Jojo's Bizarre Adventure 3 (Part 5)
Sep. 8th, 2006 04:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedTHIS PART ON THE OTHER HAND. (I really did not expect to finish so soon, it's just that I couldn't stop reading. ^^; good thing I didn't have anything important to do today, four hours sleep = not a good way to start the school year.) Scanslations are only up to the middle of volume 60, therefore I am only up to middle of volume 60.
Part Five: There is this nice-looking and polite young man who wants to be the best gangster (a Gang Star), so he joins the Mafia (this part takes place in Italy) and is assigned to work with five other boys who all dress outrageously. At first the others don't trust him, but eventually they come to respect him, and then to unconsciously rely on him even though he is technically not the leader of their operating cell. The beautiful thing about this is that he and the leader are friends or at least co-conspirators (they want to take down the Big Boss FOR GREAT JUSTICE), and so there's no awkwardness in the gradual shift of power. Bruno is capable, not the type to hold it against someone who issues orders in a crisis if they're sound. Giorno, in turn, stays out of the way most of the time.
There's a series of chapters that stick Giorno and one other member of the group together in a crisis, and each time the other member comes to the realization that Giorno's judgement is always absolutely reliable, and there is just something about him that is extremely compelling so that almost before they knew what was happening, they'd accepted Giorno in their hearts. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of cult leader. ^_^
So that's one thing. But really part five is ALL ABOUT THE STANDS. They are SO COOL omg. It's like they bypass reason and go straight to the section of the brain responsible for recognizing cool things. The art has a lot to do with this. The stands in this section aren't just fascinating, they are also visually exciting, stuff like melting walls and liquid floors and zippers on faces and running up stairs that sink so that you end up back where you started. Part Four had an Escher stand that sort of hinted at the kind of optical effects Araki busts out in this part, but really you haven't seen anything until you've seen three of the characters turned into stackable cubes which are then reassembled into furniture. NO, REALLY.
Kid-game like stands:
1. Stand moves through the shadows, to avoid it you must stay in the sunlight.
2. Stand turns everything you say into a lie, correct interpretation is the opposite.
3. Stand attacks people going from high to low, to avoid you must always only go up <-- if only this had not been not explained in the context of mosses that thrive at lower elevations. OBVIOUSLY, REACHING DOWN TO TIE YOUR SHOE AND HAVING YOUR HAND FALL OFF BECAUSE IT'S NEARER TO THE GROUND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE. Similarly the other biological weapon Stand -- the one that targeted people with higher temperatures -- had nothing to do with science, either. (Actually, men do tend to have higher body temperatures than women, but it has nothing to do with percentages of body fat, good grief).
The rest:
1. Giorno's Gold Experience. The first time we see it we're told he has the power to "give life" to inanimate objects, for instance by turning a rock into a frog. The objects he's given life to supposedly have the power to deflect the enegry of attacks back on their attcker, but this effect is only seen once and it doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of what Gold Experience does (unless you say GE has "filled" the objects with energy until they can't take in any more), so I am going to view it as a mistake and assume this isn't a regular power. Anyway, Giorno doesn't have any direct control over the things he gives life to. What he does control is their creation. He's not restricted to things that actually exist in nature -- he can make snakes that attack on sight and vines that climb up through thin air to grab objects out of the sky and insects that seek out the rest of the material they were originally made from. Basically, these behaviors are all "programmed" in from the moment the lifeform is created. Given Araki's view of genetics (and recent discoveries) it's really not surprising that even complex actions can be predetermined this way.
When Giorno's creatures are a certain distance away from him, they revert back to being buttons or coblestones or whatever. From a physics perspective this is sort of like a nod in the direction of conservation of energy, though not really (to truly conserve energy everything Giorno created would have to revert back before it could effect anything, like virtual particles). The exception to this rule is created body parts: after taking hold, these can remain as replacements forever. This is sort of in the tradition of Stands like Josuke's, which distinguish between "part of my body" and "no longer a part of my body". Of course, it makes no sense that this is a healing ability, because there is no way you can transplant an eye just by making a new one and sticking it on your face.
2. Bruno's Sticky Fingers. Most of the time he uses this on walls, to create an opening to the other side. I don't think he's creating portals to anywhere when he does this -- no alternate dimensions -- it's just that his ability forgets all about mass and treats everything like a surface. Putting a zipper on something disrupts local space, allowing you to bend surfaces in weird ways. Reconnecting two surfaces and zipping them together is as good as reconnecting everything beneath them. The reason Bruno can store items in a "pocket" he's opened up on his face is that he's hollow. XD
3. The Man in the Mirror. I enjoyed the fact that in mirror world, all of the writing is backwards. Since Fugo's watch on his left wrist was suddenly on his right wrist, I suspect he temporarily became left-handed as well. It's too bad Araki didn't do anything with this, imagine how disorienting it would be to suddenly be moving your right foot when you wanted to move your left. (The human brain is adaptable, though. It'd probably only take a few minutes to fix the problem. Until you return back to the regular world...)
This chapter also features the Most Wrong part of Jojo so far, where Giorno creates a vaccine to counter Purple Rain's uncounterable virus. He does this by turning a piece of Purple Rain (who is immune) into a snake (also immune) and then injecting the snake's "vaccine" into himself. I think Araki got "vaccine" confused with "antidote" here, cause vaccines do not work this way.
4. Diavlo's King Crimson. Diavlo predicts the future and then uses that knowledge to move the timeline to a point where he is not in danger. Prediction would already be very powerful, but he also erases everything that happened/would have happened in between. Once he does this that time ceases to exist, except in his head. I see nothing wrong with erasing the future though you run into trouble since time increments should always be continous... well, but maybe he's just collapsed the timeline into such a short space that the increment is too small to be perceived. What I wonder about is the range. Giorno, sitting in a boat outside the tower, sees a cat move from one end of the dock to another. Is he in range, or just out of it? King Crimson's range can't extend over all space, or every time he used his ability there'd be five-car pileups on the interstate. But if it only goes so far, there'd be a "jump" on the border of what's in range and what's out of it, where one side would experience more time than the other. Obviously that's no good.
Since he has a limit of about 5-10 seconds I guess you could get around this by creating a situation in which at no point in this 10-second span is he not in danger of losing his life (a continuous area effect like Gnocchi's or Proscutto's might do it). Unless I'm missing something?
5. Trish's Spice Girl. This ability looks like Secca's (hard surfaces become yielding) except that in Trish's case they are actually mushy, allowing them to be pulled apart, while Oasis only causes objects to sink into the ground without altering the ground's basic properties. His range is also very short; he has to be almost directly underneath you for it to work. Otherwise I only wanted to mention the Salvador Dali-esque melted clocks in Trish's chapter.
6. Where can I get a Secret Base Turtle?
7. Vanilla Ice. This stand has the ability to lower the temperature. The name is misleading -- Vanilla Ice doesn't create ice, it lowers the temperature until the surrounding air turns solid. What protects the user isn't the ice shield, it's the fact that any object entering this area will have its heat taken away, and heat is just randomized kinetic energy so kinetic energy (motion) will also be taken away. So bullets don't work, but larger bullets do -- larger object, more energy, too much to take away before it gets to the skin.
This is a really powerful stand. I mean, think about the way the shield works: it's just normal hardened air, the reason it follows the user's movements isn't that it's flexible, it's that new air is continuously being frozen, while the old air is heated up fast enough to keep him from ever touching anything cold. Because it's so powerful, the range is very, very short. In fact I think it might stop at the shild, and everthing else is conduction. (Giorno was right to drive into the water. Water has a higher specific heat than air and it's a better conductor, so not only will it take longer to cool down a large canal than a small car, you'll have to or the car's temperature won't drop.)
8. Bruno's test tube baby. This is the stand that turns people into cubes, and then stacks the cubes into objects. In all of these stands that distort people's shapes -- like that Escher stand, or the one that deflates people like balloons, or Rohan's Heaven's Gate -- the distortion doesn't kill anyone, but they enter a state of suspended animation where normal processes like breathing don't apply. The exception is Sticky Fingers, for some reason zipping your head away from your lungs stops you from breathing. XD; the rule of thumb seems to be consciousness, if you are conscious it means blood should be flowing to deliver oxygen to the brain, and you're in trouble if it isn't.
On the subject of artificially created baby assassins (...WEIRDEST STAND ABILITY EVER), even though it was magically born via stand ability from a Bruno's blood smaple and a "host mother" who gave birth to it from the back of her head, it still has to be taught words. XD "This is a baseball bat, it's used for [bludgeoning people to death]"? Is that anything to teach a baby?! Also, on the stats page "Learning" is given as F, I think that's hardly fair considering it learned to talk, walk, and reason in under three hours.
Random observations:
1. What is this, a videogame gang? Collect lira to advance to the next level (of gang leadership)? Excuse me, are there any gangs that actually work this way?
2. Though he is little, he is but fierce (Narancia). *g* By the end of this part I'd even forgotten what a horrible pun Aerosmith is. All the other members of the gang, who are not Giorno, seem have the complete files on Bruno's posse; who knows why they thought their Stand abilities were a secret they had to keep from him. (Well, maybe it's only the assassin group that has the files.)
3. The Boss gives his orders via email so that there will be "no way to intercept" them. XD. Also, was that suicide really necessary?!
4. "People say 'Happiness must be carved out for yourself!' But we don't decide what happens in our lives! Facing hardships is common!" <--This is Araki's note on Bruno's background. Gotta say, I dig his brand of predestination.
5. Trish feels a psychic connection to the boss. This is how many mysterious parent/child bonds again?
***
I like the new tracking feature so much that I added it to the entry comment bar on my journal. *g* If you're a paid or permanent account user with flexible squares as your layout, here are the tutorials you can use to do this:
1. http://community.livejournal.com/s2flexisquares/420736.html?thread=3592064#t3592064, builds on
2. http://community.livejournal.com/s2flexisquares/2307.html, see
3. http://murklinstest.livejournal.com/17235.html for instructions on creating a custom theme layer.
Part Five: There is this nice-looking and polite young man who wants to be the best gangster (a Gang Star), so he joins the Mafia (this part takes place in Italy) and is assigned to work with five other boys who all dress outrageously. At first the others don't trust him, but eventually they come to respect him, and then to unconsciously rely on him even though he is technically not the leader of their operating cell. The beautiful thing about this is that he and the leader are friends or at least co-conspirators (they want to take down the Big Boss FOR GREAT JUSTICE), and so there's no awkwardness in the gradual shift of power. Bruno is capable, not the type to hold it against someone who issues orders in a crisis if they're sound. Giorno, in turn, stays out of the way most of the time.
There's a series of chapters that stick Giorno and one other member of the group together in a crisis, and each time the other member comes to the realization that Giorno's judgement is always absolutely reliable, and there is just something about him that is extremely compelling so that almost before they knew what was happening, they'd accepted Giorno in their hearts. I felt like I was witnessing the birth of cult leader. ^_^
So that's one thing. But really part five is ALL ABOUT THE STANDS. They are SO COOL omg. It's like they bypass reason and go straight to the section of the brain responsible for recognizing cool things. The art has a lot to do with this. The stands in this section aren't just fascinating, they are also visually exciting, stuff like melting walls and liquid floors and zippers on faces and running up stairs that sink so that you end up back where you started. Part Four had an Escher stand that sort of hinted at the kind of optical effects Araki busts out in this part, but really you haven't seen anything until you've seen three of the characters turned into stackable cubes which are then reassembled into furniture. NO, REALLY.
Kid-game like stands:
1. Stand moves through the shadows, to avoid it you must stay in the sunlight.
2. Stand turns everything you say into a lie, correct interpretation is the opposite.
3. Stand attacks people going from high to low, to avoid you must always only go up <-- if only this had not been not explained in the context of mosses that thrive at lower elevations. OBVIOUSLY, REACHING DOWN TO TIE YOUR SHOE AND HAVING YOUR HAND FALL OFF BECAUSE IT'S NEARER TO THE GROUND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE. Similarly the other biological weapon Stand -- the one that targeted people with higher temperatures -- had nothing to do with science, either. (Actually, men do tend to have higher body temperatures than women, but it has nothing to do with percentages of body fat, good grief).
The rest:
1. Giorno's Gold Experience. The first time we see it we're told he has the power to "give life" to inanimate objects, for instance by turning a rock into a frog. The objects he's given life to supposedly have the power to deflect the enegry of attacks back on their attcker, but this effect is only seen once and it doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of what Gold Experience does (unless you say GE has "filled" the objects with energy until they can't take in any more), so I am going to view it as a mistake and assume this isn't a regular power. Anyway, Giorno doesn't have any direct control over the things he gives life to. What he does control is their creation. He's not restricted to things that actually exist in nature -- he can make snakes that attack on sight and vines that climb up through thin air to grab objects out of the sky and insects that seek out the rest of the material they were originally made from. Basically, these behaviors are all "programmed" in from the moment the lifeform is created. Given Araki's view of genetics (and recent discoveries) it's really not surprising that even complex actions can be predetermined this way.
When Giorno's creatures are a certain distance away from him, they revert back to being buttons or coblestones or whatever. From a physics perspective this is sort of like a nod in the direction of conservation of energy, though not really (to truly conserve energy everything Giorno created would have to revert back before it could effect anything, like virtual particles). The exception to this rule is created body parts: after taking hold, these can remain as replacements forever. This is sort of in the tradition of Stands like Josuke's, which distinguish between "part of my body" and "no longer a part of my body". Of course, it makes no sense that this is a healing ability, because there is no way you can transplant an eye just by making a new one and sticking it on your face.
2. Bruno's Sticky Fingers. Most of the time he uses this on walls, to create an opening to the other side. I don't think he's creating portals to anywhere when he does this -- no alternate dimensions -- it's just that his ability forgets all about mass and treats everything like a surface. Putting a zipper on something disrupts local space, allowing you to bend surfaces in weird ways. Reconnecting two surfaces and zipping them together is as good as reconnecting everything beneath them. The reason Bruno can store items in a "pocket" he's opened up on his face is that he's hollow. XD
3. The Man in the Mirror. I enjoyed the fact that in mirror world, all of the writing is backwards. Since Fugo's watch on his left wrist was suddenly on his right wrist, I suspect he temporarily became left-handed as well. It's too bad Araki didn't do anything with this, imagine how disorienting it would be to suddenly be moving your right foot when you wanted to move your left. (The human brain is adaptable, though. It'd probably only take a few minutes to fix the problem. Until you return back to the regular world...)
This chapter also features the Most Wrong part of Jojo so far, where Giorno creates a vaccine to counter Purple Rain's uncounterable virus. He does this by turning a piece of Purple Rain (who is immune) into a snake (also immune) and then injecting the snake's "vaccine" into himself. I think Araki got "vaccine" confused with "antidote" here, cause vaccines do not work this way.
4. Diavlo's King Crimson. Diavlo predicts the future and then uses that knowledge to move the timeline to a point where he is not in danger. Prediction would already be very powerful, but he also erases everything that happened/would have happened in between. Once he does this that time ceases to exist, except in his head. I see nothing wrong with erasing the future though you run into trouble since time increments should always be continous... well, but maybe he's just collapsed the timeline into such a short space that the increment is too small to be perceived. What I wonder about is the range. Giorno, sitting in a boat outside the tower, sees a cat move from one end of the dock to another. Is he in range, or just out of it? King Crimson's range can't extend over all space, or every time he used his ability there'd be five-car pileups on the interstate. But if it only goes so far, there'd be a "jump" on the border of what's in range and what's out of it, where one side would experience more time than the other. Obviously that's no good.
Since he has a limit of about 5-10 seconds I guess you could get around this by creating a situation in which at no point in this 10-second span is he not in danger of losing his life (a continuous area effect like Gnocchi's or Proscutto's might do it). Unless I'm missing something?
5. Trish's Spice Girl. This ability looks like Secca's (hard surfaces become yielding) except that in Trish's case they are actually mushy, allowing them to be pulled apart, while Oasis only causes objects to sink into the ground without altering the ground's basic properties. His range is also very short; he has to be almost directly underneath you for it to work. Otherwise I only wanted to mention the Salvador Dali-esque melted clocks in Trish's chapter.
6. Where can I get a Secret Base Turtle?
7. Vanilla Ice. This stand has the ability to lower the temperature. The name is misleading -- Vanilla Ice doesn't create ice, it lowers the temperature until the surrounding air turns solid. What protects the user isn't the ice shield, it's the fact that any object entering this area will have its heat taken away, and heat is just randomized kinetic energy so kinetic energy (motion) will also be taken away. So bullets don't work, but larger bullets do -- larger object, more energy, too much to take away before it gets to the skin.
This is a really powerful stand. I mean, think about the way the shield works: it's just normal hardened air, the reason it follows the user's movements isn't that it's flexible, it's that new air is continuously being frozen, while the old air is heated up fast enough to keep him from ever touching anything cold. Because it's so powerful, the range is very, very short. In fact I think it might stop at the shild, and everthing else is conduction. (Giorno was right to drive into the water. Water has a higher specific heat than air and it's a better conductor, so not only will it take longer to cool down a large canal than a small car, you'll have to or the car's temperature won't drop.)
8. Bruno's test tube baby. This is the stand that turns people into cubes, and then stacks the cubes into objects. In all of these stands that distort people's shapes -- like that Escher stand, or the one that deflates people like balloons, or Rohan's Heaven's Gate -- the distortion doesn't kill anyone, but they enter a state of suspended animation where normal processes like breathing don't apply. The exception is Sticky Fingers, for some reason zipping your head away from your lungs stops you from breathing. XD; the rule of thumb seems to be consciousness, if you are conscious it means blood should be flowing to deliver oxygen to the brain, and you're in trouble if it isn't.
On the subject of artificially created baby assassins (...WEIRDEST STAND ABILITY EVER), even though it was magically born via stand ability from a Bruno's blood smaple and a "host mother" who gave birth to it from the back of her head, it still has to be taught words. XD "This is a baseball bat, it's used for [bludgeoning people to death]"? Is that anything to teach a baby?! Also, on the stats page "Learning" is given as F, I think that's hardly fair considering it learned to talk, walk, and reason in under three hours.
Random observations:
1. What is this, a videogame gang? Collect lira to advance to the next level (of gang leadership)? Excuse me, are there any gangs that actually work this way?
2. Though he is little, he is but fierce (Narancia). *g* By the end of this part I'd even forgotten what a horrible pun Aerosmith is. All the other members of the gang, who are not Giorno, seem have the complete files on Bruno's posse; who knows why they thought their Stand abilities were a secret they had to keep from him. (Well, maybe it's only the assassin group that has the files.)
3. The Boss gives his orders via email so that there will be "no way to intercept" them. XD. Also, was that suicide really necessary?!
4. "People say 'Happiness must be carved out for yourself!' But we don't decide what happens in our lives! Facing hardships is common!" <--This is Araki's note on Bruno's background. Gotta say, I dig his brand of predestination.
5. Trish feels a psychic connection to the boss. This is how many mysterious parent/child bonds again?
***
I like the new tracking feature so much that I added it to the entry comment bar on my journal. *g* If you're a paid or permanent account user with flexible squares as your layout, here are the tutorials you can use to do this:
1. http://community.livejournal.com/s2flexisquares/420736.html?thread=3592064#t3592064, builds on
2. http://community.livejournal.com/s2flexisquares/2307.html, see
3. http://murklinstest.livejournal.com/17235.html for instructions on creating a custom theme layer.