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Busy on all fronts
Coworker's mother is apparently in the hospital, she hasn't been in all week and we're gearing up for a release - during which time everyone would have 1 1/2 times their normal workload even if we weren't a body short. So. ^^;
SSBB: 5 stories vetted, 4 stories pending formatting/spellcheck/artwork issues, 2 stories not in, cover art in, graphic work still to go. Geebus, the contributor pool is turning into a hive mind. XD;; I guess y'all will see when the issue goes up.
Weekend: Sunday is Andrew's Greek Easter party, by long-standing tradition. Saturday I'll be making eggplant lasagna to go with that litre of cheap cerusuolo I picked up last week.
JoJoNotes (all the way up to volume 50!):
Kira Yoshikage -> ki-ra-ki-in -> Killer Queen
...Shaddup, I had to figure it out on my own okay.
I came across an interview fragment somewhere where Araki-sensei said he purposefully omitted the backstory of how and why Kira got to be so fucked up, because if he'd told it the reader might have felt sorry for Kira, so he left it on the level of nebulous hinting (it had something to do with his mom?). In JoJo it's permissible to despise villains, respect them as opponents, love to hate them, but not sympathise with them. But somehow you feel a bit sorry for Kira anyway. ^^;
I have this idea that Araki himself sympathizes with solipsistic aesthetes; Rohan obviously, but Kira can almost be said to be one. At one point I thought, he'd probably like the gothloli girl from Shimotsuma Monogatari! Then I realised that Josuke is the gothloli girl from Shimotsuma Monogatari (unless he's the furyou one). XD
***
I guess the Achtung Baby kid will not reappear. In current(?) continuity she'd be about twelve, and Araki does not do loli - at all. XD He does not have little girls in his manga. Nor is he into drawing huge boobies or upskirts (though I've noted a couple of panty shots - no, really). If anything, what he seems to like in a woman are legs-up-to-here. Like Mariah in part 3, Tomoko and Reimi and Yukako and Kira's not!wife all sport high hemlines that show off their long, shapely legs. Something about the way he draws women reminds me of Five Star Stories, actually.
(In general you find more little boy characters in shounen manga than little girl characters anyway, because - it's shounen manga. But I'm not sure this extrapolates to more scenes of naked little boys being attacked in the bath by psycho deviants, which has happened twice now counting baby!Polnareff. D: If the point is to teach the readership the difference between good touching and bad touching...)
***
Contrary to the usual narrative logic Josuke's get-rich-quick schemes work, though not without peripateia. And then his mom takes his money away, and he goes and shakes down people like Rohan or his dad for more. (I suspect that if Josuke had lived with Joseph all his life, he probably would have spent his childhood trying to bilk Joseph of pocket change, and Joseph would've been like SPROG PLS THIS IS HOW IT'S DONE, and they'd end up as the strongest two-man con team in NYC. But they would only activate their powers for great justice!) The Rohan ep made for total awkwaaaaardness because 1) Josuke was listening to chibi devil!Josuke sitting on his left shoulder but 2) Rohan is the kind of grownup who'd get serious about beating a kindergartener at connect-five. ...Also his house burnt down. *at a loss for words* And poor Mikitaka. XD
Speaking of fallout from Josuke vs Rohan I should mention that I was amused by ricerboy stand user. XD Part 4 is all about these small-town characters, really.
***
The tangible form of Heaven's Door is... the main character of Rohan's manga (it's like at first he needed to draw a picture and show it to people, whether on paper or sketched in the air, but at he improves he can "manifest" the character without having to draw it). So if other mangaka had stands, would they look like characters from their series? XD Something like--
Stand: Mokona
User: CLAMP
Destructive power: E
Speed: C
Effective distance: A (automatic type?)
Stamina: A
Precision: B
Growth potential: C
Special abilities: transmission of messages and objects between dimensions, sub-universe creation, vocal mimicry, alcohol consumption
...Maybe Mokona only belongs to Mokona, and the blowfish is Aikawa Nanase's. Or something.
***
You know, in normal manga when someone says hi by handing you a gouged-out eyeball and licking you on the cheek, it means he's evil.
(Eyeball...
...)
MC: And that's it for the panel. Any questions? Yes, in the back row.
AUDIENCE: Sensei, how come you're always threatening to put one or both of a major character's eyes out in a fight but you never actually go through with it?
ARAKI: ...
ARAKI: ...
ARAKI: Mokona, you know you're banned from these events!
MOKONA: What, I'm more than 100 feet away! D:
***
I thought Josuke was fascinating in an analogous way to Giorno - a manga character who doesn't resemble anyone other than his parents. XD
Giorno, Brando side:
* blondness
* ambition [1]
*shoujo sparklies
* ability to commit murder and face the world like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth
* "MUDAMUDAMUDAMUDA" [2]
Giorno, Joestar side:
* ability to leave the house during the day [3]
* moral faculties
* thinking so lateral it's nearly vertical
* penchant for heavily modded school uniforms [4]
Giorno, utter mysteries (mother's side?):
* kind of short
* that wacky thing he can do with his ear
[1] Joestars are aimless and unruly teenagers, even Jonathan. They figure out what they want to do in life around age 20 or so, and proceed to become very good at it (since they're like, geniuses and all). The precocious self-possession and certain sense of destiny (as a CRIMINAL MASTERMIND) by junior high is a Brando trait. >_>
[2] It makes total sense by Araki logic (which is not your normal earth logic) that something like this would be heritable.
[3] I wonder if he sunburns easily? Maybe it's totally killing his complexion to be hanging out on the deck of a private mafia-owned yacht off the coast of Capri, but he has a dream etc.
[4] No, seriously, that object is his boarding school uniform. Check out what the other kids are wearing when you see him going back to his room with the lighter. What is wrong with schools in JoJoverse?
***
One practically has to read part 5 as a different series altogether. Gold Experience's abilities are rather baroque in their statement, like Giorno himself, and not as Occam's Razor-ish as Josuke's or Jotaro's.
1) Hitting Gold Experience directly reverses the blow, so one can't, one has to attack Giorno instead. However unlike most of the fights in which the characters have to go searching for the user of an unassailable stand, Giorno is right there. XD;
2) Gold Experience injects life force into any object it hits. That is to say, breaking down a door with GoldExp has the side effect of strewing the surroundings with small frogs and Pomona's choicest blooms. Giorno is able to make the animals obey him to an extent, like biting on command or flying in a given direction. He can also control the growth rate of plants. The animals themselves will sometimes retain characteristics of their former "existence" as pipes, shoes, body parts etc. Details of scope (such as whether or not GoldExp needs to be making physical contact) seem to vary according to Araki's whim. ~_~
Really I think he came up with this as an excuse to draw GioGio with swirls of pink flower petals.
3) Gold Experience also injects life force into any human it hits. This... causes a head rush, which effect is perhaps more hilarious than useful (it's not like you'd normally get a chance to recover between blows), but who knows. XD
Oh, and I'm reading the second Yukikaze novel (it came in the last shipment). 50 pages in, and one can tell the focus of the argument has shifted, but Rei is still catatonic so nothing much concrete is happening. ^^;
SSBB: 5 stories vetted, 4 stories pending formatting/spellcheck/artwork issues, 2 stories not in, cover art in, graphic work still to go. Geebus, the contributor pool is turning into a hive mind. XD;; I guess y'all will see when the issue goes up.
Weekend: Sunday is Andrew's Greek Easter party, by long-standing tradition. Saturday I'll be making eggplant lasagna to go with that litre of cheap cerusuolo I picked up last week.
JoJoNotes (all the way up to volume 50!):
Kira Yoshikage -> ki-ra-ki-in -> Killer Queen
...Shaddup, I had to figure it out on my own okay.
I came across an interview fragment somewhere where Araki-sensei said he purposefully omitted the backstory of how and why Kira got to be so fucked up, because if he'd told it the reader might have felt sorry for Kira, so he left it on the level of nebulous hinting (it had something to do with his mom?). In JoJo it's permissible to despise villains, respect them as opponents, love to hate them, but not sympathise with them. But somehow you feel a bit sorry for Kira anyway. ^^;
I have this idea that Araki himself sympathizes with solipsistic aesthetes; Rohan obviously, but Kira can almost be said to be one. At one point I thought, he'd probably like the gothloli girl from Shimotsuma Monogatari! Then I realised that Josuke is the gothloli girl from Shimotsuma Monogatari (unless he's the furyou one). XD
***
I guess the Achtung Baby kid will not reappear. In current(?) continuity she'd be about twelve, and Araki does not do loli - at all. XD He does not have little girls in his manga. Nor is he into drawing huge boobies or upskirts (though I've noted a couple of panty shots - no, really). If anything, what he seems to like in a woman are legs-up-to-here. Like Mariah in part 3, Tomoko and Reimi and Yukako and Kira's not!wife all sport high hemlines that show off their long, shapely legs. Something about the way he draws women reminds me of Five Star Stories, actually.
(In general you find more little boy characters in shounen manga than little girl characters anyway, because - it's shounen manga. But I'm not sure this extrapolates to more scenes of naked little boys being attacked in the bath by psycho deviants, which has happened twice now counting baby!Polnareff. D: If the point is to teach the readership the difference between good touching and bad touching...)
***
Contrary to the usual narrative logic Josuke's get-rich-quick schemes work, though not without peripateia. And then his mom takes his money away, and he goes and shakes down people like Rohan or his dad for more. (I suspect that if Josuke had lived with Joseph all his life, he probably would have spent his childhood trying to bilk Joseph of pocket change, and Joseph would've been like SPROG PLS THIS IS HOW IT'S DONE, and they'd end up as the strongest two-man con team in NYC. But they would only activate their powers for great justice!) The Rohan ep made for total awkwaaaaardness because 1) Josuke was listening to chibi devil!Josuke sitting on his left shoulder but 2) Rohan is the kind of grownup who'd get serious about beating a kindergartener at connect-five. ...Also his house burnt down. *at a loss for words* And poor Mikitaka. XD
Speaking of fallout from Josuke vs Rohan I should mention that I was amused by ricerboy stand user. XD Part 4 is all about these small-town characters, really.
***
The tangible form of Heaven's Door is... the main character of Rohan's manga (it's like at first he needed to draw a picture and show it to people, whether on paper or sketched in the air, but at he improves he can "manifest" the character without having to draw it). So if other mangaka had stands, would they look like characters from their series? XD Something like--
Stand: Mokona
User: CLAMP
Destructive power: E
Speed: C
Effective distance: A (automatic type?)
Stamina: A
Precision: B
Growth potential: C
Special abilities: transmission of messages and objects between dimensions, sub-universe creation, vocal mimicry, alcohol consumption
...Maybe Mokona only belongs to Mokona, and the blowfish is Aikawa Nanase's. Or something.
***
You know, in normal manga when someone says hi by handing you a gouged-out eyeball and licking you on the cheek, it means he's evil.
(Eyeball...
...)
MC: And that's it for the panel. Any questions? Yes, in the back row.
AUDIENCE: Sensei, how come you're always threatening to put one or both of a major character's eyes out in a fight but you never actually go through with it?
ARAKI: ...
ARAKI: ...
ARAKI: Mokona, you know you're banned from these events!
MOKONA: What, I'm more than 100 feet away! D:
***
I thought Josuke was fascinating in an analogous way to Giorno - a manga character who doesn't resemble anyone other than his parents. XD
Giorno, Brando side:
* blondness
* ambition [1]
*
* ability to commit murder and face the world like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth
* "MUDAMUDAMUDAMUDA" [2]
Giorno, Joestar side:
* ability to leave the house during the day [3]
* moral faculties
* thinking so lateral it's nearly vertical
* penchant for heavily modded school uniforms [4]
Giorno, utter mysteries (mother's side?):
* kind of short
* that wacky thing he can do with his ear
[1] Joestars are aimless and unruly teenagers, even Jonathan. They figure out what they want to do in life around age 20 or so, and proceed to become very good at it (since they're like, geniuses and all). The precocious self-possession and certain sense of destiny (as a CRIMINAL MASTERMIND) by junior high is a Brando trait. >_>
[2] It makes total sense by Araki logic (which is not your normal earth logic) that something like this would be heritable.
[3] I wonder if he sunburns easily? Maybe it's totally killing his complexion to be hanging out on the deck of a private mafia-owned yacht off the coast of Capri, but he has a dream etc.
[4] No, seriously, that object is his boarding school uniform. Check out what the other kids are wearing when you see him going back to his room with the lighter. What is wrong with schools in JoJoverse?
***
One practically has to read part 5 as a different series altogether. Gold Experience's abilities are rather baroque in their statement, like Giorno himself, and not as Occam's Razor-ish as Josuke's or Jotaro's.
1) Hitting Gold Experience directly reverses the blow, so one can't, one has to attack Giorno instead. However unlike most of the fights in which the characters have to go searching for the user of an unassailable stand, Giorno is right there. XD;
2) Gold Experience injects life force into any object it hits. That is to say, breaking down a door with GoldExp has the side effect of strewing the surroundings with small frogs and Pomona's choicest blooms. Giorno is able to make the animals obey him to an extent, like biting on command or flying in a given direction. He can also control the growth rate of plants. The animals themselves will sometimes retain characteristics of their former "existence" as pipes, shoes, body parts etc. Details of scope (such as whether or not GoldExp needs to be making physical contact) seem to vary according to Araki's whim. ~_~
Really I think he came up with this as an excuse to draw GioGio with swirls of pink flower petals.
3) Gold Experience also injects life force into any human it hits. This... causes a head rush, which effect is perhaps more hilarious than useful (it's not like you'd normally get a chance to recover between blows), but who knows. XD
Oh, and I'm reading the second Yukikaze novel (it came in the last shipment). 50 pages in, and one can tell the focus of the argument has shifted, but Rei is still catatonic so nothing much concrete is happening. ^^;
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JouShizuka Joestar (the invisible baby) does not return. Araki was asked about her in an interview and his basic response was, "...Who? ....Oh HER, wow, you are a real Jojo maniac to remember HER! Um... I planned for her to not reappear. Yes. It was all planned. Didn't forget she existed or anything like that."Similarly, when they asked him, "So WHO was that guy who helped Josuke and had the SAME HAIR and LOOKED JUST LIKE HIM? Was that Josuke helping himself back in time somehow?" and Araki was like, "Uh... NO OF COURSE NOT, DO NOT BE RIDICULOUS, THAT WAS JUST A RANDOM INJURED-LOOKING SCHOOLBOY OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, WHO RANDOMLY HELPED THEM AND RANDOMLY LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE JOSUKE, HAD HIS SCHOOL UNIFORM AND HAIR, AND LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE HIM" and the interviewer was like "oh, because I thought maybe--" and Araki was like "NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING, LET'S MOVE ON, FANBOY"
As for Giogio, he is TOTALLY his fathers' son. I think we can postulate that the ear thing is from the Joestar side, since they're not just aimless... they're also all uniformly retarded as teenagers. XD Stupid Joestar Tricks! And, of course, his penchant for SEIGI. But yes, his ability to murder people and think about what he's gonna have for dinner right after, at the age of 15, that's the Brando sperm at work. Oh and his "gold experience" that turned his hair blond. XD (Postulating that this happened because of puberty, since daddy's been dead for years?)
Agreed re: bizarre lateral thinking nonsense. XD
And yeah, why is he such a short little fucker? He's half 195cm British man! We figure maybe he's not finished growing (well, he is only 15). Josuke is short too though. (From a Jojo POV. He's still hella tall for a Japanese boy. XD) Maybe Araki stopped liking tall people?? But no, lots of OTHER hot guys are still tall... saaa. Maybe he thought they were too hard for his Japanese readers to identify with. XD
As far as I can tell Gold E does have to touch things for its abilities to work, though after that it seems Giogio has some basic control over the resulting tree/snake/whatever for quite a distance.
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I was kind of disappointed that we didn't get to see an excerpt of Pink Dark Boy (on the other hand, maybe it would have been too scary or too meta-ish).
Isn't it great how we go from the small-town hijinks of Part 4 to the baroque and dark mafia saga of part 5? Such a change in tone....
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I will leave you to guess what Jolyne's Stone Free yells when it's beating the shit out of things. orz
Really I think he came up with this as an excuse to draw GioGio with swirls of pink flower petals.
Ka is in denial of the fact that GioGio apparently ejaculates sakura petals. (http://jojo.highervoltage.net/part5/vol_54_files/jojo054-01.jpg)
Yeah, you can really smell the Brando in GioGio just by his ruthlessness. Joseph and Jonathan and even Jotaro could kill a man, but they would sort of reserve that for super-villains, and they just really don't have any sort of bloodlust. But Giogio, well, he takes after his
mommyother daddy! :DAraki seems to be becoming more and more fascinated with antiheroes, in a way (although his heroes are still too inherently noble to ever truly fit the mold of the antihero, isn't that so?) But look at this:
1) Jonathan: uber-noble, upright, titled noble
2) Joseph: still pretty noble, but sort of a bad boy who now punches people if they annoy him
3) Jotaro: ...see above
4) Josuke: a yankee? XD (not really)
5) Giogio: wants to become the don of dons...FOR JUSTICE, THOUGH, RLY
6) "Hmmmm, how can I make my main characters be worse than the mafioso, but still not evil? I know! EVERYONE CAN BE A PRISON INMATE! :D" (Only Jolyne is wrongfully convicted, and that's really just wrongfully convicted of MURDER; she still has GTA and some other minor offenses on her rap sheet)
It's interesting to trace that progression.
Also, they say in the manga a couple times that GioGio's hair only turned gold in the past few months (plus you can see his junior high photos as Haruno Shiobana with black hair and eyes....actually, ever notice that Mista is just about the only character he's ever drawn with matte black eyes? Hmmm)
If you're enjoying arc 5 and have a PS2, you sort of owe it to yourself to get the GioGio PS2 fighting game. XD
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