12 Days of Christmas – Day 9 – “Life After Death” by Notorious B.I.G

2012 was the year of Jojo, in more ways than one. Even before the show got announced, I started putting in the effort to catch up to the ongoing manga. That’s a lot of ground that needs to be covered, and I’m still nowhere near finished the series. I’m up to the beginning of Part 6 at the moment, so I felt I should spend one post talking about a noteworthy moment I read. I would discuss the anime, but I’ll be talking about it in the Anime Awards I’ll be putting up later and this would just be a copy/paste of that. So I chose this moment primarily because it relates to the anime, but at the same time doesn’t.

It was during the first three weeks of the show that I read through Part 5, Vento Aureo. At this time I remember reading the discussions by new fans of the show, and one subject that kept appearing was the comparison of Dio’s rise to power to something out of a monster movie. I first read this story a while ago, but somehow I never fully made that connection. There was a lot in the series that sounded like classic horror – the zombies, the Pillar Men, a character in Part 3 who is basically Freddy Krueger in the body of an infant – but it wasn’t until people starting talking about it that I really noticed. And by coincidence, it was at about that time that I came across this fight in Vento Aureo. This is a Stand by the name of Notorious B.I.G (stop laughing!).

To start off, I’ll give a brief explanation of how Stands work for those who don’t know yet. Typically, a Stand is the psychic personification of the user. If you’ve ever seen a bizarre, possibly humanoid being behind a Jojo character in official art, that’s a Stand. Each one has it’s own unique design and way of fighting, but typically there are rules that each Stand follows. One of the most important rules is that any damage dealt to a Stand is dealt to the user as well, and while there are those that get around that rule, this was one of the first times a Stand completely broke it.

Notorious B.I.G is one of the most monstrous stands introduced so far because almost nothing about it seems human. It lacks any kind of identifiable shape most of the time, resembling one of those blob creatures I’ve heard so much about. It doesn’t even have a Stand user to really identify with because the user had to die for this thing to be created. This means that it’s more or less impossible to kill because it no longer has a concept of death. It’s also a vicious attacker, being able to corrode anything it comes into contact with almost instantly. About the only weakness the characters can find is that it can only sense others through movement, but that only makes the monster movie feeling stronger. It gave me a few flashbacks to Tremors whenever characters needed to move slowly and get to safe ground.

The chapters with Notorious B.I.G were some of the most intense of the series so far. Even when Jojo has always had a lot of moments where you just wonder how anyone could get out alive, it never had quite the impact of a mutating slime creature fought in a high altitude plane. I’m sure the next few parts will have scary moments of their own (I’ve read the words “invisible zombie alligators” somewhere) but I doubt anything will be quite the same as this.