JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 5], Episode 14: Kiss of Love and Revenge, Part 2
I've always liked the Limp Bizkit storyline in Stone Ocean, and a good chunk of it is how... interesting it is with how it plays around with trope conventions regarding a zombie power. It's not like we've never had a zombie-style power in JoJo before, with Phantom Blood's vampire tropes having lots of lesser zombie goons among the villains... but that's probably why Limp Bizkit subverts regular zombie tropes so much -- we've seen it before in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Even Part 3's Justice (Enya's Stand) also has some zombie-like minions.
The first half of the episode continues the fight against the invisible alligator, and... the ridiculousness of fighting an invisible alligator (who can climb walls just because) is kind of just a backdrop to Jolyne and Ermes yelling at each other. Ermes's storyline isn't particularly new -- she takes to the vengeance thing personally, refusing to get help, which is a storyline that on top of my head is pretty similar to Part 2's Caesar and Part 3's Polnareff. We get a fun bit where the invisible alligator can walk on walls for no real reason, and then F.F. uses herself as bait, gets her arm bitten by the crocodile before she summons her gun and murders the shit out of the crocodile. 
We then return to see the pipe where Ermes buried Sports Maxx, only to see it exploded open and handprints on it.
And we get to one of the cooler parts of this arc, where Sports Maxx is just shambling out of the pipe, heading towards the chapel and looking for the 'bone' that Whitesnake/Pucci had assigned him to look for. The haggard Maxx complains about the taste of sewage in his throat, and visits the woman's ward to look for 'Bitch' (no, literally, the jackass just calls him 'bitch' in English), one of the prostitutes he frequents. Sports Maxx tries to talk to a guard and Bitch, and it's rather obvious to the audience that Sports Maxx is actually holding a one-sided conversation, with the two of them interacting with everything else around them.
So Sports Maxx is an invisible ghost, and it's rather interesting to see this egoistical gangster guy try to continue to throw his weight around, beating up another prisoner that Bitch attacks out of confusion when she feels Maxx touch her. Maxx continues to attack this male prisoner, taking out money and some drugs he's hiding and thinking that he's giving them to Bitch while the poor lady is just freaked out. Sports Maxx tries to dope up on drugs, only to have all the veins in his arms burst with disgusting gray liquid that Maxx identifies as sewage. Which is a horrifying imagery and sequence as Sports Maxx realized that he's dead, and his Stand, Limp Bizkit, had activated on him.
Furious and angry, Sports Maxx attacks Bitch and tears her body apart, leading to the impressively gruesome image of a feral, invisible-zombie Sports Maxx covered partially in blood, outlining parts of him. That's very cool-looking, and even the episode's eyecatches use it as a way to visualize Limp Bizkit.
We then come to the second half of the episode, where Jolyne and Ermes arrive on the battlefield, facing off against Sports Maxx in the graveyard -- which the story foreshadows early on when Ermes is trailing Sports Maxx. We kind of get a repeat of the invisible alligator zombie fight, with Jolyne using Stone Free to create a string web while the two ladies fight against invisible combatants. Turns out, though, that the combatants that they've been fighting is actually Bitch's zombie instead of Sports Maxx. They deal with Bitch... and then all the graveyard's graves explode open and a horde of invisible zombies start attacking.
Jolyne advocates retreat, but Ermes refuses to. She has a score to settle... and she knows that Sports Maxx will be attacking her personally because of the grudge between them. Again, the fight itself isn't the most interesting thing because after the horror factor of the invisible zombies have passed, it's just a bunch of invisible adversaries... but Ermes's voice-acting and her burning desire to take down her sister's murderer is told very well.
There's also a neat usage of the zombies by Ermes allowing her head to be bitten by Sports Max... only for Sports Maxx to actually have removed his head and holding it in a way so Ermes' attack would miss. Ermes prevents injury to her own head by creating a dummy head with Kiss (I'm not sure how it works, but I guess when the heads merge together the damage is halved or something?). When Ermes' heads are combined together, however, all aspects of Ermes' duplicate head is pulled back... including the piece in Sports Maxx's zombie gullet. This ends up marking where Sports Maxx is, leading to a Stand beatdown by Ermes.
And it's... it's rather simple, but after all of Sports Maxx's mocking throughout these two episodes, interspaced with images from the Gloria flashback, it's pretty nice to see Ermes finally unleash a series of brutal beatdowns right onto Sports Maxx's head and body. And all of her punches are for Gloria. None of it is for Ermes herself, which I thought is a rather neat subversion of "...and this is for me!" one-liner. Anyway, Ermes uses Kiss to destroy Sports Maxx's head, earning them the two discs. And in a neat little scene, we get the light coming in just as Sports Maxx's Stand is annihilated and the zombies disappear.
As F.F. arrives to treat Ermes, we jump back to the cold open of episode 13, which explains that Jolyne went to the Ultra Security part of the prison for a reason, as the guards find her alongside the corpse of poor 'Bitch'. It's overall a pretty fun two-parter, and I was rather satisfied with it.
Random Notes:
- Limp Bizkit is a 90's experimental rap band from Florida. I do confess to not really liking a lot of their work, but they're all right.
- "A ZOMBIE HAS NO CONCEPT OF UP AND DOWN! IT CAN WALK ON WALLS AND CEILINGS!" has to be one of the most ridiculous sentences to come out of a character in JoJo.
- "Even if I rip out all the shit in your guts and fill your empty skull with it, I won't be satisfied!"
- I actually forget just how much the cast abuses F.F.'s plankton-healing powers. I don't think it gets as ridiculous as Crazy Diamond, but it certainly is there.
- Man, this episode really did ratchet the brutality up, even in JoJo standards, huh? Using blood to splatter around the invisible ghost-zombies really is a great decision.
- There is a bit of a oddity in the manga where the girls are speculating that Sports Maxx is a natural-born Stand user, and instead it is made rather consistent with the flashbacks between Sports Maxx and Father Pucci that he received his Stand Disc from Whitesnake.
- We also get extra scenes for Ermes and Gloria's benefit that feels very natural that I was surprised to read that they were original to this episode -- the flashback scene of Sports Maxx watching as his goons strangle Gloria; as well as Gloria's ghost hugging Ermes at the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment