“Koichi Hirose (Echoes)”
Fridays at 12:30 pm EST on Crunchyroll
Koichi runs afoul of a con man using his Stand to extort money and favors.
Iro’s thoughts
Lesson Number One of Diamond is Unbreakable: do not fuck with Koichi.
But seriously, I keep fixating on the idea that DU has weirder, more bizarre Stands, and The Lock is a great example. In a regular battle manga, or even during Stardust Crusaders, or basically any other context entirely, The Lock would have been prrrrrretty much useless. But here, in small-town Japan, taking advantage of a good-hearted high school kid and his innocent family, it’s super dangerous. More specialized Stands like The Lock can make every fight in DU seem super contrived without the unifying plot device of “Dio’s henchmen are attacking” to work in every situation, but I think the variety in conflicts other than just punchy-punchy easily make up for it.
Koichi’s Echoes is also a pretty bizarre Stand, and its applications will only get moreso as time passes. Anyone who’s been watching JoJo for this long knows that crazy written sound effects are a huge part of Araki’s MO, and it took until now for him to figure out a way to weaponize them. It is a weirdly specific power – as a lot of Stands will be from now on – and it’s a great twist for Koichi to use it to throw “Believe in me!” at his mom rather than just keep trying to overwhelm the villain with noise. “Being a good kid” is another of Koichi’s assets available to him in battle, like Jotaro’s grumpy poker face.
So, in general, this was a pretty standard episode of JoJo, which is fitting since we’re only a few episodes in. Not too much to say here.
Dorarara-bservations
- I’m sticking with the original Stand names goddammit
- Echoes is named after a Pink Floyd song, much like Crazy Diamond.
- Echoes bears a noticeable resemblance to Cell from Dragon Ball, and Koichi’s hair sticks up like a Super Saiyan. Given a couple later events, I’m sure this is intentional.
The Glorio Blog 
Yep Koichi’s stand is super weird. Are those roller skate wheels at it’s hip? Does it drag itself along like those adorable dogs that have paralyzed hind legs and use doggy wheelcharis?
The hair thing was a total DBZ shoutout.
Koichi’s stand is kind of odd, but fits in that this season has a lot of bizarre, smaller stands that have more strategy based uses, as opposed to raw power. Kobayashi and Koichi have surprisingly similar stands, in that they both have some sort of access to the soul.
I heard that in the manga Kobayashi first appeared as a full-sized human (like Josuke and Okuyasu), but then shrank to his current size after the battle with Koichi. Thoughts?
Yeah, the whole size-changing thing happens more than once in Part 4. Villains start big and then start being drawn around Koichi’s size when they’re no longer a threat.