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EP. REVIEW: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

For me, Part 3 is way more light-hearted than Part 4, because everything, aside from DIO's and Vanilla Ice fights, is a "big funny fight" where the protagonists got to joke around fighting Stands.

Ability

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words: Atom Heart Father is bound to Yoshihiro's soul, and in turn lets him bind himself to photographs. He can manipulate items that are in the depicted area, even if hidden from view (e.g. a knife inside a drawer), and prevent depicted people from leaving that area. It even prevents people from entering the area that is depicted; if someone tries to, he is teleported to the other side of the area. Even if Yoshihiro ends up being the only thing depicted, he can still extend portions of himself or his clothing out of the picture to move around. The major weakness of this Stand is that Yoshihiro is bound to the last photograph of him that was taken, meaning someone can save themselves from his power by photographing him with their own images excluded.

They should've taken a picture of Papa flying away. He'd still have the sky above as a limit, but he couldn't get outside the horizontal scope of the picture frame. Of course, planes would freak right out when they teleported across that airspace. Small price to pay.

But how convenient that Kira managed to find someone with exactly the same build as him, to the point that wife couldnt see the difference post-shower, heh. Wasn't it just the face that was replaced?

PenGirl wrote:

For me, Part 3 is way more light-hearted than Part 4, because everything, aside from DIO's and Vanilla Ice fights, is a "big funny fight" where the protagonists got to joke around fighting Stands.

I agree with that; for me, the series took a nosedive in part 3. When I call the current arc light-hearted or whimsical, I'm primarily thinking of the tone set by parts 1 and 2. In part, this is because the introduction of Stands in parts 3 & 4 as a plot device hasn't really worked for me; I find the distance it creates between the users and their fights makes them feel a lot less visceral, a bit like watching two people play a violent variant of chess instead've a tense, direct confrontation between a hero and irredeemable evil. Other contributing factors are the slice-of-life emphasis in part 4 and the increasing emphasis in both parts 3 and 4 on rotating through a new villain of the week with each episode. Both of those choices cause me to feel less engaged emotionally with the show, since it doesn't feel like each week's mini-plot really matters in the grand scheme of the show (because there no longer is much of a grand scheme, I guess).

I always found parts 1 and 2 over-the-top, but in the same spirit as Beowulf - a dark epic about a battle between titans, completely absurd but enjoyable exactly for that macabre, self-serious absurdity, if you were willing to buy into it - and I really liked that about them. Parts 3 and 4, by contrast, feel to me a lot more like a more violent retelling of Power Rangers.

Gina Szanboti wrote:

They should've taken a picture of Papa flying away. He'd still have the sky above as a limit, but he couldn't get outside the horizontal scope of the picture frame. Of course, planes would freak right out when they teleported across that airspace. Small price to pay.

Jotaro broke the camera after he took the second picture to cut crop himself and Josuke out. They had no way to take a picture of him flying away.

People think Part 4 is "light-hearted" because it happens on a town? I find it to be more terrifying than anything, because brings a sense of "false safety". In fact, Kira is almost a Seinen villain in a shounen series.

I think part 4 being confined to a small town relates to what I've argued in that it scales back the stakes (if we're always in Morioh, only Morioh ever really appears to be at risk, and the rest of the world may as well be fine), but I don't think it has much to do with my lack of interest in the protagonists' fights, the missing sense of danger and tension, etc. I think Morioh could feel very dark; it could even excel at bringing to life my fear for our heroes' lives. It just hasn't hit those notes tonally very well for me, largely because of the other factors I pointed to a few posts ago.

In a story, what matters more than the scale of the threat is the emotional stakes the protagonist has in the conflict. For instance, the fate of the world is at stake in Moonraker, whereas in Rear Window, the only thing at stake is the protagonist himself, and everyone else is safe. Yet Rear Window is near-universally considered the better movie because you care more about Jeff in Rear Window than about James Bond in Moonraker.

If you're not enjoying Part 4, I'll bet the reason behind it is something other than the scale.