This Week in Anime
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind is Surprisingly Hardcore
by Nicholas Dupree & Michelle Liu,
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind is not for the squeamish, as a story about gang warfare where the good guys and the bad guys are just a whisker's width apart. This week, Nick and Micchy pick their favorite of these bad boys and discuss what makes Part 5 stand out so violently.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead. Not Safe For Work warning for language.
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Nick
Micchy, it's taken weeks of extensive research, peer review, and intense internal debate, but we've finally found it.
Micchy, it's taken weeks of extensive research, peer review, and intense internal debate, but we've finally found it.
We've found the worst fashion choice in all of Jojo's. Congratulations, Fugo.
Micchy
I have no idea what you're talking about. Fugo's swiss cheese suit is the absolute pinnacle of high fashion.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Fugo's swiss cheese suit is the absolute pinnacle of high fashion.
It was a fierce competition, but there's just nothing that can compare to low-riding butt-window slacks. He literally could not look worse if he was wearing a used garbage bag.
On the contrary, I find his commitment to revealing clothing perfectly admirable.
Okay we could go on about Fugo and his awful clothing choices, but Jojo's isn't entirely about fashion (yet).
Seriously though, there's so many Looks this season.
Yeah, for fashion we've always got the Gucci spinoffs. Nah, we're here to talk about our mafia boys and their quest to teach kids about the dangers of narcotics.
Oh, and their struggles with doors.
It's been many weeks since we checked in on Golden Wind and I gotta say, I was not expecting to like this nearly as much as I do. I've always been sort of a casual Jojo's fan. There were parts of Battle Tendency and DiU that I really liked, but it's never been appointment viewing for me. But something about Part 5 has just clicked with me, y'know?
Maybe it's the strong sense of camaraderie and compassion I can sense within Bucciarati's crew.
Look, if you've never had a bro perform impromptu surgery on you with a stapler, you don't know the meaning of trust. Anyway, Golden Wind has been all about the other members of Passione recently, and what led them to join the mafia in the first place.
Giorno's taken his first step toward overthrowing the mob, worming his way into the organization and killing Polpo in the process (thank you jesus). And he's gotten quite the warm welcome from his new teammates!
I'm not gonna lie, Giorno is one of my least favorite members of the part 5 cast, mostly because the other guys are such fun assholes by comparison. Abbacchio, for instance, has a history as a police officer disillusioned with the criminal justice system, and he primarily expresses his displeasure via insulting people he doesn't like.
And by making them drink his piss.
please don't remind me of the piss drinking i do Not want to think about that
I mean at least Giorno didn't actually drink it.
Then again, we never see the jellyfish spit it out or anything...
But that just means his tooth is now filled with piss! That's gross!!
Maybe Giorno's got a golden tooth now iykwim.
Please, please no, stop this madness.
So Abbachio's the first member of Passione besides Bucciarati that we get to know, and he's got a pretty interesting backstory. One of the struggles of making your protagonist group merciless criminals is endearing them to the audience, and so far Part 5's done a solid job with that.
Abbachio used to believe in the system and tried to live up to it, only to find himself ground down by the realities of corrupt justice and spit out on the street.
A common thread tying these guys together is distrust of traditional institutions. For Abbachio and Mista, it's the criminal justice system; for Narancia and Giorno, it's the nuclear family.
It's a solid theme to tie all these guys together into a shady organization, in a way that allows them to be likable while also being ruthless.
I mean, that decapitated head is alive and hanging by its eyelid from a fishing hook.
Let it never be said that these boys are nice people. Not even the lovable shit-for-brains Narancia, he would absolutely cut a bitch if need be.
I mean, Mista seems pretty nice. Nobody else in this show bothers to feed their stands, which is kinda fucked up if you think about it.
They've got principles, and they don't go out of their way to pick on the powerless, but never do these guys play nice with people they don't trust, and that's largely what sets the cast of part 5 apart from previous Jojo ensembles.
Well that and one of them has a stand that's just a fucking gun Sex Pistol.
Ahem, I think you mean Six Bullets. God, the localized names never cease to slay me.
Narancia's is my favorite because it just wipes out all innuendo and makes his Stand sound like a nickname for his dick. Li'l Bomber indeed.
The kid would absolutely call his junk that, where is the lie. Now what's interesting about part 5 is that while previous Jojo conflicts were pretty straightforward (Josuke vs a serial killer; Jonathan and Jōtarō vs an immortal vampire), part 5 is about internal power struggles within a single criminal organization. There's no easy good guy vs. bad guy; our heroes are only the 'good guys' by a matter of degree.
Heck, our heroes are basically at war now with a different group who are trying to do the exact thing Giorno wants to do. The only difference is that they're willing to kill innocent people to do it. It's a neat shade of gray that makes the conflict much more ripe for new themes.
Granted this is Jojo's, so it hasn't spent much time mulling over morals yet, but it's still a nice element to have between all the murder and swearing.
Part 5 does eventually start to go off the rails, which might be why it's something of a black sheep to western fans, but these early arcs are definitely more thoughtful and nuanced compared to parts 1 or 2, for example. The other awesome thing about having a cast full of jerks is that they hold back on the violence even less than their predecessors. Part of JJBA's appeal has always been the hyperviolence, but part 5 ramps it up to pretty absurd degrees.
And it's not afraid to get uh, creative. You think Araki wrote this fight after he got a Zoo Book about spiders?
Most definitely. If you can believe it, that spider shit isn't even close to the weirdest violence in this part. The stand powers get so bananas.
Well I'm excited, because right now I'm ready to declare Narancia's fight the best confrontation in Jojo's so far.
Most of Narancia's introductory fight is real classic Jojo's. You think the protagonist is in dire straits, but then he reveals that some innocuous thing he did earlier was actually the key to his victory. The best Jojo's fights are all like this; just as you think they've lost, the hero goes "actually, you've walked straight into my trap". Except Narancia's not nearly smart enough to lay a trap more sophisticated than "burn down the whole fucking city".
It also features ridiculous brutality from fighting a spider inside a bottle to air bombing a rat colony to whatever you even call this:
Look, I don't even know what the hell kinda laws of physics these fights work on, but it's cool so I don't care. I'm mostly impressed that well over a hundred episodes in, Jojo's still has ways to completely blindside us with weird nonsense.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that I really like Narancia already. Give me a boy voiced by Daiki Yamashita and I'll adopt him on instinct, but he's also got a genuinely affecting motivation for why he's so devoted to his teammates.
He's a snot-nosed kid who's dumb as a brick, but he recognizes kindness when he sees it and respects Bucciarati for helping him out of sincere compassion. So now he's willing to do anything to be by his side.
Also he gets plenty of food, that helps.
Narancia is trying his best, but sometimes his best involves getting stabbed in the face by the girl he's supposed to bodyguard.
Maybe keep him away from knives. For his own sake.
And while we're at it, can we skip Fugo's intro and have the next mini-arc just be about Trish? Pretty please?
Trish will get her time in the spotlight, don't worry. You'll just have to suffer through Fugo's sponge pants in the meantime.
Now it's been a while since I read part 5, so I'm hazy on the details, but what's coming up with the hitman team is gonna be sick, violent, and violently sick. I'm kinda itching in anticipation.
You might think it hard to top sending people pieces of their friends' corpses in separate blocks of formalin, but it's gonna get so much grosser and I can't wait.
So long as it's executed as well as this first cour, I am 100% on board. Funnel it into my eyeballs right now.
I hope we get so many more shots of Fugo's ass-windows.
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