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petroniaI'm at volume 20. *shakes fist at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
worldserpent for her copious free time XD* Sort of at the point where I can't resist hitting the Japanese internets up for crazy fanworks and spoilering myself horribly in the process. But Dioraemon was worth it
Anyway. Both the art style and the narrative structure shift once again; it's now almost Platonically shounen fighter manga. In fact I experienced a dip in interest during the "defeat these opponents to get them to join your party" rounds, but it picks up as the road trip heads into the exotic expanses of the Indian subcontinent -> Central Asia -> Arabia and Our Heroes develop chemistry as a team (a relative weakness of part 3 is that the characters pop up out of nowhere at first, compared to part 2 where all the major players have deep and close ties to the original Joestar family tragedy - you're given the requisite backstory when each first appears, but it takes a while to grasp their personalities). The basic pattern is travel west -> beat some people up -> travel west (seems somehow familiar ahaha). The verisimilitude in setting reminds me of the better stretches of Tintin, except with more freaking out over toilets. :P The Amazing Race meets Street Fighters? The group hijinks do carry a reality-TV entertainment value, ex. Kakyouin's cherry incident, Joseph vs. camel, burly men vs. dirty nappies, every scene involving Polnareff and a human of the female persuasion, etc. Not to mention all-time classics of manga villainy like "How did you know I was hiding in the mini-fridge?"
The fights/"stages" occur with linear regularity, never letting up, but they don't bore or tempt one to page through like shounen manga often does. Several reasons for this:
1) They don't drag. 2-3 chapters and it's onto the next. ...Though this does create situations where Our Heroes sustain serious if not debilitating damage in one episode and by the next it's "Jotaro, I can't believe you got that Pakistani tailor to make you an exact replica of the school uniform you destroyed!" "And it's 100% Kashmir wool too!"
2) The good guys don't win battles by brute force; nor for that matter do they win because their courage/hidden spiritual strength/will to survive/desire to protect their loved ones/insert shounen manga cliché is greater than that of their opponent. They win because... they come up with better tactics. This makes it a billion times more interesting because instead of tapping your fingers against the desk waiting for Our Hero to realise that ZOMG HE CAN DO IT AFTER ALL!!, you wait to see how he outthinks the opponent. Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) this involves improbabilities of the "Little did you realise that as you were punching me in the face I had slipped this doodad into your left ear!" variety but at least you don't get the tiresome sensation that you're mentally outpacing the mangaka's storytelling.
3) Quite early on Araki stopped making the encounters simple stand ability vs. stand ability (fun and offbeat as they are) and started employing horror tropes for greater resonance. Seriously, if you think about it they are all there, from Poe to Stephen King:snakes deadly bugs on a plane, the orangutan and the girl, the malevolent ghost ship, the demonic car, doppelgangers, monsters that grow explosively out of your own flesh, the town of the walking dead, "Hotel California", the monkey's paw, masked serial killers haunting shards of mirrors and dreams you can't wake up from... It's like Araki rented out the entire horror section of his local video store. He puts his own spin on each plot so it's never entirely predictable (though in the dream episode I totally expected Kakyouin to bust out with "Have none of you morons seen Nightmare on Elm Street?!" meta- Scary Movie style), but the combined effect is such that I feel jumpy after a late-night reading session. XD;;
worldserpent for her copious free time XD* Sort of at the point where I can't resist hitting the Japanese internets up for crazy fanworks and spoilering myself horribly in the process. Anyway. Both the art style and the narrative structure shift once again; it's now almost Platonically shounen fighter manga. In fact I experienced a dip in interest during the "defeat these opponents to get them to join your party" rounds, but it picks up as the road trip heads into the exotic expanses of the Indian subcontinent -> Central Asia -> Arabia and Our Heroes develop chemistry as a team (a relative weakness of part 3 is that the characters pop up out of nowhere at first, compared to part 2 where all the major players have deep and close ties to the original Joestar family tragedy - you're given the requisite backstory when each first appears, but it takes a while to grasp their personalities). The basic pattern is travel west -> beat some people up -> travel west (seems somehow familiar ahaha). The verisimilitude in setting reminds me of the better stretches of Tintin, except with more freaking out over toilets. :P The Amazing Race meets Street Fighters? The group hijinks do carry a reality-TV entertainment value, ex. Kakyouin's cherry incident, Joseph vs. camel, burly men vs. dirty nappies, every scene involving Polnareff and a human of the female persuasion, etc. Not to mention all-time classics of manga villainy like "How did you know I was hiding in the mini-fridge?"
The fights/"stages" occur with linear regularity, never letting up, but they don't bore or tempt one to page through like shounen manga often does. Several reasons for this:
1) They don't drag. 2-3 chapters and it's onto the next. ...Though this does create situations where Our Heroes sustain serious if not debilitating damage in one episode and by the next it's "Jotaro, I can't believe you got that Pakistani tailor to make you an exact replica of the school uniform you destroyed!" "And it's 100% Kashmir wool too!"
2) The good guys don't win battles by brute force; nor for that matter do they win because their courage/hidden spiritual strength/will to survive/desire to protect their loved ones/insert shounen manga cliché is greater than that of their opponent. They win because... they come up with better tactics. This makes it a billion times more interesting because instead of tapping your fingers against the desk waiting for Our Hero to realise that ZOMG HE CAN DO IT AFTER ALL!!, you wait to see how he outthinks the opponent. Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) this involves improbabilities of the "Little did you realise that as you were punching me in the face I had slipped this doodad into your left ear!" variety but at least you don't get the tiresome sensation that you're mentally outpacing the mangaka's storytelling.
3) Quite early on Araki stopped making the encounters simple stand ability vs. stand ability (fun and offbeat as they are) and started employing horror tropes for greater resonance. Seriously, if you think about it they are all there, from Poe to Stephen King:
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 03:24 pm (UTC)("This is so not me! Bathroom disasters are Polnareff's department!")
Didn't Remiel classify this as one of his series for hardcore degenerates? I actually have nebulous memories of running and screaming in the past, specifically from GioGio's outfit which I still find baffling. Dolly Parton wouldn't wear that thing, at least not before dinner.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 05:36 pm (UTC)GioGio? You're in part 5 now?
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 07:52 pm (UTC)I'm not, I'm on like volume 22, but I do look at pictures and things you know. XD (For instance I found an Oricon survey asking people what manga they'd like to see as a big-budget live-action Hollywood movie, and JoJo was the top answer from the men. I went o_O; for a while then I thought, well, it would just have to be like X-Men but with more eighties music. But the top answer overall was Dragonball, which I can't imagine no matter what. XD
Death Note placed really highly on the list - like second or third. But there are going to be movies, so.)
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 08:08 pm (UTC)Arc 2 might be a good movie without a lot of cutting. So would part 1, because it is short.
(The other arcs? No... Too long, too many characters.)