APADFTMOM Day 26: JoJo Week Part 8: JoJolion

And so our journey through JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure comes to an end as we reach the current point of the series. Throughout this past week we’ve directly compared each of its components against each other to see how consistent story structure in a multi-work piece does not mean the stories have to be the same. We’ve seen a wide array of personalities, motivations, and relationship dynamics that may be similar but are never the same. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has proven to be a machine whose parts can be swapped out at will without fear of it breaking. Today I’m honored to cap off our JoJo Week by going from 1890 America to 2011 Japan for the eighth installment of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled JoJolion.

APADFTMOM Day 25: JoJo Week Part 7: Steel Ball Run

Think of all of the JoJo lore we’ve touched on this week. It isn’t much due to my intent to keep my posts as spoiler-free as possible, but there’s still a lot of lore established in the introductions to help begin each section of the story. Up until this point, we could sum up JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure as the legacy of the Joestar family as they battle a man with a personal vendetta against them as well as the rippling effects of his ideals for over a century. Despite being broken up into multiple sections with multiple protagonists, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has had that one overall narrative to help keep things coherent.

APADFTMOM Day 24: JoJo Week Part 6: Stone Ocean

No two parts of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure are the same. Sure, we’ve been discussing how the series hammers out a format for itself and sticks to that format for the majority of its run and that format is a very important piece of the identity of the series as a whole, but at the end of the day it’s just a meta tool used to help with coherency. By no means is it a recipe for success on its own. The material used to flesh out that skeleton is what pulls people in and keeps them there. Today our trek takes us from Italy in 2001 to Florida in 2011 for the events of the sixth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled Stone Ocean.

APADFTMOM Day 23: JoJo Week Part 5: Golden Wind

With the end of Diamond Is Unbreakable and the full establishment of the template for our plot structures moving forward, we can finally consider ourselves to be in “modern JoJo.” Today’s topic exists in a weird place overall in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Diamond Is Unbreakable introduced a format and showed that it can work, so it rests on the shoulders of the sequel to prove that there are enough variables within that format to present a new, different story. Today we move from 1999 Japan to 2001 Italy for the fifth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled Golden Wind.

APADFTMOM Day 22: JoJo Week Part 4: Diamond Is Unbreakable

With some adjustments to how conflict is established, the fourth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure provides the series with its finalized template for its storylines. There are many small changes between future parts to help keep things feeling fresh, but for the most part the series now has a set structure with which it can reliably frame its stories while keeping readers invested. Today we will be going over that finished product and showing how this part showcases how it can be used to great effect. We now make the jump from 1989 Egypt to a fictional town by the name of Morioh in 1999 for the fourth part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, titled Diamond Is Unbreakable.

APADFTMOM Day 21: JoJo Week Part 3: Stardust Crusaders

While Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency helped cultivate a lot of the long-term storytelling ideas behind JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, the series really found itself in 1989 with the release of the third part, Stardust Crusaders. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure takes a hard turn here as battles become more plentiful and much more unique due to less of a focus on a martial arts style of combat, the parts begin to get much longer, and the chapter-to-chapter narrative structure is given more of a monster-of-the-week feel with mini-arcs highlighting the various small-time opponents that the cast needs to overcome. We now jump from the 1930s to the 1980s with Stardust Crusaders, the most popular part of one of the most popular manga series of all time.

APADFTMOM Day 20: JoJo Week Part 2: Battle Tendency

The biggest trademark difference between each part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is the uprooting of the whole series for the continuation. Each part does not share a setting and later on we’ll see how shared characters are used more to bridge the gaps between parts rather than help serve as a direct continuation. Each part submerges the audience in a brand new setting and as time goes on, we’ll discover the familiarity established during these transitions to help readers feel at east. Today is the beginning of those transitions as we jump from 1880s England to 1930s New York for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, part 2: Battle Tendency.

APADFTMOM Day 19: JoJo Week Part 1: Phantom Blood

There are some series out there that are so captivating and stand out so much that they seem to transcend their mediums as a whole. This is much more prevalent in anime than in manga with series like Dragon Ball Z, early Naruto, Boku no Hero Academia, and Sailor Moon holding special places in people’s hearts even if those same people otherwise have no interest in anime. Many factors can play into this such as universal praise for the series, nostalgia, getting caught up in the hype, or just experiencing it in the right place at the right time, and all of these are valid. At that point, though, it’s no longer just about consuming media; There’s a personal attachment to something that feels like it’s more than just a piece of media.