JoJo's Bizarre Adventure/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Erina Joestar is seen using Dio's coffin as a makeshift lifeboat, and presumably used it to shield herself from the explosion of the ship. This distinctive item is shown both at the end of Part 1 and in a flashback during Part 2. How was it that Dio was found a century later in that exact same coffin?
  • Are Stands and the Ripple related at all?
    • It was suggested in part 3, but later we learn that Stand powers are just the result of being hit by metal/rock from outer space. So probably no.
    • Araki states in an extra chapter explaining stands that the Ripple's ultimate goal is perhaps to bring forth a full-fledged Stand.
      • If that is so, then how does Anubis work?
        • He's a posthumous remanant Stand imprint, pretty much like Carne's Notorious B.I.G. and Kinoto's Cheap Trick. However, unlike those two, he lays dormant inside the sword - or rather, he uses the sword as a medium to possess 'people' (or cows).
  • What happened to Dio's other vampire powers during Part 3 (blood freezing, eye beams)?
    • He still had them, they just weren't quite as useful as a psychic time stopped kick to the balls. He uses the eye beams in the arcade game.
      • Also, he made a point of showing that he hadn't fully synched with Jonathan's body yet, and therefore he probably couldn't control his vital functions enough to do things like the freezing trick, though he did spray blood from a wound on his leg into Jotaro's eyes. Though that doesn't really explain the head related abilities, which included being able to shrug off having his head vertically sliced in two.
    • Doylist explanation: Araki wanted to downplay Dio's vampiric abilities in favour of his Stand, much like he did with Joseph's Ripple. After all, he was presumably still capable of using his eyebeams, and while Joseph's Ripple-empowered Hermit Purple could possibly protect him from it, Jotaro had no such protection.
  • Why did Joseph become old? I thought the Ripple slows your aging process?
    • Well, it does for a while anyway. At some point your age catches up to you. It happened to Straights too, which is why he became a vampire.
    • Joseph slacked off practicing Ripple for a few years, as he notes at the beginning of Part III. That seems to be why age caught up with him faster than the other practitioners.
      • Having witnessed first-hand what extended life did to Straights, it's possible Joseph decided he didn't want to end up like Straights and so he let himself age naturally.
      • In any case, Joseph was a grandfather who was covered in muscles, was easily keeping up with teenagers and young adults, could roofhop and was flat out told by Mariah that he was actually quite sexy despite his age. He might not be Lisa Lisa, but we never learned if he ever reached her level of skill/power and he certainly aged more gracefully than his wife.
        • As for why he became so frail and apparently Ripple-less in Part 4, perhaps being drained by Dio did some sort of permanent damage to his respiratory system and he couldn't use the Ripple anymore. Or maybe Hamon healing just doesn't work that well on Alzheimer's and the previous Ripple Masters were just very lucky in that regard (though I don't remember seeing any of them older than Part 4's Joseph except possibly Zepelli the first's master.
  • Giorno's Stand had the power to reduce any action done on it to zero. To the point that time affecting attacks are useless. So shouldn't he have been unaffected by Stairway to Heaven's universal rewrite?
    • The way I see it either: A) The stand lost the arrow at some point, or B) Stairway to Heaven can simply override it as part of its own reality warping abilities.
      • The lost of the arrow was irrelevant.After the stand transforms,the arrow doesn't need to be in contact to keep thr "requiem" state.See the Golden Experience Requiem with the arrow on it's forehead and GER without the arrow.
    • It's also possible Giorno was indeed unaffected and he's still chilling in America. He has yet to appear in Steel Ball Run so it's possible.
      • Araki did say somewhere that Giorno might had been in Florida during the Stone Ocean incidents...
    • It's also possible Josuke was also unaffected since Crazy Diamond and Golden Experience had similar powers (Reduce momentum of an action to zero/undo changes to an object) and they are together searching for a way to fix things back to normal.
      • OH.MY.GOD. This is totally what Part 8 is going to be about.
    • At the tail end of Golden Wind (or whatever we're calling it now), it did appear that the Stand arrow fell out of Gold Experience Requiem right after he killed Diavolo with it, which might have reset it back to plain old Gold Experience. See here [dead link]
    • One must keep in mind that Stairway to Heaven doesn't actually destroy/rewrite the universe. It is bound to get destroyed after nearing the end of it's natural life cycle and only after this that Pucci can rewrite it in his own image. So he doesn't actually attack Giorno, the universe merely ends. But then again, GER was broken enough for King Crimson not to work on it. Maybe it's just a plot hole...
      • I support this as the most likely explanation. GER only protects from attacks against itself AND it's owner, as without Giorno it would not be able to exist given it's a stand tied to a user like the rest (unlike SCR which was automatic). When Made in Heaven activated, it was not having it's natural life cycle threatened, so it just let the ability go ahead knowing full well in the reset, it would be fated to meet Giorno again and thus exist. Thus, the reason GER never stopped MiH is because it was not threatened. If Pucci had attempted to rewrite things so that the remaining son of Dio changed his course in life that would not lead to him getting GER, THEN the stand could have done it's work.
    • My take? Requiem isn't as broken as people make it out to be. Despite the impressive description of its powers, it seems to be more of a Game Unbreaker. Outside of Diavolo attempting to timeskip and Requiem going "lolno" (and the eternal deaths), it just seemed to act like a beefed up Gold Experience. To use an analogy, King Crimson is Diavolo's GameShark, Gold Experience Requiem rips the GameShark out of Diavolo's hands and does the card crusher meme with it.
  • Why did Arabia Fats take orders from Dio even though Fats could have killed Dio using his Stand (The Sun)?
    • Dio is so overpowered, he would have found some way around it.
      • This assuming that The Sun would've worked on Dio as the, well, sun does. Sun-shaped or not, it was still just a Stand, not a trillion-kilometer orb of fiery fusion death.
        • Except I'm pretty sure it's just the Sunlight itself that kills Vampires. And The Sun was powerful enough to light up the sky even when it was night time. Stop underrating it.
          • Unfortunately for Arabia Fats, Dio has that canonical Kinsey-rackup effect. Every one of his male henchmen becomes gay for him. Steely Dan, N'doul - and he ALMOST gets Abdul, too. Seriously, man. A badass-yet-underrated stand Mr. Fats may have, but he doesn't have the Canonical Power of Overriding Sexy. Plus Brando is one diabolical cavalier bastard and he'd probably stop time and maul the poor bastard if Fats tried anything with The Sun.
    • My theory is that either A) It generates heat and light, but no UV rays (which was stated in Part 2 to be what makes sunlight harmful to vampires) or B) He is gay for Dio like everybody else.
    • In addition to the above, there's also the possibility that he had a spore inserted into his brain which Dio could have had kill him at will unless he decided to expose his brain to UV light (which might make it auto kill him), or that he was just a sociopath that was in it for the money like several other of the 7 signs and had no real desire to kill someone who was offering to give him $100,000,000 for killing a teenager.
      • Or it could be that Dio was inside a building that was shielded from sunlight and surrounded by loyal fanatics with broken abilities and Fats' mirror trick would probably be useless in an urban setting with an intelligent hawk (which can easily generate car sized hunks of ice, so good luck baking Dio out) looking for you, especially since the Sun has a relatively short range and needs to be within eyeshot to aim.
  • If Yoshikage Kira wanted a normal life and not be bothered by anything then why did he go around killing women and taking their hands? Seems to be asking for trouble and to be bothered.
    • Kira had mental problems. He couldn't resist his compulsions.
    • Maybe he wanted to have a normal life BESIDES dismembering women...
    • "Normal" might be a mistranslation. Wikipedia's list of chapter titles has Kira wanting a "quiet" life.
  • Josuke merged Angelo with a rock as an alternative to killing him, but wouldn't Angelo just have suffocated in a second after being merged with the rock anyway?
    • I don't see why, he still has most of his human body, including his lungs, and his nose and mouth seem to be working just fine.
  • Koichi's Act 2 had the power to create anything that made a noise by writing the sound effect on something (i.e. crackle for fire, whoosh for wind; presumably this could even extend to the boom of an atomic bomb or the crack of a spine being broken), so it basically had infinite uses; so in what way is Act 3's ability to make things heavier an improvement?
    • Well, Act 3 seems to be much faster and more combat-capable than Act 2. Additionally, we don't know the exact limits of what Act 2 could generate. It's quite possible that blowing away Yukako was the upper boundary of what it could do.
    • For that matter, how are the powers of Act 2 and Act 3 even related at all?
  • Why wasn't Okuyasu a little more vengeful towards the man who killed his brother, once they had him at their mercy?
    • Okuyasu is a good person, really. No one in the good side of "Diamond is Unbreakable" killed anyone.
  • How did Arika survive after his Stand died in the ocean?
    • The Stand didn't actually die.
  • How did Jotaro get all that stuff into his cell at the start of Part 3 if Star Platinum has a range of only a few metres?
    • A plot hole, perhaps?
    • He probably stole stuff from the guards.
  • Why didn't Joseph become a vampire when he got the blood transfusion like Vanilla Ice did?
    • Most likely it doesn't work that way. Don't forget that vampires on Jojo are, in fact, humans with the 'secret potential' of their brains "unlocked": this is not some Dracula-curse or whatever, vampire transformation here must have something to do with Dio's cells-- the ones that, remember, he can freely control (as it can be clearly seen on the battle against The Lovers or with Okuyasu's father). Vanilla Ice was transformed because Dio so choosed, but as he was already dead at the time of the blood transfusion, he could not transform Joseph into one, as he would have to conciously do that.
      • In the first series, Dio tried to transform Jonathan into a vampire, which involved deliberately injecting a specific chemical into his target, which a skilled Hamon user can eject if its in small enough a dose. An unconscious Dio that was not yet synched enough with his Joestar body to have full access to his vampiric abilities probably isn't too much of a danger to Joseph, especially since it was his own blood that he got back.
  • How exactly did Gyro manage to survive Sugar Mountain's curse when it was shown he had already become part of the tree before Johnny traded for the bottle of wine with the last of the Nameless Men?
  • During the battle against Kira, there's the point where Josuke has to decide whether to risk healing an injured Okuyasu. Koichi conducts the bomb energies from Okuyasu into himself, but then Josuke heals him back to whole while he's in the middle of exploding. So why not just wait for Kira to blow up Okuyasu and do the same thing?
    • He wasn't sure he could pull it off, and the risks were too great.
      • He was afraid because If Okuyasu had been turned into a bomb, then Kira could have blown up Okuyasu and killed Josuke, and since Crazy Diamond can't heal Josuke.. yeah.
  • One thing that bugs me is near the beginning of the third "series", it's pretty much made very obvious that The World is connected to the other Joestar stands (Dio uses the power of Purple Hermit himself once), but when he's explaining his power, that connection isn't stated, and he's somehow surprised that Jotaro could stop time too. Given Dio's intelligence in the first section, this development doesn't seem to be very in-character.
    • Maybe The World is Dio's stand while the vine-like stand Dio was seen with earlier was Jonathan's?
      • That only raises more questions!
        • Maybe Dio thought, since his body was Jonathan's to begin with, that he also obtained a part of Jonathan's stand, which gave him the powers of the other living Jostar-stands. But since Jotaro never used Star Platinum's ability (since he didn't know about it), Dio probably thought, "So his power is Super-Strength and Speed. That makes my ability to stop time unique." So, it was a misunderstanding on his side. (Even Dio isn't without fail.)
    • Also, after turning into a vampire and spending a century underwater, Dio's personality might have changed somewhat.
      • That's something I hadn't considered before. I can accept that.
  • Exactly WHAT happened at the end of the battle with Kira? Josuke and co have him on the ropes, so he uses his stand to reverse time and save himself, then... it cuts to Koichi going to Italy. Did I miss something?
    • Yes you did. It looks like the scanlation site you were using must have skipped a few chapters. There was a definite end to that battle, where Kira is stopped from detonating everyone who looked at him by Jotaro, before an ambulance runs Kira over, and he is dragged to hell in the Spirit World.
    • Probably the one thing I cannot understand about Jojo is right before this involving Kira's 'Bites the Dust' ability (which is admittedly really kind of cool and trippy). Kira had everyone right where he wanted them, and he even activates KQ's power, and then huge severing tears are shown on the gang for a panel. So what happens? Does he win, or?! Time resets!! But still we see him win... He. Won. Period.
    • He doesn't know who got killed. It isn't even clear if he knows that time did indeed reset (he seems to be able to deduct it from the way Koichi acts), so the only way to be sure was to wait until the repeat-death happens.
  • What is Silver Chariots(NOT REQUIEM) Ability? I do understand why the abilities of JJBA 3:Stardust Crusader aren't as crazy and strange as the the ones of the other chapters (since Araki had to try things out). Hermit Purple has psychic visions in form of pictures, Magician Red controls Fire while The Fool has sand. Heck, even Hierophant Green has a similar ability as Stone Free (Jolyne Kujo's Stand). Only Jotaro's stand had also no abilities besides it's super strength (until the big fight with Dio). But Silver Chariot? He can ...stab ...things and lose it's own armor in favor of speed. No reality warping abilities like the other...just WHY?
    • Silver Chariot is just very fast. It doesn't have much power, it doesn't have any real magical abilities, and its only long-range ability is shooting the rapier tip. However, the stand can literally stab a beam of light when its armor is removed, and it is also very dexterous (Like Star Platinum).
      • Ahaaaaaaaa....Now that I remember: In the fight with Abdul, Silver Chariot could even cut the flames of Magician Red. That was actually pretty awesome...but that doesn't make his stand less lame. Well not much anyway...
    • Silver Chariot is also unique in regards to Stands because of its armour - it can be attacked, but if its armour isn't penetrated, Polnareff won't be hurt. This applies to its sword as well; notice, for instance, how Vanilla Ice's Cream swallows the sword's tip, but it doesn't hurt Polnareff's hands.
  • Just wondering...would Dio's plan in JJBA Part6: Stone Ocean work if they used Star Platinum instead of ZA WARUDO? Since both stands had the ability to stop time. IT COULD HAVE WORKED!
  • The way that Joseph lost the bet against the D'arby the Gambler. Which was based on not spilling water. When there's no evidence that stand users can necessarily see the Ripple energy and one of the things he learned to do when he first started training in Hamon was how to make water keep its shape even if you turn the glass upside down or break it. That... that really bugged me.
    • And then there was the problem with the Lovers trying to implant a Dio spore into the body of a preternaturally talented Ripple user. Come to think of it, the entire dearth of Ripples on Josef's part. Stands may be the only things that can harm other stands, but normal objects can at least block and distract them and I can't help but think that Hamon'd be really useful when dealing with the users. Stuff like the Jojo Crackers could have really helped improve his offensive game and the various water tricks would have been really helpful against Dark Blue Moon, Geb and D'arby, as well as possibly shielding him from Justice. And if he learned his mother's Ripple Hypnotism, he would have a much less complicated method for interrogating any captured stand users.
    • By his own admission, Joseph doesn't use Ripple much in Part 3 because he's out of practice.
      • Which doesn't really make sense since he has been hunting down a very dangerous opponent whose most easily exploitable weakness is the Ripple for the last three years, and he was using the Ripple even before he was trained and only took a few weeks of intense training to reach the level where he could fight a monster like AC/DC on relatively even grounds.
      • A few weeks of intense training using a magical pillar that might not even be standing any more.
      • Again, he had 3 years to practice, a good knowledge of the basics of the Ripple, and if necessary, the money needed to buy a submarine on short notice should be just fine for recreating the pillar of oil that had no notable magical properties. Especially since the Speedwagon Foundation is more than happy to help the Jojos in any way possible and know how to get in touch with the Ripple school.
      • He didn't need to eat, drink, or sleep when he was on the pillar of oil. It's magic.
  • Okay, so how exactly is Steel Ball Run related to the main Jojo universe? Is it an alternate reality? Is it the new history that was created after Pucci's universe reset? Is it just happening at the same time as Part 1, but with characters that coincidentally have similar names? So confusing...
    • I'm pretty sure it's the new history after the universal reset.
  • Why does everyone keep the existence of Hamon, vampires, cyborgs, Stands, ghosts, and aliens hidden from the general public (at least in Parts 1-5; I haven't read Part 6 yet)? No one ever really gives a reason. There are obvious reasons why Passione doesn't tell the world about Stands, of course, but there's no real reason why the heroes of Parts 1-4 keep all the supernatural stuff a secret, and even less of a reason why some of the minor characters in Part 4 do so.
  • How come we never see Jotaro's dad? Unless the scanlation I read just made stuff up, Sadao Kujo is alive and well, at least during part 3. Even if he is on tour, you'd think he'd at least visit his comatose wife in the hospital.
    • Maybe he did visit her, just not on-panel.
  • Not to rant on the obviously popular Stands, but why did they change the fighting system from The Ripple to Stands and pretty much make almost every supernatural thing (ghosts and aliens aside) due to stands when they already had vampires, pillar men, cyborgs, the already mentioned Ripple, ect. It feels like they had the foundations of a wild Fantasy Kitchen Sink in Parts 1 and 2, and severely toned it down in place of a Meta Origin.
    • Personally, while I liked the vampires and Pillar Men, I think the cyborg thing was pretty stupid. If the Axis Powers had that kind of technology, why didn't they use it to win the war? (The easy answer is "because it was impractical to mass-produce", but that doesn't explain the lack of cyborgs in the postwar world; see my point about The Masquerade above.)
    • This really doesn't answer the question. Why did they state that everything supernatural from part 3 onwards was a result of stands when they already had the foundations of a Fantasy Kitchen Sink?
    • Part 4 had ghosts and an alien. Isn't that enough?
      • I was just wondering why they got rid of the ripple that's all.
  • If Notorious B.I.G./Carne's stand only activates upon death then how did he pass Polpo's test? Even if the arrow killed him to bear the new stand, how could Notorious B.I.G. disappear after passing Black Sabbath's trial? Also it wouldn't have made sense for Diavolo to instantly pick him as a part of his personal guard without actually knowing what he does. How could he have known?
    • This is just speculation, but maybe when Notorious BIG killed it's victims, Carne came back to life? We've seen Stands doing wierder stuff. Or maybe it was a positive version of Cheap Trick, which simply finds a new host when the old one dies.
  • What's the full story on the Ripple? Part 1 says Will Zeppeli first learned it in Tibet but Part 2 said it's an ancient tradition in Italy. (I think, will probably need to reread the whole thing again).
    • In SBR's alternative universe, the Spin is the Ripple's counterpart and it was used for medical purposes. In part 1, Jonathan gets his arm healed by the Ripple... and in SBR, Johnny' spine does get healed after learning how to use the Super Spin, after fighting D 4 C. Maybe this also meant that the Ripple was also used as such?