38 - A Brief Interlude
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Last time, we destroyed a compulsive gambler by exposing his chocolate addiction. This time, we're stitching together a couple scenes that bookended the previous update. It'll be a bit short, but there's a lot of plot information here.
Also, this is going to have spoilers for later parts of JoJo, at minimum up through Part 6. I'll try to keep any relevant explanations brief.
If we'd made some slightly different choices so far, we'd have learned these guys' names and I wouldn't be typing out their descriptors every time.
Professor Wikipedia tells me that the actual band Hanoi Rocks is bizarrely popular in Japan and also considered a spiritual precursor to other, bigger bands, so I guess this makes some kind of weird sense?
I debated with myself for several minutes if I should make the stock "teleports behind you" jokes here in deference to how old screenshot LPs (and let's be real, this one too) have pretty basic humor sensibilities, but now I'm tired. So let's just move on.
And just like that, Vins has taken full control over the Slaves to Fate organization... who have mostly been non-entities so far and likely will continue to not be terribly relevant. Maybe in another life.
Let's pan over elsewhere and begin the more overtly spoilery scene.
Last spoiler warning!!
Let's Explain JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Spoilers (click to expand)
Sometime during Part 3, Dio wrote in his diary the "Path to Heaven", which is basically just Dio's needlessly complex scheme for creating a utopia in his image. After defeating Dio, Jotaro finds and reads the diary before destroying it. Years later, the Big Bad of Part 6, Enrico Pucci, uses his Stand to extract Jotaro's memories and learn the contents of the diary.
With this information, Pucci's Stand evolves into Made in Heaven, which accelerates time and space to the point of infinite recursion. Pucci intends to force all beings to live with exact foresight of their actions, removing free will. The heroes - including Jotaro's daughter Jolyne, Pucci's own estranged brother Weather Report, and baseball jersey wearing child Emporio - manage to defeat him, protecting the new world from corruption but also losing their memories of their adventures together as the universe resets.
So, the reason we've been seeing cameos of other characters all over the place, regardless of when or where they originate? Not just cute references, but explicitly because of the swirling whirlpool of spacetime caused by Made in Heaven.
And with this information, we can line some pieces up. Vins wants things to go exactly as in "canon", without Cascada, and in Update 31 she says she's doing it for her "sweet child's sake", whatever that means. Alicia, Berlin, and Steel are supporting Cascada with the hope that her sassy personality and sick arm cannon can prevent the discovery of Dio's diary and thus butterfly-effect prevent Pucci's plans. This implicitly will prevent Alicia from dying... somehow.
With that out of the way, we can talk about phenakistoscopes! Spin a disc with a bunch of drawings on it and look at it through gaps spaced to prevent the image from blurring into a single mass, and you've got early animation!
I recently went to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and they've got a variant on one of these that's a big sculpture that rotates like a carousel. It becomes "animated" when they strobe the lights in the enclosure at the proper speed. It was neat, but it would have been neater if it wasn't themed after Toy Story.
7th Stand User invokes the phenakistoscope specifically because of the effect of seeing all the images simultaneously. If we think of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure the manga as one image, then we might think of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure the anime as another, and 7SU as yet another. They're separate entities that nevertheless blur and combine with each other.
Meanwhile...
See you again!
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