JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E21 Review: Learn to Fly

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 21: AWAKEN

This episode is an interesting one, since it gets split between Jolyne and Anasui's "fight" against the Green Baby's Stand, which is Green Green Grass of Home; as well as Foo Fighters' last Stand. It's a rather packed episode with a lot of things going on, which is a bit of a stark contrast compared to how traditionally Part-III-style stretched out Dragon's Dream and Yo-Yo Ma have been. It does make this episode particularly intense, and since episodes 21 and 22 kind of form like a two-parter to end the second 'cour' of Stone Ocean, and the Jail House Lock two-parter acts as a bit of an epilogue. 

It's also the swan song to my favourite character from Stone Ocean, Foo Fighters... and I'm not really sure why I like her/them so much. I guess it's the character concept? The weird-ass Stand? The general idea of a creature that's so alien learning what it means to be 'human', or to be 'sentient'? We don't really get too many bonding scenes between the main cast members of Stone Ocean, not quite like how the main casts of Parts III and V were shown as a unit all the time, while Part IV prides itself on its well-developed setting of Morioh Town. But out of the main cast, we did get a fair bit of Jolyne, Ermes and F.F. hanging out in the prison. The anime does admittedly truncate and cut chunks of it, but there's enough to, I feel, make F.F.'s monologue at the beginning of this episode about her biggest fear being losing her intellect being pretty well-done. 

We then cut to the cliffhanger from the previous episode. F.F.'s split-second of hesitation allows Pucci to summon Whitesnake, and F.F.'s unique existence as a sentient Stand means that Pucci could use Whitesnake's ability to push the Disc out of her host's head and very nearly just nullify her then and there. F.F., however, shoots herself in the head, knocking the Disc out and keeping her Stand (and her life) active. F.F. also sends a colony of plankton into D&G's mouth, utterly fucking him up and killing him. Elsewhere in the swamp, Yo-Yo Ma also disintegrates. Yo-Yo Ma's death leaves behind the egg-cocoon containing the strange creature only known as the Green Baby, and Jolyne notes the star marking on the baby's body. 

We do spend some more time with F.F.'s last stand, though. She's seen what Pucci looks like, and therefore it's in Pucci's best interest to kill her right here, right now in order to protect his identity, something not too dissimilar with what happened to Kira a couple of parts ago. In a situation similar to what F.F. found herself in during the Dragon's Dream fight, she needs water to regenerate from her wounds. We get a pretty fun chase as Whitesnake hounds down Foo Fighters, and while it was the most apparent during the cour 1 finale, I do really like just how distinct and foul-mouthed Whitesnake is compared to the more reserved Pucci. 

In their struggle, Whitesnake manages to tear Foo Fighters into two, reducing her to an interesting blend of her original robotic-looking Stand form and her human guise, which I think is the 'default' of what this entity called Foo Fighters truly is... since we do get into the discussion of what would happen if Jolyne and company stole the Foo Fighters Disc from Pucci again. 

Anyway, back to the episode -- Pucci demands to know what happened in the punishment wards, and Foo Fighters kind of deflects, telling half-truths and trying to piss Pucci off by getting him to rant that the creature born of the bone can't be killed. Turns out, though, being a plankton hive-mind thing, Foo Fighters can control her decapitated lower body (which contains the Disc), which is running around towards the faucet. This lower body manages to gain water and reform its true self... but then turns out that Whitesnake had inserted a boiling water Stand into the 'upper half' dummy, forcing Foo Fighters to activate the boiling water Stand, and very nearly killing Foo Fighters. Pucci rants about how no creature, let alone micro-organisms, can survive up to the high temperatures of boiling water. 

That's just the first half of the episode, because the second half of this episode adapts the 'fight' against the Green Baby. Or rather, its Stand, Green Green Grass of Home. This is a Stand power that I felt worked differently in the anime and the manga, because it's not just the Stand shrinking whatever comes close to it, but rather there's a bit of a play in perspectives in the manga with the whole 'vanishing point' thing and how artists work to give the impression of perspective with what's technically two-dimensional art. I don't think that impression comes off as strongly in animated format, though the anime does have a leg-up in actually showing the environment changing around Jolyne as she gets shrunk, and a great showcase as Jolyne and Anasui switch places and stuff. 

Anasui offers the situation, noting that the baby has an 'aura' that shrinks anything that gets close to it, so that they'll never be able to reach the baby since they shrink by half every time they get half as close to the baby. Or something. There's some theoretical physics that I'm not ready to get into at right now. Jolyne, being a Shonen battle-manga protagonist, is very much willing to yolo and reach the baby, charging in and shrinking a lot. It's dumb, and Anasui notes how dumb it is, but then Anasui goes into talking about how that singular focus is what attracted Anasui... and of course a narcissist like Anasui would fall in love with someone who gives their all to something else. 

Anasui also quickly figures out another property of the Green Baby's Stand, where a bottle he kicks near the baby doesn't shrink because the baby is... well, babying around and touches the bottle. It isn't super apparent until you compare each action sequence with the manga, but they do a great job at making sure that nothing the Green Baby does is really malicious and he's just... babying around being curious at the world around him, while it's his Stand that is really going around attacking everything around him. 

Because as Jolyne tries to challenge the power of constant shrinkage against the constant of gravity (she throws herself off a leaf), the true form of the Stand, the superhero-looking monkey Stand manifests itself and starts attacking Jolyne. The Stand itself snaps off Jolyne's strings, causing her to perpetually fall and shrink, while Green Green Grass of Home seems to be able to grow? Or it retains its size or something. Anasui uses Diver Down to attack and get Jolyne out of the way, but both humans find themselves in a mountainous landscape since they've shrunk and fallen to the dirt. The seemingly-automatic Stand abuses the properties of its shrinking-by-proximity by chucking a pebble, which grows into ginormous size. 

Jolyne and Anasui, however, manage to trick Green Green Grass of Home into running into the bottle, which is now immune to shrinking or size-changing, and as the Stand grows, it gets stuck in the bottle.  With the power of Diver Down, Jolyne and Anasui manage to run out of the neck of the bottle. The Stand being trap affects the Green Baby, who starts to struggle a bit and kick the bottle itself, trapping Anasui. Jolyne is adamant at freeing Anasui, who refuses to let the bottle be destroyed lest the hostile Stand gets freed...

...and then, very abruptly, the Green Baby touches Jolyne, and everything gets reverted back to normal, with the baby hugging Jolyne and being super-interested with the Joestar mark on her shoulder. Anasui predicts the strange green baby will continue being an enemy, and... again, I've never been the biggest fan of this sequence either, though watching it and knowing what's to come, I can appreciate this a lot more than the plantification caused by the Green Baby's cocoon. The fact that the anime really does highlight the innocence and childlikeness of the baby just babying around the field does make it more believable that the automatic Stand would stop being hostile and disappear the moment the Green Baby sees Jolyne as his 'family' of sorts. I mean, the existence of the Green Baby itself is so weird and this thing has so many things going on with it at once (and only the shrinking thing is attributed to his Stand) and... well, the Green Baby is probably the plot point that I like the least out of Stone Ocean. 

Pretty well-structured episode, though, and my hang-ups with the weirdness of Dio's bone and the Green Baby isn't something that the anime could fix without a severe overhaul, and I'll just chalk it up to 'weird things are really happening'. 

Random Notes: 

• It's never named outside of the commercial cut, but the Green Baby's Stand is called Green, Green Grass of Home, based on the Tom Jones song of the same name. 
• Also, yes, I consistently omit the comma in the Stand's name while writing this review, because it was a bit hard to proofread these sentences with an extra comma in-between.
• Maybe I should've called it G3H, the way Araki shortens Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap to D4C? 
• We never get to learn the name of Pucci's boiling water Stand, and I feel that's quite a shame. For a collector of Stands, we never actually get to see Pucci and Whitesnake abuse it by summoning random Stands as My Hero Academia would do with All For One. 
  
• I guess the boiling water Stand is automatic, since Foo Fighters doesn't seem to have any control over it? I guess it would be something similar to Survivor, then. 
• Jolyne stitches her tongue to be able to talk, recovering from the damage done by Yo-Yo Ma's acid. While it is something she's shown to have done before, using her Stand to stitch her wounds, I do wonder why she didn't do it during the Yo-Yo Ma fight? Obviously the Doylist answer is that the fight was meant to be Anasui's shining moment, but there really isn't much of a Watsonian answer beyond 'Jolyne forgot'. 
• Is it just coincidence or foreshadowing that Jolyne was basically trying to weaponize gravity against Green Green Grass of Home? Especially considering what powers the Green Baby would give Pucci? 
• Pour one out for D&G, huh? Such a pathetic, irrelevant antagonist. I actually wonder if Yo-Yo Ma was his natural Stand or just something Pucci implanted into him (which throws a real monkey's wrench into whether the Stone Ocean villain Stands are true 'reflections of the soul' or not) but Yo-Yo Ma being so persistent, confident and indestructible despite his sycophantic nature is such a huge difference from D&G, who's barely a tool and a goal for the other characters, suffering from Anasui and F.F.'s respective attacks without really actively fighting back. 
• There's a shot of random fish dying as the Green Baby is born, but we can chalk it up to just something equivalent to its initial tree-sprouting eldritch reality-warping abilities instead of something connected to what the Green Green Grass of Home Stand does.
• In the manga, the Green Baby leaves 'markings' on the soil and on Anasui's hand, but this is all entirely cut out of the anime... mostly because it never really comes up ever again. 
• I really do like the design of Green Green Grass of Home, and I think there's some vibe to this thing that really makes it feel like it could be a main villain in a more modern-setting superhero story, like this guy could fit right in within the cast of My Hero Academia or some shit.