JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind – 29

「目的地はローマ! コロッセオ」 (Mokutekichi wa Roma! Colosseo)
“Get to the Roman Colosseum!”

For the last home stretch of Part V, the story aims to take the stakes even higher now that Bruno’s team has all of the information they need to take on the Boss. But as Doppio makes his next move to meet up with Passione before his secret is revealed, he calls upon help from two of the creepiest Stand users in the entirety of JoJo who are lethal and depraved enough to be who Diavolo regrettably considers his last line of defense.

To begin, let’s discuss how this is the episode where we can finally call the Boss by his real name, Diavolo. A mysterious hacker is able to reach out to Bruno’s team as they look up the leads they have on Abbacchio’s last clue, and reveals to them both Diavolo’s true name and the mystery behind Stand powers. Part IV was where Araki started to touch on how Stand users are created after interacting with Stand arrows fashioned out of virus-plagued rocks from Cape York, Greenland. Along with the extensive knowledge that the mystery hacker has on the Stand arrows, he is also privy to Diavolo’s identity and lures Passione to Rome with knowledge on how to use the Stand arrow to unlock a Stand user’s hidden potential capable of defeating Diavolo. This sets up the plot for the final coming episodes of Part V but also provides valuable insight for knowing more about the Stand arrows and why they have been so prevalent since Part III when Enya had a majority of the arrows at her disposal.

So far, we’ve only had a handful of JoJo villains who have done undoubtedly heinous acts out of personal enjoyment; There’s J. Geil being a serial rapist and murderer, Anjiro previously raping & murdering three young boys and biting the face off of a dog before going after Josuke’s family, Yoshikage Kira and his hand-collecting murder spree, and Alessi’s history of tormenting children. But this episode introduces two characters that are more than welcome to join the club with Cioccolata and Secco. David Productions pulled no punches in showing how grotesque Cioccolata is by not only tying him in with the deaths of Gelato and Sorbet but also with how much detail they put into capturing his backstory in all of its gory detail. His experience in the medical field is every person’s nightmare as he has used his position in an elderly hospital to poison some of his patients and psychologically goad others into killing themselves, and became a doctor for the luxury of being able to use the operating room to slowly butcher his patients as the anesthetics start to wear off. To make matters worse, he’s filmed every murder and convinced one of his former patients, Secco, to help him after rendering him as his own personal pet. Araki had always flirted with the horror genre on many occasions in JoJo, but Cioccolata is one of the first villains to feel overtly inspired by splatter horror movies and with his harlequin make-up, green Kodak Black braids, and a penchant for snuff films, Cioccolata wouldn’t look out-of-place in a Rob Zombie film or Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights.

Seeing as how demented Cioccolata is, it would only be fitting that his Stand ability would be to watch people slowly rot away with mold. Similarly to Purple Haze, Green Day’s ability plays into the body horror of someone’s body breaking apart and dissolving at ease. For those affected by Green Day, they have to make sure not to reach an altitude any lower than their present position or else they’ll face the sudden risk of being thoroughly dissolved by the green mold that forms on the victim’s bodies. Because of this, it makes the beginning of the fight particularly riveting since they all have to think on their toes to avoid being killed by Green Day, allowing for scenes such as when Mista shoots their speedboat’s motor so that the ensuing explosion will launch the entire team above the pier. Even though the hacker’s revelations and some of the cool animation tricks that David Productions has been doing with Doppio’s phone calls were impressive, the most jaw-dropping scenes of this episode were definitely the introductions of Cioccolata and Secco and Passione’s beginning strategies for outmaneuvering Green Day’s rotting ability. It will be exciting to see how they pull off the tail-end of the Cioccolata fight, but that might either be an episode or two away.