JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Stone Ocean – 07, 08, 09

「６人いる！」 (Rokunin Iru!)
“There’s Six of Us!”

「フー・ファイターズ」 (Fuu Faitaazu)
“Foo Fighters.”

Stone Ocean continues to push the envelope further when it comes to the inventive body horror that shines through its fights. As Jolyne and Hermes come up with the craziest, most complex solutions towards cheating death, we’re introduced to a moisture-sucking plankton Stand named after everyone’s favorite post-grunge rock band The Foo Fighters.

YOU KNOW YOU MAKE ME BREAK OUT

Framing the introduction of Foo Fighters (or F.F.) around a murder mystery near a swamp is an ingenious decision with all of the factors that ended up going into it. As a sizable rescue party is gradually picked off by Foo Fighters, the best strategy that Jolyne and Hermes can come up with is to keep their distance from the water while also trying to stay as close to the security guard as possible to avoid triggering an explosive band. It’s a fascinating way to frame the fight because it adds to the tension of Jolyne and Herme fighting to survive the plankton’s attacks while also remaining within the radius of the guard’s body.

They are also forced to make a lot more “off-the-cuff” choices during the battle. Considering how many of their solutions pop up a few seconds before they have to make some “do-or-die” decision-making, it isn’t until their situation is dire that they realize they can make the most of a random oversight. Moments like Jolyne unraveling her stomach to avoid a fatal gut punch, Hermes having to build a strategy around how her stickers will be able to handle the water, and Jolyne turning on a tractor instead of directly attacking Foo Fighters so that F.F. would be too distracted to kill her are details I could only imagine appearing in a crazy JoJo fight.

THE BEST! THE BEST! THE BEST!

What amps up the tension to its highest is how Foo Fighters is a very freaky Stand. Because Foo Fighters is plankton that survives through constantly absorbing moisture, Foo Fighters’ preferred mode of fighting is finding different ways to have her victims sucked dry and torn apart.

The imagery of Foo Fighters speaking through the mouths of three possessed prisoners as their faces begin drooping and their dried husks begin to fall apart is on par with some of the more repulsive scenes you’d get from a horror film. Similarly, it’s hard not to get horror movie vibes from when Hermes is fighting for survival underwater, thinking on her toes as quickly as she can before she’s drowned and used as another host for Foo Fighters.

While the fight concluded amicably as Foo Fighters decided to protect Jolyne in prison after being spared, it was funny to see Foo Fighters go from being menacing plankton to a cute yet unsettling woman. I’ll be continuing this discussion with the start of Episode 09 below.

「取り立て人マリリン・マンソン」 (Toritatenin Maririn Manson)
“Debt Collector Marilyn Manson”

But before I do this, just give me a moment.

There’s something I want to say, but I don’t know where to wedge it in.

No wait, I know.

Almost there, I’ve figured it out.

Okay, let’s talk about Pucci. It was pretty funny to see him work his way through tying cherry stems together with his tongue while Mirashon was only trying to do her confessional. It’s neat to see him in all of his glory given that it’s the first main instance where we see him plotting out his efforts to hand out discs to potential Stand users.

Because they spent so long giving us only Whitesnake’s perspective, it’s neat that our first main introduction to Pucci as a character is how he’ll both try to create Stand users through his confessional booth as the prison’s priest and be disarming by doing innocuous things like tying cherry stems together for funsies.

C’MON, LET’S GO FIGHT SOME FOO’S

The funniest thing about Foo Fighters assimilating into the friend group is watching them use Etro’s body to replicate human behavior in some of the goofiest ways like drinking from puddles or playing catch with a baseball.

Jolyne and Hermes do their best to get her to act naturally like drinking all of her liquids from a massive gas station soda cup or learning to throw without looking like they’re carrying the world’s heaviest baseball. But even with a few success stories in Foo Fighters’ favor, it’s still a work in progress to get F.F. accustomed to humanity when they’ll look at a cup of backwash and see it as an absolute win now that she has bonus liquid.

FASHION SHOOTS WITH MARY LYNN MANSON

It’s outrageous that the west has had to deal with wacky localization names like Dan of Steel or Jean Pierre Eiffel when Mary Lynn Manson is the most blatant reference to a musician they managed to squeeze through. I guess they’re lucky that the real Marilyn Manson has bigger problems on his shoulders to worry about JoJo characters.

But nonetheless, it is a funny instance where Stone Ocean dates itself by having its first reference to a hyper-popular TRL sensation be for shock rocker Marilyn Manson. It’s also emblematic of how the references stop worrying as much about trying to incorporate a musician’s name or discography into the Stand abilities. While Foo Fighters already had little to do with moisture or plankton, Marilyn Manson has even less to do with weaponized gambling. Maybe it has to do with the same kind of dismemberment his character did on Celebrity Deathmatch did, but that’s a stretch.

Nitpicking aside, the mechanics of the fight are pretty interesting with Mirashon’s compulsive gambling manifesting into a Stand that acts as a violent referee for high-stakes betting. The stakes do drop quite a bit knowing that Jolyne is able to make up conditions based on the vague nature of a bet.

But at the same time, it’s intense to see it all play out as Jolyne tries her damndest to find ways to toss the baseball back at Foo Fighters while they’re trapped in different parts of the prison. The back-and-forth the two had in the elevator was an impressive scene with how many asspulls they had to make just to get the ball through one end to the other.