JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind – 17

「ベイビィ・フェイス」 (Baby Face)
“Baby Face”

JoJo has had a history of kinkshaming creepy Stand users. Whether it be Yoshikage Kira’s murderous hand fetish, Alessi’s desire from tormenting children and tormenting adults he’s turned into children, or many others who wouldn’t leave rape, murder, and/or bug-consumption off the table, there’s no shortage of JoJo characters no one would want to meet in a dark alley. This is especially true for Melone, the La Squadra member we previously saw licking his lips as a woman passed by. This episode is a great refresher, however, to why exactly Melone is considered to be one of the more overtly perverse Stand users in Golden Wind so far.

Through Melone’s overwhelming desire to construct the perfect version of his remote Stand, Baby Face, he ends up being an extremely frightening foe. Because Baby Face’s construction relies on the physiology of its host, Melone obsesses over the health condition, birth date, and blood type of his victims before he implants them with the Baby Face stand. With the angry train passenger, her lack of patience ended up fueling just the right amount of passion and anger for Melone to target her and create Baby Face with the composition needed to kill Passione. Although Melone is already perverted enough as it is, Baby Face amplifies his deviousness to its highest degree by having the laptop component of his Stand assault the woman, causing the Stand to appear underneath her clothes. Combined with the Stand peeing on her as Melone is teaching it the fundamentals of life and murder, and it creates an unsettling and creepy atmosphere around Melone, Baby Face, and its conception. What we’re looking at is unorthodox Stand rape that intends to define the depraved personality of Melone and why his psyche would come up with an entity like Baby Face. Your mileage will vary on whether this is enough to throw you off from this particular section of the story, but the narrative does try to make the effort to explain that the Stand doesn’t physically rape people despite all of the messed up details behind the Stand’s mechanics and how he was conceived from that woman.

For Baby Face’s fight, however, David Pro was gracious enough to nip it in the bud very quickly as it shows that the main flaw of Melone’s plan is that he went for Giorno early on. While he did pull the wool over Trish and Bruno, Giorno’s main strength is the matter that surrounds him, so Baby Face being comprised of physical objects made it a simple feat for Giorno to not only recover parts of himself that were taken from him, but also eviscerate Baby Face from the inside-out with objects/life he can spawn like piranhas. Giorno might’ve been able to make short work of his Stand, but it interesting to see Giorno’s abilities stand out more and have him show how useful he can be to Passione.

Speaking of which, this happened to be the same section where we got to see the infamous moment where Giorno uses Gold Experience to steal one hundred cars. Through the brilliant improvised planning on Giorno’s part, he decides the best way to throw La Squadra off of their location is to turn a hundred vehicles into frogs so that they’ll have a hard time tracking down which one is exactly their car. Additionally, this was also the part of the story where Trish questions the bathroom situation in Coco Jumbo as she questions whether Bruno expects her to pee inside of the turtle. Bruno’s answer is exactly that, but through a zipper that could possibly feed their bathroom waste to Coco Jumbo. Mista also had a funny moment where he accidentally crashes their getaway car because Sex Pistols ended up alerting the truck driver by eating his hamburger. But as they try to scout out another way to travel, Melone’s one contribution to the remaining members of La Squadra is pinpointing where Passione is for the time being. Whether this pays off for Melone, Ghiaccio and Risotto will come to light in the next episode.