JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E32 Review: The Wind Has Stopped

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 32: Heavy Weather, Part 3

And now we get the conclusion of the Pucci brothers' deathmatch, and... I do like the fight between Weather and Pucci, featuring Anasui. I really do! It's just that... considering that this is basically the last time that they fight each other, it did end in a disappointingly not-too-satisfying conclusion between the grudge match after the previous episode had been rather great at showcasing the hatred between the two biological brothers... and the explanation about the Heavy Weather Stand, I think, still rubs me the wrong way.

We check in a bit with Jolyne's group, where they use Joylne's Joestar-mark-radar ability to try and figure out where Weather Report is... before cutting back to Weather and Anasui, who are the primary protagonists of this fight. Honestly, I really did wonder how this scene would've played out like if it was Weather and Jolyne instead of Anasui? Because I don't hate Anasui like a lot of the fandom seems to be, but I do find that his larger role in some of the episodes ended up... not really mattering. Eh. 

Weather gives an abridged version of last episode's events to Anasui, before theorizing that touching the snails causes the metamorphosis into a snail. They begin to walk around to look for Pucci, who Weather can sense is nearby, but both of their efforts yield nothing but snails. Suddenly, Weather's leg is amputated by an attack, and Pucci rises -- almost comically, IMO -- from a pile of snails. Pucci yells about how he's overcame the power of Heavy Weather, and he can't turn into a snail. 

Pucci gives a huge rant about how Weather's uncontrollable Heavy Weather will help Pucci get to heaven, by wiping out all of the good guys in the town. However, turns out that Anasui has submerged Diver Down into Weather Report's body, giving him a Diver Down leg so he can jump around. This is illustrated very well with the visual image of Weather Report's blood dropping on Pucci's face. 

...and I guess this really completes Diver Down's weird handling in Stone Ocean. From this point onwards Diver Down is really just used to 'dive' into objects and sometimes taking the damage in lieu of another character. Really, Diver Down 'storing damage' or 'modifying others' kinda disappears after he kills Guccio, lobotomizes Yo-Yo-Ma and mangles Kenzou. A small detail, but I would still like to point this out. 

We get a rather cool fight between Pucci and Weather, with their Stands clashing and Weather's Stand transforming his cloud-arm into a giant blade. However, as Weather seems to have the upper hand, Pucci flashes a rainbow light to Anasui, turning him into a partial-snail and causing Diver Down to slough off. 

And... this is the weird bit that I do still think is the weirdest and most shoehorned 'JoJo exaggerates some real-world facts' things ever. I love the idea of subliminal messaging being used into a power. Hell, I don't even think subliminal messages causing you to think you are a snail -- and that because of Stand powers, it actually physically turns out into a snail -- to be all that weird compared to some of the Stand powers we've seen in Part V and VI. The concept itself isn't that terrible... but forcing it as the 'ah-ha, this is the explanation' for how Heavy Weather works, especially since previous episodes have shown characters like Jolyne or Ermes starting to turn to snails explicitly by touching the rainbows or snails instead of looking at the rainbows... it really does feel shoehorned in, and the anime (which tends to fix this confusion.

It just feels like Araki is trying too hard to do the 'each Stand only has one power', but with Echoes already being shown to have Acts, and a lot of other main-character Stands having additional abilities, I really can't see why it couldn't have just been an 'act 2' of the Weather Report Stand, and that rainbows that transform people into snails is just part of the ability without the bizarre subliminal messages 'twist'. It's like the Yo-Yo Ma "it's not the mosquitoes, it's invisible acid saliva" twist, honestly.

We also have the handwave that, oh, Anasui has already been influenced so knowing that it's subliminal won't work on him. And that Whitesnake can remove Pucci's sight with discs, turning him blind and allowing him to avoid the vision. This also demonstrates an ability of Whitesnake to remove senses, when previously it's only been shown to only remove memories and Stands, which... yeah, it feels like another new situational ability being "revealed" just for the sake of this subliminal messaging twist. 

I dunno. It just really didn't work for me, is all, and while I've mellowed out on some of the weaker parts of Stone Ocean (Yo-Yo Ma, Dragon's Dream, the final episodes), this one really still rankles me a bit. 

Ahem. Anyway, Pucci beats up Anasui a bit, then with a fun line of "you shall be crucified", is about to murder Weather Report. But then suddenly Pucci gets impaled by blood-spikes, because Weather is using his weather manipulating abilities of using cold winds to manipulate them, preventing Pucci from using his Daredevil-tier blind-senses to sense where they come from. Pucci then uses Whitesnake to control Anasui and hijack his sights, which... okay, I feel like this can be handwaved as an extension of Whitesnake being able to reduce memories to discs?

Without describing every single move that happens here, there's a cool bit where Weather keeps creating blood spikes, while Pucci tries to force Weather to move and give away his position in the fog. There's a cool bit where Weather refuses to dodge, lets himself be impaled in the blood-spike, and force the frozen blood to connect himself and Pucci... and then he begins to beat the shit out of Pucci. 

And then, rather randomly, the car that Team Jolyne is driving crashes onto the location, sending snails and fog flying around. Jolyne sees Pucci seeming to stand in the dust cloud, and we get a very cool scene where Jolyne uses Stone Free's strings to rev up the wheel of the car to launch her like a catapult... only to be too late, because Pucci punches through Weather's chest and kills him. 

Jolyne freaks out, but then Anasui stabs "Pucci" in the head, revealing him to be Donatello, who had a Disc shoved into his head that forces him to 'dig up' the memory of Pucci killing Weather. There was an interesting bit where it seems like Jolyne is going to suffer with the guilt of crashing her car and interrupting the fight, inadvertently causing Weather's death... but it is kind of sad for poor Weather to just kind of... die like that, y'know? Especially since he seemed to be winning. Considering how interesting the backstory was, it really did always feel like while the confrontation with the blood spikes were pretty interesting, I've always felt like Weather was killed off for shock value. 

Oh, and Donatello Versus also gets killed. It's always, again, bugged me that Whitesnake is able to 'force' Donatello to bring out that Underworld memory of Pucci killing Weather. It's not like Whitesnake has Heaven's Door abilities randomly, right? But I think I'm kinda burned out after talking about the power inconsistencies in this leg of the story. It's also kind of a shame what happened to Versus. His death really is done without any fanfare, and all the talk about him being a rogue element that is evil but opposes Pucci ends up really going nowhere, huh?

Anyway, yeah. A bit of a shame. People complained about Dragon's Dream and Yo-Yo Ma as the weaker parts of Stone Ocean, but after watching this episode, I do think that I'm a bit more disappointed with the Heavy Weather arc specifically because it actually has some great highs. The snail transformation is some really great body horror, the Pucci/Weather flashback was amazing, and if you ignore some previously-unseen applications of the powers (which are either asspulls or creativity depending on how mean I'm feeling the day) even the brotherly fight is great. But... yeah. Just not a huge fan of the ending and how abrupt it all is. 

Random Notes:

• During Pucci's explanation about subliminal messages, the description about the campaign poster with 'sex' and the movie with popcorn/cola frames snuck into several frames are cut... but the images from the manga are still shown on-screen. 
• Also, it's not super-notable, but a lot of the snail transformation for our heroes are undone a bit earlier, or they simply never get that disfigured. Part of it is probably to not distract the audience from the gravitas of Weather's death, but maybe they just didn't want to make that many new character models. 
• I do like that the anime changed Pucci's final farewell and his killing of Weather to have happened during the chaos of the fog and Jolyne's car crash, making it a bit more believable that none of the Stand-users present are able to chase and track him down right then and there. 
• I did really like Anasui's eulogy, talking about how he wouldn't give his life for his parents, but Weather has been a true friend and he would do so for him. 
• Emporio is almost entirely unconscious in the manga version of them finding Weather's body, but we actually get to see him picking up Weather's Stand disc here, which gets to be important later on.