Media I've Consumed: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 5 (First Watch)

Giorno Giovanna is a 15 year old small time swindler with an encyclopedic knowledge of all plant an animal life in Naples Italy. He mostly spends his days tricking tourists and unsuspecting locals out of their money using his stand Gold Experience. Until he runs into a low level member of the gang Passione. After a run in with Bruno Bucciarati another member of the gang who cannot stand the fact that Passione is distributing drugs the two team up to find and kill Passione's mysterious boss. Coming along for the ride but unaware of the real objective for most of it is the rest of Bucciarati's crew Leone Abbacchio, Pannacotta Fugo, Guido Mista, and Narancia Ghirga. However, as they go about their missions they are attacked by increasingly dangerous stand users with names I can only assume Araki chose by opening to random pages of an Italian cookbook.

I feel like part 5 is when Araki really starts to get comfortable with stands as a power system. The fights start getting weirder with more niche stands with the episodes becoming more like a puzzle than a typical shonen action fight.

For the fights though it feels like some of the main cast get to do a lot more of the fighting than others. Giorno and Mista seem to do the most fighting. Even in stand battles Giorno doesn't fight in he plays an important role as he has the most overpowered ability in all of Jojo, a functional brain. Giorno alone probably solves about 80% of enemy stand abilities and how quickly they're defeated from that point on depends on how much effort the enemy went through to remove Giorno from the fight.Then after those two Bucciarati probably gets the next most fights, then Narancia, Then Abbacchio whose stand isn't particularly great for combat, and then in distant last Fugo, whose stand we only see for one fight as far as I can remember. Albeit Fugo's stand is so stupidly strong it seems like Araki doesn't know what to do with it without it becoming just an I win button and basically writes Fugo out of the story later(Which to be completely fair to Araki the way he does it entirely fits Fugo's character).

One of the best aspects of part five, at least for me is the increase in fights involving multiple stand users working together. Mista using his stand Sex Pistols to change the direction of bullets he fires is pretty simple but when combined with Giorno's stand ability to imbue inanimate objects with life and things get more interesting. Overall I really like the stand battles in this part.

This part is gonna be more spoiler heavy because I want to talk about one of the themes of the show and it involves the main villain.

Araki was really obsessed with fate in this part wasn't he? It's interesting because on the one hand you have the rolling stone at the end revealing that those who died were fated to die acknowledging the power of fate. While on the other you have Giorno overcoming and defeating the boss and King Crimson whose stand ability is sort of the personification of fate. A man who was so obsessed with control that his stand manifested as the ability to see the future and erase time thus allowing him to always act in a way where he was destined to win. Fate was literally on his side, but Giorno and the others managed to overcome fate and win anyways. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to talk about it for a moment.

If it wasn't obvious already, I really enjoyed part five, It's probably my favorite part of Jojo so far. I think the overall story is really good. It's a much more focused and tighter story than part four while not dragging nearly as much as I feel part three did. But also importantly it was still stupid enough to be really fun to watch with friends! Which brings me to one more thing my friend who has read/seen all of Jojo's many times was doing a drinking game while watching and I thought I'd share it here.