Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable

By: MSJ

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, in a nutshell, is a long-running manga/anime series about punching ghosts, a family that perpetually experience increasingly strange adventures, and beautiful characters striking flamboyant poses so hard your spine will snap. Now this bare-bones description of Jojo's will give the impression that it is just some fan service battle manga, but you would be wrong with that notion. Jojo's is a battle manga with a villain of the week formula that relies heavily on the sheer creativity or madness of the creator Hirohiko Araki. Most writers of long-running series will be content to stay within the bounds of their reach and rehash the same story elements/tropes until the series has become nothing, but a mockery of its former self. Araki instead embraces the sheer absurdity of his concept, finding new ways to keep the series fresh as it can never be placed in any one genre. The series is never content with one genre as it transitions from buddy adventure to Mafioso tale, to slice of life horror. Jojo's started out as horror manga with the main villain being a vampire, but the horror elements took a back seat to action all the while Araki never found himself straying too far from the series' horror roots expressing this through gore and dread. Horror is always clear and present in the series. Be it through the special abilities of the varied cast or the antagonists. Part four titled Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable is home to numerous horrific instances in Jojo's alone. One story arc sees a character forced into a Misery-esque scenario with Koichi, one of the main cast, trapped by a woman that is madly in love with him as she isolates him from his friends and forces him to be her ideal boyfriend. Another character from the main cast, Rohan, has an ability that turns individuals into walking books. Skin will peel and form pages relaying to the reader every detail of a person's life despite sounding mundane the image will stick in any readers memory.

Finally, early in the story, there is a killer rat that can shoot poison darts which upon contact turns any organic matter into an amorphous blob of meat. Once again Jojo's is not foreign to horror it actually uses horror consistently throughout with some parts possessing more horror elements than others. Diamond is Unbreakable (DIU for the sake of brevity) is one of the more horror-flavored parts of Jojo's through its antagonist, that is Yoshikage Kira. For those that have never experienced Jojo's, it follows the lives of various members of the Joestar family with each of the eight parts changing protagonists, each with some special ability that defies the laws of physics. Part four is DIU which follows Josuke Higashikata as his small suburban town comes under threat of a serial killer. A simple serial killer in Jojo's world sounds fairly tame in comparison to the numerous exploits the family has had fighting a vampire overlord and a god in earlier parts. What makes the main antagonist of DIU such compelling force to be reckoned with is his execution. Yoshikage Kira is the third main antagonist of the Jojos' and with Kira Araki scaled the series down. Previous threats in Jojo's saw the entire world at stake. Kira was only a threat to the small town that Josuke inhabited, even taking the lives of one of Josuke's friends. Kira operated unimpeded throughout Josuke's hometown of Morioh for nearly two decades as the rate of young women disappearing skyrockets with no one able to track down the killer. With this being Jojo's he, of course, has a special ability that proves daunting for the protagonists to face. Kira's special ability is killer queen. A close range power causes anything he touches to explode if he detonates his "trigger". The blast is quick and deadly incinerating every trace of a person in a single action allowing Kira to be ruthlessly efficient. At the same time with no traces being left any remnants of a loved one disappears suddenly as someone falls victim to Kira's perversions. Not only is the pain of losing a loved one traumatic in itself, but the families of Kira's victims will have to go on in life without so much as a proper funeral. A fate similar to real-world victims of numerous unsolved murders/disappearances.

That is what Yoshikage Kira represents a specter of death with no face or name only bloodlust. Kira relishes in the anonymity that he has built for himself as he is free to kill and live a simple quiet life as he pleases. There comes a point in the series where the heroes search the home of Yoshikage Kira, only to find seemingly innocuous things such as third place trophies and eerie group photos of him positioned in the background. This reveals to the characters and audience exactly who Kira is. He is a man that wants to blend into society by any means necessary as he avoids taking any action that will garner him recognition so that he will be masked by mediocrity in a fashion where he is just another face in a crowd. This is what makes Kira terrifying, he is a murderer that has built the perfect camouflage as an average person with all of his psychotic tendencies going unnoticed by the world at large. Kira's behavior mimics that of numerous prolific serial killers in history as light research will show, the most dangerous things about prolific serial killers has been their ability to hide in plain sight. A fear amongst most people is that any stranger that they would come across could be a serial killer. Kira, unlike other fictional antagonists, represents this tangible fear for he is the killer lying in wait.

Check out these other great articles:

Batman: Court of Owls

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