JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S03E30 Review: Cats Are Scum

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:  Diamond is Unbreakable, Episode 30: The Cat Loves Kira Yoshikage

We get an episode that centers all around Kira again, and this really is why Kira Yoshikage ends up being one of the most memorable villains in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Dio may show up in more Parts than Kira, but he tends to be offscreen for huge chunks of it, sitting on his throne or lurking in the darkness, whereas most of the other villains tended to either only show up or be relevant at the end (Kars, Diavolo) or to mostly act as someone who sends evil minions to hound the good guys (Pucci, Dio). The only other main villain that really ends up being  arguably as developed as Kira is Part VII's Funny Valentine, but it's going to take 2025 or something when we do reach Part VII in anime format.

Anyway, this episode sort of shows the things that Kira does to avoid suspicion. He ends up noting that he needs to buy new shoes because his feet is one size larger than Kosaku, he is practicing how to copy Kosaku's penmanship, manages to handwave eating the mushrooms that Kosaku hates by making it look like he just enjoys his wife's cooking... and while Shinobu doesn't really notice it, the kid, Hayato, is pretty suspicious. Mind you, Hayato himself is kind of a creepy kid himself. Who the fuck puts a camera in their parents' room and mutters to himself "it's been some time since my parents got naked together"? What the fuck, little boy.

This episode's main bulk deals with Shinobu and Kira dealing with the appearance of a strange cat that snuck into the house. Really fun bit on the episode's part to show the various eccentricities of cat behaviour, by the way. It seems to be a bit hostile to Shinobu, and the panicked Shinobu ends up waving a broom around and causing furniture to fall down and crush the cat. Kira notices an arrow hole on the side of the cat, but shrugs it off and buries it. And then -- and it's never really explained why beyond "Stands be wacky, yo" -- the corpse of the cat ends up being reincarnated into this horrific cat-plant hybrid with cat eyes sprouting as stamens, a little cat mouth, and it uses its leaves to sort of behave like a cat... but it's also a plant, requiring sunlight to become active. Oh, and it retains its Stand ability to launch air bubbles.

Stray Cat (as Kira dubs it later in the episode) ends up attacking Shinobu, remembering her as the human who killed it, and after blowing up part of Shinobu's toe, Kira shows up and decides to immediately kill the cat. Interestingly, Stray Cat's ability to manipulate air pressures makes it kind of immune to Kira's bombs, which cannot detonate. Killer Queen mashing the finger-trigger confusedly is pretty funny.

But most interestingly isn't just the fact that Kira is fighting a little cat-plant monster. It's the fact that he's straight-up protecting the passed-out Shinobu, implying that he's actually grown to care for her... but his sociopathic mind ends up rationalizing it to himself that he's just "maintaining his cover, that's all" while taking possibly-fatal air bubble explosions that he really could've avoided. It's never really elaborated much beyond this arc, but the relationship between Kira and Shinobu -- as twisted as it is, considering Kira's a man masquerading as the woman's dead husband -- certainly is an interesting and well-written one.


And in one of the more horrifying bits that sort of makes up for the nonsensical "I drink IV fluid to replenish my lost fluids" nonsense from the previous episode, Stray Cat apparently took Medicine 101 and uses an air bubble to send a little embolism into Kira's veins, which is way, way more horrifying than exploding compressed air bubbles have any right to be. Kira blows up part of his vein to get rid of it, of course, but that was pretty creative, I think.

The way Kira wins, though, ends up being pretty simple because apparently Stray Cat isn't as intelligent as Iggy or Pet Shop from Part III, not really being able to reason and ends up just behaving like a normal cat and gets distracted when Kira throws a ball at it.

Kira then covers everything up, digging out Stray Cat and hiding him in an attic (where it remains dormant due to the lack of air), and telling Shinobu that she fainted out of guilt. But while Shinobu is certainly fooled by all the concern Kira is showing him, the final scenes show Hayato investigating what the hell's going on with his dad, and ends up digging around in the cellar and finding Stray Cat. Hayato nearly gets strangled to death by the air bubbles, but by some freak luck manages to puncture the bubble and use the airflow to close the window and shut out the sunlight.

Kira, meanwhile, realizing that Hayato isn't with his schoolmates, ends up going back to investigate. Hayato manages to make it look like Stray Cat 'broke out' on its own and it's not because of Hayato discovering it... but then Kira ends up monologuing like a goddamn moron, alerting Hayato that his "dad" isn't really his dad but someone else. It's definitely a bit of a silly ending to what is a pretty great episode -- surely there are a lot of better ways to make Hayato realize that Kosaku is actually Kira other than these observations leading to Kira mouthing off and monologuing like a moron? Still, the episode's  honestly pretty neat, a nice, little self-contained episode starring the Kawajiri family, Kira's psyche and Hayato's little investigations into his "father".

The JoJo Playlist:

• The Stand, Stray Cat, is apparently a reference to the 70's American band Stray Cats, known for the songs Stray Cat Strut, Rock This Town and I Won't Stand In Your Way.