More summaries of Stone Ocean
Jun. 19th, 2006 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaI'm writing this because I don't feel like doing my Flash homework. XD
Part 1 of summaries here, and predictably I messed up the order of events somewhat - first Dio flashback happens before rain of frogs. Er. This backstory is baffling and questionable (my two favorite adjectives w/r/t JoJo), but I forge on. orz
Pucci met Dio in 1988, when he (Pucci, not Dio) was sixteen. A year older than Jotaro, come to think of it. This was, if you recollect, the period during which Dio was going about "making friends" with other stand users; I'd always kind of assumed you had to be in Egypt to fall afoul of him, like Abdul and Kakyouin, but from what Pucci says he seems to have racked up the air miles as well. It... you know what, I'm just going to translate this directly, I can't convey it in summary:
Right. Like that.
For the rest it's about as contextualised as a student council meeting in Utena - even better, like one of Touya and Akio's underdressed conversations later in the series. Some sort of spacious living room opening onto a palm-tree garden, in Cairo or Florida or anywhere; you can tell the flashbacks are separate occasions because Dio is wearing a different skanky outfit in each, and sometimes he's sipping a glass of wine or building a scale-model sailing ship or... you get the idea. orz I'm always glad to see Dio, whether it be in Stone Ocean or SBR or whatever, yet he never comes but enveloped in a shimmering aura of surreal brain-hurtage. Why is that?
Also: three guesses as to who read the notebook post-Egypt adventure and had it burnt without revealing the contents, so the information exists only in his memory - and the first two don't count.
The rain of poisonous frogs proved a logistic problem to the extent that the guards shipped Jolyne and Weather Report to the infirmary without asking too many difficult questions. XD; Jolyne recovers and is hanging around with F.F. when she realises she hasn't seen Hermes at lunch recently, what gives? It turns out Hermes has her own problems: specifically, she's plotting vengeance on the mafia hitman who left her older sister Gloria's body floating in the river. Gloria had made herself an inconvenient witness to another hit - Hermes unwittingly let herself be spotted near the site of the crime, so Gloria went to the police in order to protect Hermes from possible mob repercussions. The hitman, Sports Max (er, I think that's it =_=) is in Green Dolphin Prison on a tax evasion rap, so Hermes robbed a convenience store and got herself sent to prison. She follows him around for several days (noting that he basically has two hobbies: sweeping the prison chapel and stuffing small birds and animals) before cornering him, hello my name is Hermes Costello, you killed my sister, prepare to die - and uses Kiss to trap and drown him in a sewage pipe. Even so it doesn't go off easily, because it turns out Sports Max's stand ability is - wait for it - summoning invisible flesh-hungry zombies. If there is a stuffed bird or crocodile in the room, you'll be attacked by an invisible bird or crocodile. If you're in a cemetary, the graves will yawn open and ravening zombies will emerge - but they will be invisible, and as everyone knows, invisible zombies are the hardest zombies to deal with.
Of course Sports Max turns himself into a zombie as well. By the way, this stand's name is Limp Bizkit. There's a punchline there but I can't put my finger on it.
The guards finally have it up to here and drag Jolyne off to solitary confinement; they can't pin it on her but she's clearly the center of a vortex of death, dismemberment and tomb desecration. However this is a voluntary development from Jolyne's POV, as it was clear from Sports Max's actions immediately before his death that he was searching for something. Jolyne & co. review his memory disc and find the record of a conversation with Whitesnake, in which Whitesnake asked Sports Max to use his stand ability on a bone...... Dio's bone. NO REALLY BEAR WITH ME. Sports Max pointed out, reasonably enough, that his power usually works insofar as the body is reasonably whole and not 99% incinerated two decades ago, and in any case does Whitesnake really want whoever it is back as an invisible zombie?
Whitesnake: It's worth the attempt. Why don't you give it a try?
Sports Max: I just did.
Whitesnake: ...What?
Sports Max: Well, you said to so I just did. Did it work?
Whitesnake: I don't--OH SHIT OW.
Upon which the bone flew through Whitesnake's hand and disappeared around a corner. XD;;; Five minutes ensued of flailing and recrimination on the part of Our Perhaps Not Very Well-Organized Villains before they realised they're better off following the bone at a respectable distance, because it seems to know where it's going (the reader's imagination fails). And it was last sensed near the solitary confinement units, so Jolyne gets herself sent there. F.F. asks Emporio to give her a hand, but Emporio can't make it over to the other building on his own. Luckily there is Annasui, who agrees to help them because he fell in love with Jolyne at first sight and wants to marry her. This is worrisome because Annasui loves to take things apart - he was the sort of little kid who turned watches into piles of tiny gears and springs - and he's in jail because he took his last (lyin', cheatin') girlfriend apart as well. XD;;
As if the series wasn't dark enough already, solitary takes it up a notch. Jeering, feces-throwing inmates, cockroach-infested rations, the works. At one point two guards come to hose Jolyne down and start scuffling in front of her - with increasing violence, until one beats the other to death and proceeds to let out all the dangerous inmates and turn the joint into the Thunderdome. This is of course the work of a stand, one that Dio told Pucci about, and the story is instructive.
I've got to continue some other time, though. XD
Back to work!
Part 1 of summaries here, and predictably I messed up the order of events somewhat - first Dio flashback happens before rain of frogs. Er. This backstory is baffling and questionable (my two favorite adjectives w/r/t JoJo), but I forge on. orz
Pucci met Dio in 1988, when he (Pucci, not Dio) was sixteen. A year older than Jotaro, come to think of it. This was, if you recollect, the period during which Dio was going about "making friends" with other stand users; I'd always kind of assumed you had to be in Egypt to fall afoul of him, like Abdul and Kakyouin, but from what Pucci says he seems to have racked up the air miles as well. It... you know what, I'm just going to translate this directly, I can't convey it in summary:
How many people does one encounter in the course of a lifetime? The number must be low, if we count only those who have had some influence on the way we conduct our lives... It was 1988. I met a man who came from Egypt, who "was able to stop time", and we grew close.
Dio: Perhaps there is "a way to reach Heaven".
--The man who came from Egypt said, abruptly.
He was young... beautiful... but carried himself like a man who had lived for hundreds of years. At the time I was sixteen, a student, about to enter the seminary, who was to dedicate his life entirely to God. From the first we found each other easy to converse with, and - though mysterious - he became a dear friend to me.
Dio: Don't look so confused. I speak of "Heaven" as a matter of the mind: that place toward which the human spirit tends. It's not to say that one must die to achieve it. Strength of spirit, too, is something that must evolve, and the point at which it finally attains... I think you of all people must understand what I mean.
Dio: True happiness lies there: if one can get to "Heaven"... I know. Happiness is not to be gained from an invincible body, or vast riches, or standing above all men. The true victor is the one who sees "Heaven"... I will arrive there, no matter what sacrifices are required.
Pucci: But practically speaking, what method would that be?
He said he had to make certain, but that my aid was necessary. The method was written down in a notebook: that was what he said. And then - before I could learn what the method was - the notebook was burnt. That was in Egypt, in 1989.
Right. Like that.
For the rest it's about as contextualised as a student council meeting in Utena - even better, like one of Touya and Akio's underdressed conversations later in the series. Some sort of spacious living room opening onto a palm-tree garden, in Cairo or Florida or anywhere; you can tell the flashbacks are separate occasions because Dio is wearing a different skanky outfit in each, and sometimes he's sipping a glass of wine or building a scale-model sailing ship or... you get the idea. orz I'm always glad to see Dio, whether it be in Stone Ocean or SBR or whatever, yet he never comes but enveloped in a shimmering aura of surreal brain-hurtage. Why is that?
Also: three guesses as to who read the notebook post-Egypt adventure and had it burnt without revealing the contents, so the information exists only in his memory - and the first two don't count.
The rain of poisonous frogs proved a logistic problem to the extent that the guards shipped Jolyne and Weather Report to the infirmary without asking too many difficult questions. XD; Jolyne recovers and is hanging around with F.F. when she realises she hasn't seen Hermes at lunch recently, what gives? It turns out Hermes has her own problems: specifically, she's plotting vengeance on the mafia hitman who left her older sister Gloria's body floating in the river. Gloria had made herself an inconvenient witness to another hit - Hermes unwittingly let herself be spotted near the site of the crime, so Gloria went to the police in order to protect Hermes from possible mob repercussions. The hitman, Sports Max (er, I think that's it =_=) is in Green Dolphin Prison on a tax evasion rap, so Hermes robbed a convenience store and got herself sent to prison. She follows him around for several days (noting that he basically has two hobbies: sweeping the prison chapel and stuffing small birds and animals) before cornering him, hello my name is Hermes Costello, you killed my sister, prepare to die - and uses Kiss to trap and drown him in a sewage pipe. Even so it doesn't go off easily, because it turns out Sports Max's stand ability is - wait for it - summoning invisible flesh-hungry zombies. If there is a stuffed bird or crocodile in the room, you'll be attacked by an invisible bird or crocodile. If you're in a cemetary, the graves will yawn open and ravening zombies will emerge - but they will be invisible, and as everyone knows, invisible zombies are the hardest zombies to deal with.
Of course Sports Max turns himself into a zombie as well. By the way, this stand's name is Limp Bizkit. There's a punchline there but I can't put my finger on it.
The guards finally have it up to here and drag Jolyne off to solitary confinement; they can't pin it on her but she's clearly the center of a vortex of death, dismemberment and tomb desecration. However this is a voluntary development from Jolyne's POV, as it was clear from Sports Max's actions immediately before his death that he was searching for something. Jolyne & co. review his memory disc and find the record of a conversation with Whitesnake, in which Whitesnake asked Sports Max to use his stand ability on a bone...... Dio's bone. NO REALLY BEAR WITH ME. Sports Max pointed out, reasonably enough, that his power usually works insofar as the body is reasonably whole and not 99% incinerated two decades ago, and in any case does Whitesnake really want whoever it is back as an invisible zombie?
Whitesnake: It's worth the attempt. Why don't you give it a try?
Sports Max: I just did.
Whitesnake: ...What?
Sports Max: Well, you said to so I just did. Did it work?
Whitesnake: I don't--OH SHIT OW.
Upon which the bone flew through Whitesnake's hand and disappeared around a corner. XD;;; Five minutes ensued of flailing and recrimination on the part of Our Perhaps Not Very Well-Organized Villains before they realised they're better off following the bone at a respectable distance, because it seems to know where it's going (the reader's imagination fails). And it was last sensed near the solitary confinement units, so Jolyne gets herself sent there. F.F. asks Emporio to give her a hand, but Emporio can't make it over to the other building on his own. Luckily there is Annasui, who agrees to help them because he fell in love with Jolyne at first sight and wants to marry her. This is worrisome because Annasui loves to take things apart - he was the sort of little kid who turned watches into piles of tiny gears and springs - and he's in jail because he took his last (lyin', cheatin') girlfriend apart as well. XD;;
As if the series wasn't dark enough already, solitary takes it up a notch. Jeering, feces-throwing inmates, cockroach-infested rations, the works. At one point two guards come to hose Jolyne down and start scuffling in front of her - with increasing violence, until one beats the other to death and proceeds to let out all the dangerous inmates and turn the joint into the Thunderdome. This is of course the work of a stand, one that Dio told Pucci about, and the story is instructive.
I've got to continue some other time, though. XD
Back to work!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-19 09:01 am (UTC)Your summaries are a source of joy and delight in my Monday morning. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 07:25 am (UTC)Dio makes me happy in ways I never knew I could be made happy. I wouldn't call it brain hurtage so much as I stop thinking and get on with the squeeing as soon as I see him. It is almost an ingrained reflex now.