JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E06 Review: Stickers

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 5], Episode 6: Ermes' Stickers

So the 'JoBro' of this part is Ermes Costello, and while we do meet her in the first episode, she actually gets separated from Jolyne. And for good reason, too -- the couple of conflicts that Jolyne's been wrapped up in after getting into the prison ends up being a starter fight that sets Jolyne herself up, before going straight into a backstory-heavy bit with Jolyne's dad. Ermes would've probably been a bit of a distraction there. 

But now that things have settled down and we've set up the new status quo and given Jolyne a major goal, her ally Emporio does end up doing a pretty logical thing here -- gather allies. We get a brief recap of Green Dolphin Street Prison from Emporio to Jolyne, but other than her knowing about how the prison was always kinda creepy, the rest of the episode is entirely carried by Ermes. After getting her money robbed from her in the infirmary, she goes off hunting for the jackass janitor who took her money. 

Of course, Ermes ends up realizing that she's got a cut on her hand, and she naturally has developed a Stand power. Throughout this episode Ermes is basically trying to figure out what the hell's happening to her -- which would admittedly be a bit repetitive if she gets another punchy-ghost ability, so it's nice that Kiss is actually a pretty unique ability -- not just duplication of objects, but causing an explosion of force when the objects are fused back together. And stickers are involved! Always found Kiss to be pretty fun, and I do like Ermes slowly learning how to use his sticker ability. 

Ermes ends up finding the janitor, but in the process accidentally grabs one of the discs that fall out of the janitor's head -- a neat way for the story to tie Ermes's little origin story to the mystery of Whitesnake that we set up in the previous episode. 

And then we get the actual encounter with the lunatic that is Thunder McQueen and... he's kind of an over-the-top caricature of someone with suicidal tendencies. I do like that our mysterious villain (and Ermes) acknowledge just how much of an utter bastard McQueen is and how easily he defaults to killing himself out of self-victimization. An interesting thought exercise, I suppose, but you're not going to really get much depth out of McQueen other than Whitesnake's brief monologues -- the voice actor and the animators clearly had a lot of fun hamming shit up. 

Of course, McQueen's Stand is an automatic one that inflicts the same kind of damage to Ermes, so Ermes has to fight McQueen while at the same time stop him from killing himself in increasingly elaborate ways.

Ultimately, it's Emporio that ends up approaching her and delivering some much-needed exposition about Stands. We get the explicit explanation that each person can either have a Stand disc or a memory disc or both, but while they're discussing that, McQueen has gone off to electrocute himself. Ermes ends up trying to talk McQueen down (he's insane, and also insanely unlucky) but McQueen is... well, he quickly goes to 'you're only pretending to care' until Ermes snaps and calls McQueen out for his selfishness. Ermes uses Kiss to duplicate and smash McQueen's head together, dislodging him from the cables and allowing Ermes to recover the Stand disc. 

And... and that's it for the episode. It's honestly kind of a neat, lighter fare that's much needed after the heaviness of Jotaro's fake death last episode and all the huge revelations, but I do really love, again, that not only does this episode introduce to us what's essentially the second most important character in the Part, but also shows off her brand-new ability, while also allowing the audience to get some exposition about Whitesnake, his abilities and the enigma of Emporio without having to deal with anything too imporant in the grand scheme of things. Pretty fun little episode, basically. 

Random Notes:

• The overly hammy mention of "Bugs Bunny's birthday" that Ermes did in his rant was originally "Mickey Mouse's birthday" in the manga, but I guess Disney is the one thing that they can't actually say the name of. 
• The hunt for money as a resource in the prison is going to be a major theme in the next couple of mini-arcs, and I actually appreciate that episode 1 sets up this fact about Green Dolphin Prison. 
• The brutal beatdown by those wrestler guards in episode 1 also explains why Ermes ends up getting stuck in the infirmary for an entire week. 
• Ermes was originally introduced to Weather and Anasui by Emporio, but that scene ends up getting cut and moved into a later episode, swapping Ermes out for Jolyne. I... I actually think it kind of works better, but I don't know if it'll cause inconsistencies later on. I guess we can just assume that Jolyne and Ermes do update each other on their weirdo allies. 
• It backfires very badly, but Ermes wanting to run the fuck away from McQueen is kind of the smart thing to do in her situation. 
• Using saline water to increase a body's electrical conductivity seems to be the exact kind of obscure detail that Araki read somewhere and decided to base a huge factor of a climax of a fight after. 
• Ew, exploding pisspots. 
• I'm immature, so I found the comedy bit with Ermes and her panties to be funny. 
• Thunder McQueen is named after fashion designer Alexander McQueen ('Xander' and 'Thunder' are read identically in katakana); his Stand Highway to Hell is named after the AC/DC song of the same name. Ermes's Stand is called Kiss, after the metal band KISS.