More manga
Apr. 27th, 2006 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaI'm not quite halfway through JoJo part 5. Up to this point it's a chronologically tight storyline consisting of traveling -> battling assassins -> traveling, like part 3 but with an even flimsier putative justification (unless the boss is using them as bait to draw out said assassins). Araki begins to recapitulate the nineties in music; he's more into hip-hop than alternative rock, at any moment now I'm expecting it to turn into Def Jam Vendetta. Otherwise the character designs are so outré as to be largely timeless, the only way you can tell this was written in the mid-late 90's is that the cellphones are huge. XD
Funnily enough this is easy to imagine as a live-action film. It would really have to be directed by Miike Takeshi, though: the boys are bracingly nasty even when they're on the Path of Justice (Narancia has a twitchy knife hand, Fugo's idea of first aid is a staple gun and masking tape, Abbacchio... actually I saw this fanart in which Mista was like, "O we do that to all the newbies! It's just a harmless little hazing ritual, usually Bruno does the honours?").
For some reason I found it easier to express my opinion in the form of character blurbs:
Bruno
Outfit: pantsuit last seen on Heidi Fleiss (or was it Lil' Kim?). I dig the peekaboo lace but black tadpoles on white background are a bit eye-swimmy.
Hair: Touya Akira with barrettes. And cross-weave. Bruno has the dubious honour of being the first boy in JoJo everyone mistakes for a girl. But at least it sets his cheekbones off dramatically.
Personality: sane, responsible, and a beacon of reason. Also, mom.
Note: licked GioGio the first time he met him, but have mutually agreed not to speak of this again.
Abbacchio
Outfit: someone is making him do Advent Children cosplay.
Hair: someone is making him do Advent Children cosplay.
Personality: someone is making him do Advent Children cosplay and he hates the world for it, so y'all can go fuck yourselves.
Note: people will mention "tea parties" in connection with Abbacchio [1] - this is not an indicator of tweeness.
Mista
Outfit: out of the five, the one you can best imagine on a real boy (tight cropped sweater, tiger-print pants, combat boots), although it would have to be d'n'b night at a gay club or something. [2]
Hair: does not apply.
Personality: Happy go lucky, superstitious, not a long-term planner. Medium dumb.
Note: Peter Pan as pwnz0red by six Tinkerbells.
Narancia
Outfit: like something Tsukiono Omi would toss on for a casual night out. Leather strips are involved.
Hair: Normal mid-length anime boy hair. Bandanna.
Personality: dumb but cute. Not so much badly raised as not raised at all. Twitchily violent.
Fugo
Outfit: I think Celine Dion was mocked for wearing this to the Oscars. Alternately, a normal suit that won a pyrrhic victory over a paper hole puncher.
Hair: blond, spiky, sideways part.
Personality: supposedly genius smart, but with severe anger management issues. Twitchily violent.
Giorno
Outfit: Rococo meets Japanese schoolboy meets Prince, plus ladybugs. Has to be seen to be believed.
Hair: blond, curly, sort of Marie Antoinette with bagels. Has to be seen to be believed.
Personality: one of those. You know, the Griffiths and Reinhard von Lohengramms of the world. More precisely, each world can only do with one, that's how many places there are at the top.
Trish
Outfit: revealing. Relatively okay, even fashionable, because she's a girl. >___>
Hair: flip, v. eighties, so much so it's in again.
Personality: cool, tends to treat the boys as daddy's employees which they are, but (unlike basically every other anime/manga female in comparable circumstances) not dumb. As in, does not contravene orders and run away, does not insist she can protect herself better than half a dozen trained operatives (though she knows basic self-defense), does not attempt meaningless self-sacrifice, and when told to duck, ducks. [3]
[1] Alternately, "Giorno's Golden Experience".
[2] That's discounting his hat. One day I will make a poll with pictures and ask people to vote the top three best and worst hats of JoJo, but today is not that day... In flashback Mista's hat is an ordinary b-boy tuque, so it's not inconceivable that it evolved its present shape like a tamagochi (or, indeed, like a stand), out of necessity, because he keeps bullets in it for hands-free reloading. The arrow acts as guide. On a practical level this is cool but it looks really dumb - I mean I love Mista but. XD;; The first time he did it I could not stop laughing. Some years ago I caught a couple of episodes of this fantasy anime at a university club showing; the show being utterly mediocre, all I remember about it is that the gunslinger heroine kept bullets in her cleavage and was able to reload using BOOBIE BOUNCE. If Mista were a girl, that would totally be her signature move.
I would oekaki that but I don't think I'd pull it off.
[3] Note that Araki sez he can't write women. Possibly he means "can't write women as the alien species men think they are, therefore resorts to writing them as actual people".
***
Sticky Fingers is a lot more powerful than it seems, but that's because the description is wrong. XD It doesn't create "zippers", it creates "localized warp spaces that behave according to topological rules most easily conceptualized through the visual metaphor of zippers in fabric". <--(BY Fugo, after which he is stared at blankly)
Thinking about it, even if you run a zipper down a brick wall, you wouldn't be able to get through the opening, because the edges have no give. So you also have to make changes to the area surrounding the zipper. It's evident from the visuals of the manga that Sticky Fingers doesn't so much distort the matter constituting the wall itself (as Crazy Diamond might do) as it distorts the "grid" within which the wall exists - Euclidean space, in other words. Hence the trippy Escher-esque effect. XD I mean, doesn't it just sound more impressive to say Bruno's stand power is creating dimensional wormholes? Not to mention it sidesteps the question, what sort of person must he be way deep down for his innate superpower to be "zipping/unzipping things" (when I mentioned this to Erin she said, "He must have been popular in high school.").
(The proof is that Sticky Fingers can zip things into other things without squishing either container or contents. Basically, it's like poking a piece of plastic cling film with your finger until it bulges, then pinching off the top to create a "pocket" - the cling film being 3-space. Thus Polpo's jewels are not really "in" the urinal in a conventional sense, because topologically speaking the inside of your pockets are on the outside of your coat.
Of course, topologically speaking a coffee mug is a donut.)
As well as the sheet-like warping of surrounding space, the "zipper" expresses the idea of set-connectedness. XD If the edges are joined and Bruno turns Sticky Fingers off, the hole disappears by itself, even if the object is unwound like an apple peel. If the edges aren't joined, the object remains in two pieces. This is intuitively obvious because one imagines Bruno "zipping the hole closed", but he doesn't ever actually zip the hole closed by pulling on the zipper tab (and more importantly, no one else can pull on the tab and close the hole either). It just makes it that much easier to conceptualize.
Araki has said stands themselves are essentially extended visual metaphors, because you can't really draw the cause-and-effect of psychokinesis. Like, why would Silver Chariot need to drop its armour in order to get around faster? It's not like it technically weighs anything. But this expresses that whatever mental energy Polnareff was expending on defense+ has been switched to speed+.
Eh, that's as much as I can manage tonight I think. XD
EDIT -- Having read through to the end of 56, I have to say, the easiest way of conceptualizing King Crimson's power is to think of it as Sticky Fingers along the fourth dimensional axis. :0 If you blink and lose several seconds, it's a "hole"; if you meet yourself coming and going, it's a "pocket". It's not the same as The World/Star Platinum, which is more like... moving asymptotically close to light speed with total disregard for relativity. But the day I have to worry about relativity w/r/t JoJo...
Also: Bruno. WHAT. *flaps hands helplessly*
Funnily enough this is easy to imagine as a live-action film. It would really have to be directed by Miike Takeshi, though: the boys are bracingly nasty even when they're on the Path of Justice (Narancia has a twitchy knife hand, Fugo's idea of first aid is a staple gun and masking tape, Abbacchio... actually I saw this fanart in which Mista was like, "O we do that to all the newbies! It's just a harmless little hazing ritual, usually Bruno does the honours?").
For some reason I found it easier to express my opinion in the form of character blurbs:
Bruno
Outfit: pantsuit last seen on Heidi Fleiss (or was it Lil' Kim?). I dig the peekaboo lace but black tadpoles on white background are a bit eye-swimmy.
Hair: Touya Akira with barrettes. And cross-weave. Bruno has the dubious honour of being the first boy in JoJo everyone mistakes for a girl. But at least it sets his cheekbones off dramatically.
Personality: sane, responsible, and a beacon of reason. Also, mom.
Note: licked GioGio the first time he met him, but have mutually agreed not to speak of this again.
Abbacchio
Outfit: someone is making him do Advent Children cosplay.
Hair: someone is making him do Advent Children cosplay.
Personality: someone is making him do Advent Children cosplay and he hates the world for it, so y'all can go fuck yourselves.
Note: people will mention "tea parties" in connection with Abbacchio [1] - this is not an indicator of tweeness.
Mista
Outfit: out of the five, the one you can best imagine on a real boy (tight cropped sweater, tiger-print pants, combat boots), although it would have to be d'n'b night at a gay club or something. [2]
Hair: does not apply.
Personality: Happy go lucky, superstitious, not a long-term planner. Medium dumb.
Note: Peter Pan as pwnz0red by six Tinkerbells.
Narancia
Outfit: like something Tsukiono Omi would toss on for a casual night out. Leather strips are involved.
Hair: Normal mid-length anime boy hair. Bandanna.
Personality: dumb but cute. Not so much badly raised as not raised at all. Twitchily violent.
Fugo
Outfit: I think Celine Dion was mocked for wearing this to the Oscars. Alternately, a normal suit that won a pyrrhic victory over a paper hole puncher.
Hair: blond, spiky, sideways part.
Personality: supposedly genius smart, but with severe anger management issues. Twitchily violent.
Giorno
Outfit: Rococo meets Japanese schoolboy meets Prince, plus ladybugs. Has to be seen to be believed.
Hair: blond, curly, sort of Marie Antoinette with bagels. Has to be seen to be believed.
Personality: one of those. You know, the Griffiths and Reinhard von Lohengramms of the world. More precisely, each world can only do with one, that's how many places there are at the top.
Trish
Outfit: revealing. Relatively okay, even fashionable, because she's a girl. >___>
Hair: flip, v. eighties, so much so it's in again.
Personality: cool, tends to treat the boys as daddy's employees which they are, but (unlike basically every other anime/manga female in comparable circumstances) not dumb. As in, does not contravene orders and run away, does not insist she can protect herself better than half a dozen trained operatives (though she knows basic self-defense), does not attempt meaningless self-sacrifice, and when told to duck, ducks. [3]
[1] Alternately, "Giorno's Golden Experience".
[2] That's discounting his hat. One day I will make a poll with pictures and ask people to vote the top three best and worst hats of JoJo, but today is not that day... In flashback Mista's hat is an ordinary b-boy tuque, so it's not inconceivable that it evolved its present shape like a tamagochi (or, indeed, like a stand), out of necessity, because he keeps bullets in it for hands-free reloading. The arrow acts as guide. On a practical level this is cool but it looks really dumb - I mean I love Mista but. XD;; The first time he did it I could not stop laughing. Some years ago I caught a couple of episodes of this fantasy anime at a university club showing; the show being utterly mediocre, all I remember about it is that the gunslinger heroine kept bullets in her cleavage and was able to reload using BOOBIE BOUNCE. If Mista were a girl, that would totally be her signature move.
I would oekaki that but I don't think I'd pull it off.
[3] Note that Araki sez he can't write women. Possibly he means "can't write women as the alien species men think they are, therefore resorts to writing them as actual people".
***
Sticky Fingers is a lot more powerful than it seems, but that's because the description is wrong. XD It doesn't create "zippers", it creates "localized warp spaces that behave according to topological rules most easily conceptualized through the visual metaphor of zippers in fabric". <--(BY Fugo, after which he is stared at blankly)
Thinking about it, even if you run a zipper down a brick wall, you wouldn't be able to get through the opening, because the edges have no give. So you also have to make changes to the area surrounding the zipper. It's evident from the visuals of the manga that Sticky Fingers doesn't so much distort the matter constituting the wall itself (as Crazy Diamond might do) as it distorts the "grid" within which the wall exists - Euclidean space, in other words. Hence the trippy Escher-esque effect. XD I mean, doesn't it just sound more impressive to say Bruno's stand power is creating dimensional wormholes? Not to mention it sidesteps the question, what sort of person must he be way deep down for his innate superpower to be "zipping/unzipping things" (when I mentioned this to Erin she said, "He must have been popular in high school.").
(The proof is that Sticky Fingers can zip things into other things without squishing either container or contents. Basically, it's like poking a piece of plastic cling film with your finger until it bulges, then pinching off the top to create a "pocket" - the cling film being 3-space. Thus Polpo's jewels are not really "in" the urinal in a conventional sense, because topologically speaking the inside of your pockets are on the outside of your coat.
Of course, topologically speaking a coffee mug is a donut.)
As well as the sheet-like warping of surrounding space, the "zipper" expresses the idea of set-connectedness. XD If the edges are joined and Bruno turns Sticky Fingers off, the hole disappears by itself, even if the object is unwound like an apple peel. If the edges aren't joined, the object remains in two pieces. This is intuitively obvious because one imagines Bruno "zipping the hole closed", but he doesn't ever actually zip the hole closed by pulling on the zipper tab (and more importantly, no one else can pull on the tab and close the hole either). It just makes it that much easier to conceptualize.
Araki has said stands themselves are essentially extended visual metaphors, because you can't really draw the cause-and-effect of psychokinesis. Like, why would Silver Chariot need to drop its armour in order to get around faster? It's not like it technically weighs anything. But this expresses that whatever mental energy Polnareff was expending on defense+ has been switched to speed+.
Eh, that's as much as I can manage tonight I think. XD
EDIT -- Having read through to the end of 56, I have to say, the easiest way of conceptualizing King Crimson's power is to think of it as Sticky Fingers along the fourth dimensional axis. :0 If you blink and lose several seconds, it's a "hole"; if you meet yourself coming and going, it's a "pocket". It's not the same as The World/Star Platinum, which is more like... moving asymptotically close to light speed with total disregard for relativity. But the day I have to worry about relativity w/r/t JoJo...
Also: Bruno. WHAT. *flaps hands helplessly*
