucci is more or less a retcon. But even so, their relationship added a dimension to Dio’s character that, for me, really served to fill in the gaps about him and his motivation and make him a more compelling and interesting character. Besides, if there’s a relationship that rivals the shaping power of Jon and Dio’s, it’s Dio and Pucci’s. And if Jonathon is the relationship that originally hints at Dio’s capacity for caring, it’s with Pucci that we see what happens when he doesn’t need to regard the object of his affections as an enemy.
Again, I’m going to say a lot of it is circumstance.
Now, from what I can piece together of Dio’s plan, it basically goes like this: Dio will make a trustworthy friend. He will then execute 38 sinners and destroy The World. As The World dies, it will absorb the souls of the sinners, and create Green Baby. When Green Baby awakens, his friend will recite the 14 words, thus setting into motion the creation of C-Moon and then Made in Heaven. I assume this was meant to bring Dio physically back together as well, because he does say that he has to destroy The World “momentarily,” and also because Pucci is able to make use of C-Moon and MiH largely because he merges with the remainder of Dio’s body and soul, which tells me the plan was devised to give these powers to Dio specifically.
Plus I… don’t see Dio suiciding. Ever.
So I can assume the plan was put together to result in Dio coming back together with the new stand, and that part of the reason he needed a trustworthy friend was to ensure that the 14 words would be spoken while he was unavailable to speak them.
So okay, for Dio’s plan to go to Heaven to come to fruition, he needs “a trustworthy friend,” but not just any trustworthy friend:
He must be someone capable of controlling his own desires. He must be someone who is not interested in political power, fame, wealth, sexual desires… and must be someone who chooses the will of God before the law of humans. Will I, Dio, be able to meet someone like this one day? … My 'friend’ will trust me, and I will become his 'friend.’
As it happens, the answer to whether he’ll find someone like that appears to be “yes.” So, Dio finds Pucci at a time when he’s specifically looking for Pucci… even if he doesn’t yet know the man’s name. Dio’s first impression of him is of an imperfect catholic - interested in scandalous stories full of adultery and faithlessness. But once Dio gives his excuse for being there offhours, things get interesting:
After Dio gives his excuse, he stares at Pucci - apparently waiting to see whether the lie will work. Which it does, and that in itself seems to interest Dio - actually, iI should say it seems to surprise him. And his immediate reaction is to test it, and doubt it:
You’re not throwing me out? I might be some thief that’s trying to steal the art pieces here, or maybe even worse. Or are you just saying that I can stay but planning to rat me out anyway?
I’ve mentioned before that Dio has a difficult time trusting - I think that’s part of what messed him up so badly with the Joestars. Aside from the specific issues he may have had with George or with Jonathon, or with the concept of aristocracy in and of itself, there’s also a level on which I think he never really “believed” in that stroke of good luck. From the beginning he approached it as something he had to fight to retain, and he never trusted that the Joestars saw him as an equal or a member of the family instead of a lower class leech. This comes up not once but twice with Pucci, the second time being much more harrowing and revealing, but this one is pretty interesting, too. Even when Pucci claims everything’s just fine and he believes him, Dio just can’t quite believe that someone would just accept his word on something like that.
And yet, Pucci does. That’s when Dio really becomes interested. I will note that, despite his professed distaste for “soft” types, Dio actually seems drawn to people who are principled and open to trusting. But in any case, he’s also in search of someone who will trust him for practical reasons - someone who may have desires, but specifically can control them (if they’re there). And thus he leaves Pucci with a gift and a few cryptic words that nearly guarantee that they’ll see one another again.
By the time they next meet, Pucci’s life has gone to hell. Others have written more about this than I can given how long this already is, but Pucci comes to Dio seeking absolution - he’s accidentally caused the death of his beloved sister, set a worldclass threat loose in the form of his long lost brother, and then stole his brother’s mind away. What he wants - the thought that “saves” him from the need to acknowledge his own culpability - is to believe in destiny. To believe that there was nothing else that could have happened, and therefore he had no choice and it isn’t his fault. Dio can provide this for him - this, and a potential way out, as well, in the form of a plan that will allow everyone to know their fate, and allow Dio to alter it. So you might say, as much as Dio needs Pucci to trust in him, Pucci needs to trust in Dio, too. Dio needs him to listen, and Pucci needs to hear.
So initially, Pucci is (unlike Jonathon) a necessary component in Dio’s plan instead of an obstacle to its completion. This allows him to deal with what I would suggest is a fairly obvious attraction in a much different way. So instead of breaking things and stealing Pucci’s body, he ends up doing, well, this:
He opens up to Pucci in ways you really never see him do with anyone else. They lounge and talk. Dio shares his thoughts and his plans, they bounce ideas off of one another. And while Dio may well be the clear alpha in their dynamic, Pucci is no mindless worshipper - he’s not afraid to give Dio “what the hell are you even babbling about?” looks when necessary, or to push him in ways no one else ever would. Considering how well he responded to Jonathon’s refusal to lay down and die, it’s probably not all that surprising that Dio responds well - the day he arrives at the Joestars’ he says he dislikes dogs for their servile attitude, so you can pretty much guess how he feels about his average follower, I think - he may find them useful, but he doesn’t respect them. Pucci is different in that he positions himself not as a follower but instead as a disciple, a partner, and a friend - he listens but he questions and thinks for himself, too. Furthermore, he’s able to accept Dio’s monstrousness without being, himself, monstrous in any obvious way - which has to be very validating.
This scene was fantastic to me. Because the thing is, Dio is like a minefield - it may look peaceful and calm at times, composed, but there’s always tension in the air - the awareness that if you step out of line, something may blow and you’ll end up with your guts splattered all over the scenery. So Pucci asks Dio a question, and Dio shoots off some whatever whatever (actually, his thoughts on strength are pretty interesting and show a great deal of growth since PB but anyway), but Pucci doesn’t let the question go. Instead, he pushes for an answer. And there’s that one panel where the tension is in the air again - is Dio going to lose his patience? But instead he indulges Pucci and then indulges him some more - his questions, his curiosity, even his desire to capture the stand for his collection. Araki has also mentioned in an interview that they would go drinking together or whatever, just go gallivanting around, having fun. This is entirely different than his 'normal’ pattern, because while Dio does have a history of becoming emotionally involved with those he initially seeks to use, in the past that’s only ever gone bad.
In short, Pucci is the one who draws out Dio’s long suppressed “normal” side - with Pucci he is able to form connections without twisting them, feel affection without turning it into violence. We get to see what Dio is like when he’s calm, connected, when he isn’t fighting himself and everything around him. What I always found interesting, too, is how paranoid this makes him. Because Dio has never had a good thing last in his life, and in the end that fear - the fear that he’ll lose this good thing, too, is what drives this kind of thing:
Let’s just stop for a second to think about what’s happening here: Dio is literally putting his life and power - the two things that have always meant more to him than anything - on the line to test whether Pucci is going to leave him, or turn on him. Pushing him - “Do it” - and even shoving Pucci’s fingers into his own head and forcing his own stand disc out.
Now, of course, Dio can stop time - he’s also superhumanly strong and fast. Most likely, if Pucci had decided to go ahead and pull that disc out, he could have saved himself. But that’s walking a very fine line, and a very dangerous one, too. Even so, he ultimately walks it - a fact made all the more notable when one considers that, previously, Dio has always been willing to throw even those he seems to favor more than others under the bus if necessary (e.g. Enya).
All in all, I would argue that Pucci is Dio’s second love, and by far the more successful/healthy both actually and on a purely emotional level. It’s unclear whether they’re physically involved (they are shown in bed together - with Pucci’s clothes visibly ruffled which is pretty unusual - but Dio does specify that he’s looking for someone with no sexual drive, which could complicate things) but emotionally they’re pretty deeply entangled and Pucci is certainly the only one that’s ever inspired Dio to be as emotionally raw as this:
Of course, much like his bizarre relationship with Jonathon, his relationship with Pucci ends with one of them dead and the survivor physically merged with the dead. It’s just that, in this case, it’s Dio who is consumed into the body of the other.
(Lara once said what she’s learned from Jojo’s is, if you love someone, merge with their corpse and be one with them forever. I can’t disagree. If Pucci had died instead of Dio, Dio probably would have implanted Pucci’s bones into his leg or something.)
Dio and the Brando Brats (Mostly Giorno, Really)
One of the major mysteries in JoJo’s is… what’s the deal with Giorno Giovanna? Or maybe that’s just something that plagues me. The thing is, it’s easy to write off the relevance of Dio’s other sons because there’s no indication that he had any idea they existed or vice versa. Considering their ignorance of him, it’s easy enough to assume they were just the children of random women - maybe victims he didn’t quite kill, or women he left wandering his mansion when he went to face Jotaro and never returned.
Giorno is a bit tougher, though.
For all the “how’d that even happen” surrounding Giorno’s mother’s survival (even the narrative makes a big question mark of it, thanks Araki), that’s not the most prominent question, to me. I’m sure Dio did kill most of his one night stands, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he killed every last one of them - I could see him leaving her alive if she said something interesting enough, or if she hit him in a soft spot (mother issues, for example). Maybe even if he’d simply picked her up somewhere he regularly frequented and didn’t feel like dealing with questions about where the woman he left with went… or if there was a potential stand user nearby and chasing them was more important than getting rid of her. Hell, maybe he lost just track of time and it was nearly dawn, or he had to go meet Pucci somewhere so he didn’t have time to deal with her. Whatever reason - it’s a bit unusual but she wasn’t even the only one who ever survived a night with Dio, so I suppose we know he didn’t kill everyone he ever slept with.
In any case, she survived and returned to Japan to have Giorno, thus opening a series of other questions: why does Gio have a photo of Dio? Did he know his father at all? Did he know what Dio was?
…impossible to know for sure but looking at the evidence and trying to form it into a coherent whole, my guess is something like, “They never met, but he was aware that Giorno existed and gave Giorno’s mother the photo to give to Giorno. He may have even been in contact with her to some degree before his death.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone take that position though, sob, so let me explain: it’s not just the photo, although that’s interesting in itself. It’s this:
It appears to be common knowledge that Giorno’s father died in Egypt when he was young. That, for me, was the flag-of-some-color, because his mother moved to Japan before Giorno was even born, and yet somehow she knew that Dio died - she must have, in order for anyone else to know. (Also, I’m not sure where he met her since he was traveling, but assuming he wasn’t in Egypt two years before his death - which, given how much he traveled seems unlikely - how would she even have known he’d settled there? This is just spec though.) Anyway, the only thing I can come up with is that she must have told him, at some point before leaving for Japan, that their fling had left her pregnant, and that he must have given her the photo for their kid and arranged for her to be informed if anything happened to him.
This may seem far-fetched on the surface but… really, I don’t think it is. It’s not hard to tell that Dio has, let’s say, parent issues… something that’s expanded on significantly through Diego and a major topic in Over Heaven (although I’m still ignoring the latter and the former is only barely relevant inasmuch as it seems to echo a lot of the things in Dio’s subtext as well). And, of course, I’ve already banged on a lot about Dario and George.
In any case, one thing he consistently doesn’t want to do is be his father. So I can absolutely believe that, in the interests in avoiding becoming his father, he would want to do differently - he would want his son to know who he was, and perhaps even to have the choice (later in life) of whether to remain in the light or join him in the dark. He wouldn’t want to leave his son feeling unwanted.
Of course, Dio dies before this hypothetical can come to fruition. But this scenario would also help explain Giorno’s combination of sentimentality over Dio and his lack of concrete knowledge - to an abused child who was all but abandoned by his mother and beaten by his stepfather, his late father would become a symbol of what could have been - a parent who might have wanted him more than the ones he ultimately had. A parent who died before he had a chance to become anything other than perfect.
As a sidenote, I’m not going to claim that Dio would have been a great father - vampire thing aside, there’s always been more of Dario to him than he wanted to admit. But even Dario loved his son enough to write to Joestar and ask him to look after Dio once he was gone. In any case, I do think Dio would have been wanted to do something and I don’t think he would have been willing to leave his son in the same kind of environment he grew up in, himself. Or strung out on the streets, for that matter. I’ve always thought if he’d survived, he would have taken them in, raised them as princes and demigods, and then used their power and his own to conquer the world.
Or maybe that’s just me. >_>
In Closing…
There’s this post that just went around tumblr as I was writing this, and it basically says “Tragic backstories explain actions, they don’t excuse them.” I think this is pretty relevant because I realize I’ve just written a 10k (sob) long dig into Dio’s character that could be perceived as painting him as Not That Bad. So I want to be clear here: I actually think Dio’s pretty horrifying - he’s cruel, he’s sadistic, he bullies people and burns animals alive. Even if we assume, as I do, that he cared about Jonathon, he’s still willing to kill him without much hesitation in order to save his own backside. To be honest, in a lot of ways I find his human self more disturbed than his vampire self because he’s so cruel even though he’s still just a man. But then again, his vampire self is known for tossing steamrollers and killing his most loyal retainers (well, Enya anyway), so you can’t exactly claim he’s a good guy either.
But anyway, I don’t think exploring his reasons and motivations does anything to take away from the “evil level” of his character. Rather, what it does for me is make him less of an inscrutable black box. When I first read Phantom Blood, I had such a hard time figuring out why he was doing anything at all that he did that I couldn’t enjoy the story - all I could do was stare at him like, What is your damn problem? Once I started understanding him, I was able to appreciate him.
There are a few other aspects to my doing this, as well, but I think the main other thing is that I often see Dio talked about as though he’s a one-dimensional SuperEvil, and while that’s normally said in the spirit of appreciation (which is to say, people love him for his perceived 100% Pure Evilness), it still makes me :|a a lot because I just don’t think it’s true. And because that does tend to lead to people considering Dio out of character in Stone Ocean, for example, when I really do think those aspects of him were present in a latent/unhighlighted form all the way back in Phantom Blood (and Stardust Crusaders, for that matter - he did resurrect Vanilla Ice rather than consume his blood, despite saying that he needed the blood to fully heal). So I guess I really wanted to challenge that perception, or at least throw another view out there.
I’m not going to say 'long story short" because, well, that ship has sailed and crashed and become the inspiration for a model ship scene on Dio’s table. But suffice to say, I think he’s got more dimensions than he is sometimes given credit for.
And he’s still pretty terrifying.
