JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E17 Review: The Urine Drinker's Feng Shui

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 17: Enter the Dragon's Dream

So we start off with the Dragon's Dream two-parter, which... is always kind of a contentious fight for me. I think I managed to follow the arc a bit better because I'm already a fair bit familiar with feng shui before reading the arc in the manga, but it's definitely one that ended up benefiting a fair bit by the translation to anime version. This arc is always kind of memorable due to how... interesting the Dragon's Dream Stand is. 

And interestingly, a good chunk of this fight is between Kenzo and Foo Fighters, with Jolyne spending a good bulk of the two-parter laying wounded with the eccentric Anasui watching over her. I've always liked a lot of these JoJo fights that revolve around the secondary characters mostly because... well, there's always a good chance that the secondary character loses the fight and it's always a bit more tense that way. 

We do get a bit of confrontation between Kenzo and Jolyne, with Jolyne doing the epic, memetic multicultural finger-taunt while Kenzo waxes lyrical about the benefits of (yuck) urine therapy. But then Kenzo gets distracted by striking a corpse where F.F. is hiding in, leading to a rather unlikely sequence where a corpse just happens to get knocked in the way of F.F.'s bullets. 

While Anasui protects Jolyne, we get a fun sequence where both Kenzo and F.F. are trying to figure out each other's Stands. It's a bit of a rarity in JoJo, I think, where usually the good guys' Stands are either already a known quantity for the bad guys, or if they're simple enough, but I do like that Kenzo's crazy "strike the nerve in order to activate the adrenal glands to release chemicals in the lungs" ends up not working because F.F. is a colony of planktons piloting a corpse, and she can casually puncture her own throat or squeeze through bars. 

(Also, yeah, that whole sequence with Kenzo's weird body-bloating corpse is completely nonsensical, but this is JoJo.)

Kenzo also summons his strange Stand, Dragon's Dream, a talking jade dragon with a ring and an arrow, who points at a certain direction and Kenzo seems to move in that direction. While doing so, Anasui gives us some exposition about Kenzo's backstory, where he's this bizarre cult leader who ends up drugging all his followers and burning the house they're in to avoid the authorities. Kenzo alone survived, 'luckily' avoiding death when some chunks of the building collapsed on him and shielding him from fire. 

Dragon's Dream, the Stand, hovers behind F.F. and actually talks to her, and Dragon's Dream is an... interesting Stand. He actually takes a neutral stance in the battle, able to talk to anyone, and basically drops enough hints for F.F., Jolyne and Anasui to collectively figure out the nature of its power. Kenzo himself keeps moving in the direction of the arrows, using his own innate martial arts to hit F.F. before allowing his own Stand to rip off his own arm. The arm, magically warped away by the Stand's powers, zips around and strikes F.F. from behind, before reattaching with Kenzo. 

I'm always never been a big fan of this aspect of Dragon's Dream, by the way. The whole 'temporarily warps away a limb to use them as a weapon to attack the one targeted by the Stand' thing? I get that Dragon's Dream shows the best feng shui to attack, the 'direction of unluckiness' and 'direction of safety' and all that, and it makes kind of some sense in that it basically warps reality to fit the extremes of what feng shui can do. But I really did think that the teleporting-limbs thing is a bit distracting. 

Speaking of how insane Dragon's Dream is, it basically causes super misfortune for F.F. (not too dissimilar to the final Stand in JoJolion, come to think of it) if she's standing in a place with unfortunate feng shui... like causing a bunch of mice to be attracted by blood, accidentally hit a control panel, close the doors, squish a corpse and cause a bunch of glasses to fly and impale F.F. in the mouth. Or at another point, when some flies go up towards a ventilator, which attracts a bird, which flies into the ventilator machine, breaking the fan, causing the fan to fall, and then causing a boomerang-shaped piece of debris to ricochet around the ground and slice apart F.F.'s skull -- and this bit is the cliffhanger for this part. 

Anyway, the Kenzo fight isn't my favourite part of Stone Ocean, but it certainly is interesting. I do respect what they were going on here, and while the execution might not be perfect, at least the fight is an interesting one. 

Random Notes:

• Kenzo is a reference to the fashion band of the same name. 
• Dragon's Dream is a reference to the Thorn Brennan album of the same name. 
• The name of the arc in both the anime and manga references Enter the Dragon. So does the Japanese version (Burn, Dragon's Dream), which is framed similarly to the localized title of Enter the Dragon in Japan (Burn, Dragon).
• One of the best parts in Stone Ocean, which is memed a lot -- Jolyne giving Kenzo the finger in American, Japanese, French and Naples style. 
  
• It does admittedly beat the whole purpose of Pucci sending a bunch of Stand users to attack Jolyne all at once, but at least we have a reason as to why D&G doesn't go on to attack the wounded Jolyne -- he's afraid of Anasui. Anasui protecting Jolyne and not daring to move away from her is also a neat justification as to why the good guys aren't really doing anything. 
• The 'huh?' reaction from Jolyne at Anasui's crazy "I want to marry you" proclamation is basically what you'd expect. I kinda gloss over it in the review itself because I didn't really care about it, though. 
• I was a bit confused why Kenzo could see the 'moving power' inside F.F., but apparently it's because of Survivor's effects. It's kind of, uh... odd why no one really is under the effects of Survivor anymore, but I guess all these named characters have enough strength of will or whatever to not go into full berserker mode like Westwood did. 
• Speaking of Westwood, both his and Sonny Likir's body show up as cameos in the anime. Neither of them do in the manga.