JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 20: F.F. The Witness
So yeah, we're entering the crux of the Ultra Security House Unit arc, which took up way less time to watch in the anime than in the manga. And it's not that the manga version is bad or anything, but it's just that the way the arc was restructured in the anime ends up making everything flow so smoothly. Again, I did express some frustrations about how the Green Baby plant horror sequence ended, and it's debatable whether Dragon's Dream and Yo-Yo Ma having relatively traditional Stand fights with a twist to them ends up being better pacing or not.
This episode is basically split into two concurrently-going storylines, with F.F. hunting down D&G in the prison, while Jolyne and Anasui have to deal with the sentient automatic Stand Yo-Yo Ma in the swamps. The bulk of the screentime focuses around Jolyne, Anasui and Yo-Yo Ma as they escape with a stolen boat in the nearby swamplands, as they try to evade the patrolling guards with heavy-duty machineguns. Yo-Yo Ma continues to get himself into wacky hijinks like falling and impaling himself on the ship's controls, alternating between causing disturbances like that, or teaching Jolyne and Anasui how to camouflage themselves with leaves.
There is a pretty cool confrontation when one of the guards' fans accidentally exposes Jolyne and Anasui, leading to one of those cases where we get to see Stand users fight against people armed to the teeth. Anasui's descriptions of the machineguns had been pretty great at hyping it up, but then seeing Anasui abuse the fact that normal people can't see Stands allows him to literally lob Yo-Yo Ma into one of the boats, causing the machinegun of one boat to tear apart another one.
While all this chaos is going on, we get some really uncomfortable close-ups of Yo-Yo Ma's salivating mouth, and there are a couple of sequences that seem to be red herrings of sorts. Initially, it seems like Yo-Yo Ma attacks with mosquitoes, which bite Jolyne during the chaos of fighting the guards and leave a bunch of holes in her body.
Then we get to see the horror of Yo-Yo Ma's assault, which... I have to be honest, I never really got that vibe from Yo-Yo Ma. I'm not sure if the effects simply aren't grotesque enough, or if we have just seen creepier ones in Parts IV-VI (Jail House Lock, coming up soon, is much more effective in its creep factor). Jolyne is unable to speak because there are holes in her tongue, and I guess Yo-Yo Ma's acid just dissolves and makes holes without pain? We get a comedy moment where Jolyne tries to communicate with Anasui, and Anasui thinks it's a form of flirting and goes in for a kiss.
It really is rather odd that Jolyne doesn't try to write it out -- not with pen, no, but with her strings, which she does with the "Be All Eyes" a couple of sequences later.
We do get Yo-Yo Ma doing all sorts of nonsense, like pulling out frogs and offering to make Jolyne a sexy miniskirt out of frog skin, which is just kind of an example of weird dialogue to come out of JoJo. Jolyne tries to keep both her and Anasui's vision away from Yo-Yo Ma, which prompts it to attack... and Jolyne catches the mosquitoes with Stone Free. However, the other side of her face starts to succumb to the attack, which finally clues Anasui in to the fact that they're under attack.
And, again, just like the Dragon's Dream arc, poor Jolyne gets sidelined a bit in this fight, but it is Anasui's first proper 'solo' battle. And Anasui tries his best to figure out what's going on with Yo-Yo Ma... and initially, all he does is punch a lot and kill a bunch of mosquitoes. Yo-Yo Ma alternates between being ominous and being obsequious, and we get another ridiculous JoJo scene as Yo-Yo Ma empties all of his pockets, which, among others, includes two rhinoceros beetles, several frogs, a karaoke microphone, some berries and a broccoli.
As Anasui kicks the random junk around, Yo-Yo Ma monologues about how he's only here to kill Jolyne, and as an automatic Stand that's all he can do. But he's willing to leave Anasui alive if he leaves the boat. Meanwhile, Jolyne figures out that the attack came from the spraying of the river water, upon which Yo-Yo Ma has poured his very caustic acid (in the manga, I think this is specifically identified as human-flesh-dissolving enzyme, but I'm not sure if the wording is the same here). Anasui begins to speed up the boat, which increases the spraying of the polluted water onto their forms.
...and then, rather abruptly, Yo-Yo Ma starts to jump on all fours, hide from the cawing birds, and even chases after one of the frogs that he pulled out of his trousers, which according to him has a NICE BODEEEEH! in English. Turns out that in one of the many times that Anasui struck Yo-Yo Ma with Diver Down, he merged his brain with a frog's brain, which neutralizes any intelligent capacity he has.
Now I'm not mad at all that this happened. Is it a bit too similar with the whole "merge things together to defeat the enemy in contrived ways" that Gold Experience and Crazy Diamond shorthand that the two previous parts sometimes do? A little bit, but Diver Down has been shown to be able to deconstruct and reconstruct things in ways that Anasui finds pleasing. It's just that... well, I don't know. I think I just never really felt the threat from Yo-Yo Ma, and it veers too much into the comedic routine for me to take it seriously, and Anasui having disabled Yo-Yo Ma just happens rather abruptly. I dunno. Not my favourite fight in Stone Ocean, that's for sure... but I do like that Anasui at least gets a victory over Yo-Yo Ma instead of just waiting until F.F. finishes off his user.
Meanwhile, the happenings in the Green Dolphin Prison is a fair bit more exciting, for the lesser amount of screentime it was given. The guards find the tree-i-fied corpses in the Ultra Security House Unit, being rightfully bamboozled at the results of such a grotesque Stand. The guards find the only survivor there, D&G, and take him in. There's a very cool moment where both Pucci and Foo Fighters are watching from where they are hidden, both trying to figure out what the best way to accomplish their mission is.
Pucci really wants to interrogate D&G personally, and question him what he saw in the Ultra Security House Unit in regards to whatever happened with Dio's bone, which I thought was a rather unique twist of this arc. Yes, Pucci did instigate the conflict that goes on, sending his minions to fight Jolyne, wanting the bone to do whatever it was going to do... but he has no idea what is going to happen. And with the religious reverence he has towards Dio, he is nothing short of ecstatic about what he could see.
And as Pucci is about to bullshit and/or sneak his way into the ambulance, turns out that F.F. has disguised herself as one of the paramedics. F.F. is about to riddle D&G full of bullets with her finger-gun, but then the other paramedic, controlled by one of Whitesnake's Discs, attacks. F.F. deals with the other paramedic, but then realizes that Whitesnake is there... only for Father Pucci to reveal himself, showing off his true identity and kicking off the climax of this second big arc of Stone Ocean as he forces Foo Fighters into prioritizing attacking him or D&G.
Overall... yeah, I think I said my piece about the Yo-Yo Ma fight enough in the reviews of these two episodes. And looking back, I do think that I'm not the biggest fan of this batch of fights. I get that it's meant to give Foo Fighters and Anasui a fair bit of focus as they get big solo fights. But while both Dragon's Dream and Yo-Yo Ma were pretty interesting Stands conceptually, I wasn't the biggest fan of how they were portrayed as antagonists and how they were ultimately disposed of. But hey... at least they don't take like 10 chapters to slog through!
Random Notes:
- It really is kinda funny that everyone else in Stone Ocean is being some kind of over-the-top fashion model... and then we have D&G, who's just has a minimal-budget gladiator outfit. I'm sorry, at least Guccio, with his fashion disaster look, ends up looking distinctive. D&G just kinda looks like a background character rejected from Spartacus or something.
- In the anime, Yo-Yo Ma has a band sticker from the rock band R.E.M. among his belongings. I guess while the JoJo anime can still use band names as the names of Stands or characters, actually showing them as the band itself is a big no-no in terms of copyright.
- While Pucci does listen to Handel's Messiah, in the manga he specifies that it's the version conducted by Gardiner in 1982.
- I really did wish they showed more effort to destroy Yo-Yo Ma. I've always felt like it was the biggest showcase of the heroes being fools in this part -- sure, when they were splitting up I would buy that the three heroes only have time to each launch a single strike, but I really wished they played up Yo-Yo Ma's indestructibility the same way they did Notorious B.I.G. or Superfly, making him feel truly unbreakable.
- Man, sure hope those guards didn't actually get eaten by crocodiles.
- I did remember the first time I read this arc and thought that Jolyne being unable to speak meant that the Stand was a rehash of Clash and Talking Head from Vento Aureo.
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