JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E14-15 Review: Reducing You To Lines And Words

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Episodes 14-15: Let's Go To The Mangaka's House

Kishibe Rohan is probably hands-down my favourite character in Part 4 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and I'm already pretty fond of both Koichi and Josuke. But there's just something genuinely appealing about Rohan's character, a borderline-sociopathic man-child who is obsessed with his work, extremely pompous, a gigantic prick, and has easily one of the most interesting Stands in the entire series.

See, Heaven's Door is a stand that allows Kishibe Rohan to flip you open like a goddamn book, allowing him to read any information that he wants. Rohan is also able to scribble in extra things inside the 'book', though, like "you will not be able to harm Kishibe Rohan", or "if he doesn't do X, you will kill yourself". It's such an insanely frightening Stand, and one of the very few times that an obviously-meta character manages to do it in a pretty horrifying way in-universe.

Throw in Kishibe Rohan's utterly eccentric mannerisms, and he just makes for easily one of the most fascinating and bizarre characters in a manga already full of colourful characters. Considering the writing style of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I'm not surprised that Kishibe Rohan's apparently partly autobiographical. While I doubt that Hirohiko Araki actually stabs spiders and tastes their bodies for 'research',  JJBA's fascination about a single topic and turning it into the basis of insane powers, especially in later parts where you'll have a "JoJo Trivia Segment" of the manga every now and then... yeah, I can totally see someone like Rohan turning out a manga that's as bizarre as JJBA.

The actual setup for the episode is... interesting. Koichi ends up meeting with Hazamada (the asshole with the "Surface" Stand), and for some reason, Hazamada ends up just reverting to a manga geek-cum-loser and abandons all of his utterly psychotic "make your rival stab out his own eye" character traits. It's weird since Diamond is Unbreakable doesn't have the mind-control flesh bud excuse of Stardust Crusaders for redeeming asshole villains. I dunno. But Koichi and Hazamada ends up geeking out about the author of the popular manga, "Pink Dark Boy", and the fact that its author actually lives in Morioh Town.

And while Rohan starts off as a mangaka that's just a wee bit eccentric, checking the type of spider and shit and observing its death throes (not quite sure why Koichi and Hazamada is so surprised, it's not like Rohan killed a dog or anything) and ranting about how the way to write a manga is to base it on reality, because reality is always far, far more interesting than baseless fantasy. He also gets to give a speech about how he's so passionate about writing manga, how he wants to write manga for the sake of writing manga... but at the same time, he's insecure about how many people will like his weird ideas, and "what will I do if I can't write stories?"

When Rohan leaves the room, Hazamada and Koichi are tricked into reading Rohan's latest manuscript (a little condition that ends up being dropped in Rohan's subsequent appearances), causing them to fall under the effects of Rohan's powers, Heaven's Door.

After Rohan gives a bit of an intro-dump about the effects of Heaven's Door, causes the two of them to be unable to harm Rohan, and starts reading into the lives of Koichi and Hazamada... Rohan ends up reading about all of the fancy Stands and all the insane powers that exist in the world and you can definitely forgive someone like Rohan for getting a bit too carried away, even ripping off pages from Koichi's face, and it's at this point that he skirts from just an eccentric writer with no concept of personal space or privacy to a sociopath.

And as Rohan is cackling like a goddamn psychopath, the episode cuts away to... Koichi and Hazamada having tea with Rohan and going home, all happy and satisfied with their autographs,  because Heaven's Door also has memory-manipulating powers. The only real thing that's amiss is Koichi losing 20 kilograms, but thanks to Heaven's Door's manipulations, he ends up just brushing it off, and even walks up to Rohan's house in the next morning without even realizing it.

It's actually quite unsettling, really, how Koichi realizes that he's trapped with a maniac when he enters Rohan's house, but when he pops his head out of the door, the combined effects of "forget everything that happened here when you get out of the house" and "thou shalt not harm Kishibe Rohan" causes him to lie and laugh with Josuke and Okuyasu, who has been following Koichi.

We get an insane sequence of Rohan's superhuman way of drawing manga, and... and I don't think Hirohiko Araki draws JJBA by shooting ink blots to ink pages, does he?

Of course, apparently Koichi pulls a Kakyoin-fighting-Death-13 and causes an injury on his arm, alerting Okuyasu and Josuke that something is wrong even when he ducked in and out of the house. But apparently Heaven's Door is pretty damn powerful, too, as reducing Okuyasu's entire body into strands of paper is a very valid usage of the Stand.

Josuke, meanwhile, has been standing outside of the room, and everyone present in the room realizes that Josuke can escape without suffering the effects of Heaven's Door, and he could bring in someone with a long-range stand like Yukako to beat Rohan up... leading Rohan to write on Okuyasu's body how he will burn himself to death if Josuke runs away.

And now, because Rohan has to get Josuke to open his eyes and look at his manuscript, Rohan ends up going by the logic of "what would I do if I was a manga protagonist", and apparently that means insulting Josuke's hair to provoke him... but apparently Josuke just goes... so angry that he even ceases to process what he's seeing, and punches Rohan through the manuscript and starts going berserk.

It's honestly a pretty ass-pull-y way to end this otherwise terrifying and unique Stand encounter, which basically ends not with Koichi outsmarting Rohan's Stand, but with Josuke just going so angry he cancels out Rohan's stand. It's definitely very unfortunate, and leaves behind a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

Still, we do at least get some backstory about Josuke's hair -- apparently when he was a kid struck with the huge fever caused by the Dio/Joestar curse in Stardust Crusaders, a bloodied dude that looks exactly like present-day Josuke ends up pushing Tomoko's car out of where it was trapped in a snow, which is why Josuke so idealized that look. Back when I was reading it, and anyone else familiar with manga, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this might be a time-travelling Josuke or some shit (the anime even adds in Josuke's jacket!) but nope. This is just a coincidence, and won't be brought up anywhere else in the series, even though time travel will be relevant at some point.

I also very much appreciate how the episode ends with a very Shonen Jump-esque proclamation that "Pink Dark Boy will be going on indefinite hiatus".

Overall, though, while this particular two-parter starts off very strong, and Rohan is an extremely fascinating character that just skirts the line between "anti-hero with no social skills and an unhealthy obsession" to "villain" instead of the outright "villain that makes an unexplained heel-face-turn after defeat", the way the conflict is resolved honestly leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth. 

The JoJo's Playlist:

• Heaven's Door is obviously based on the Bob Dylan song, Knocking on Heaven's Door. Knocking on Heaven's Door got a particularly popular cover by Guns N' Roses in the 80's.
• The second part of this two-parter features Diamond is Unbreakable's second opening, Chase, performed by the group Batta. Not much to say about this one -- it's definitely pleasant, though.