JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean S05E34 Review: Dark Side of the Moon

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stone Ocean [Season 6], Episode 34: C-Moon, Part 1

So yeah, last episode honestly was a bit more Pucci-centric and focuses more about Pucci's transformation and his obsession with gravity. We now enter the two-parter with the C-Moon Stand, and we start off with the cliffhanger from the previous episode -- with Jolyne's arm turning inside-out from the power of C-Moon. Very... grotesque stuff, and I am glad that this visceral moment isn't actually censored in the anime. I'm not sure how Jolyne's hand can just recover so quickly afterwards, but this is a Stand fight. It's not just crushing the hands, no. The anatomy becomes inverted and the internal bones and meat within Jolyne's fingers sploosh out and that is a certain type of disgust that I didn't know I had in my life!

We get a fun little one-on-one between Jolyne and C-Moon at this point, since Anasui is stuck on another part of the altered-gravity visitor center. As Jolyne's Stone Free tries to hit C-Moon, the villainous Stand proves to be faster and more nimble, and able to strike certain objects. Jolyne, Anasui and Emporio quickly figure out that the Stand's power is to invert gravity and turn anything it hits inside-out, which is such a visceral imagery. It really is a fair bit nastier than 'anything I punches explodes' or 'I punch really hard' or whatever. They realize that the phenomenon happening in Cape Canaveral is due to C-Moon altering gravity itself around it, causing everything to fall 'sideways'.  

Again, there's a nice little parallel to the first fights against Pucci -- or rather, Whitesnake. Pucci himself hides somewhere nearby, while his Stand do the fighting for him with its insane abilities. And after Jolyne tosses Emporio off for Anasui to hold, we get a one-on-one between Jolyne and C-Moon. And it's pretty interesting fight as Jolyne's biggest character trait -- that she never backs down -- shows up again. She refuses to back down even as C-Moon turns her leg inside-out, but she just abuses C-Moon's power by allowing C-Moon to strike her again, turning the inside-out back to normal. Everything is where they should be. It's some very selective power nonsense that honestly shouldn't have worked that well, but I do find this to be hilarious and honestly pretty par the course for JoJo. The animation's pretty okay for what it is, and I do really enjoy the voice-acting for Jolyne and C-Moon during this brief but tense fight. 

And... well, it's clear that the intention for this confrontation is for our main heroine to fight our main villain 1v1 before we get the rest of the cast -- including some of the missing ones -- back in. But I suppose it is important to cut away a bit now and then to Anasui, who insists that he's here to back up Jolyne, not to babysit Emporio. 

Jolyne continues to dodge and try and keep away from C-Moon's attacks, and there are a lot of very cool utilization of C-Moon's insane powers -- like it inverting the powers of the ticketing booth that proceed to fall sideways. It really shouldn't be all that different from any of the many movies or anime where a cinematic fight happens on a cliff, but it's pretty damn cool! Jolyne also figures out Pucci is nearby due to the precision of C-Moon's attacks.

Anasui tries to get a sneak attack in on C-Moon, and during the ensuing chaos, Jolyne manages to wrap a string around Anasui, but also connects it around C-Moon's neck, throttling C-Moon while using Anasui as the weight to basically do an improvised hangman's noose around C-Moon's neck. That's honestly a pretty cool visual!

We also get a brief shot of the military outside, and... I've always loved this in TV shows and movies where we get to see the military actually trying to do something. Remember in Dragon Ball Z when the Saiyans arrive on Earth and Nappa just casually blew up a bunch of military jets? Or movies like Godzilla or Pacific Rim or Transformers where the titular aliens and monsters blow up tanks and jets? We get a version of this as a bunch of tanks try to get into the area of C-Moon's effects but they get flipped outside down, and some rescue helicopters get spun around and blown up. It's also extra-special for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I feel, because while there's always been emergency workers and whatnot, and large-scale destruction like plane crashes and towns turning into snails, we've never seen the military do a large-scale operation like this and get absolutely bamboozled by what's going on. 

We get more struggling with C-Moon being throttled, but C-Moon manages to turn the ticket booth it's hung onto upside-down, and then begin to unravel Jolyne's strings. Anasui grabs the string with Diver Down, causing the force of gravity alteration to flow into him. Jolyne moves in for the kill... and then her punch ends up being stopped. 

Pucci arrives behind her, and Pucci talks about how humans need to surpass fate in order to achieve true happiness. At the same time, Jolyne's attempts to attack Pucci is repelled once more because now an invisible force protects Pucci... and it's revealed that C-Moon's true nature isn't just flipping gravity sideways, but rather flipping gravity so that it radiates outwards from its user. So everything is pushed away from Pucci with the force of something falling from a cliff.

And then we get the epic scene where Pucci unleashes C-Moon and punches Jolyne in a fatal area -- right in her heart. We get to see her chest crumple inwards as she tumbles off into the distance, while Anasui and Emporio scream in horror. 

...and then, at this point, Emporio receives a phone text from Kujo Jotaro, who can sense that Jolyne is in danger... but also tells them that Jolyne is alive. Anasui, reinvigorated, decides to charge forwards to kill Pucci, which is the fastest and surest way to kill Jolyne. 

And... yeah. This review is much shorter because the episode's mostly action scenes. I really do enjoy the C-Moon episodes, even if I still think that at the end of the day, Jolyne is a little under-represented in her own part's finale. (And it's not like Ermes, Anasui and Emporio are particularly exciting additions to the fight) Part of it is admittedly due to how the final three episodes play out, and this is, for all intents and purposes, the climactic Jolyne-vs-Pucci fight. I do really like the exploration of C-Moon's ability and the creative ways that it's done, and unlike some of the recent 'twists' on Stands, the revelation of the nature of C-Moon's Stand powers revolving around Pucci's person feels extremely thematic. 

Random Notes:

• I really do like C-Moon's design. The scary grimace on his face, the arrows pointing outwards from him (symbolizing gravity pushing you away, I guess?) and the screechy UHSYAAA it does... I will always prefer Whitesnake, but in the anime it's a bit more clear that C-Moon is Whitesnake with its darker parts replaced by the green armour. 
  
• Running down Whitesnake and C-Moon's bandages are the letters representing the four base amino acids in DNA and RNA -- adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C)... except that instead of an 'A', adenine is represented by the delta sign Δ. 
• While C-Moon doesn't really seem like it has anything to do with Whitesnake power-wise, having an 'aura' of gravity reversal around its user does feel like an evolution of Green Green Grass of Home's 'aura' of shrinking by half. Both Stands prevent anyone from ever truly reaching its user!
• I do really like that little pose with arms trailing behind him that C-Moon does as he's about to fight Jolyne for the first time. 
• Man, when they got C-Moon on that little hangman thing, Jolyne really should've wrapped her string around C-Moon's arms. C-Moon can probably destroy the string around his arm as well, but at least it'd buy them some time. 
• Man, remember that old-school Nokia screen? I think we've gone well into touchscreens by the time real-world 2011 rolls around, though.