“Let’s Go to the Manga Artist’s House”

Fridays at 12:30 pm EST on Crunchyroll

Rumor has it that mangaka auteur Hirohiko Araki Rohan Kishibe has moved to Morioh, and Koichi’s a big fan.

Iro’s thoughts

Rohan is almost certainly the most famous character to come out of Part 4, and in fact has his own series of spinoff tales (which include such wonders as VISITING THE LOUVRE! and A MYSTERIOUS STAND-WIELDING GUCCI BAG!) famous in their own right. He is also Araki’s admitted self-insert character, in case you couldn’t tell from Rohan being a crazed mangaka obsessed with bizarre details who insists he only draws manga for the art of it and not because he’s wildly successful. Oh, and who has one of the most overpowered Stands in the entire franchise.

Heaven’s Door Heaven’s Door (they somehow got away with not changing this one, whaaat) lets Rohan open, read, and write people, creating one of the most fantastically creepy visual effects to ever appear in a manga, with faces and skin opening up into newspaper pages. It is one of Part 4’s most iconic scenes, and in fact the open face with turning pages was using as the loading icon for the All-Star Battle game. While we know that Koichi is the best and and Echoes is super powerful, it doesn’t matter because Rohan can just write in that Koichi can’t attack him. The possibilities for this sort of ridiculous power are far-reaching and we won’t see too much of them, unfortunately. We will see at least a few, however, since getting the shit kicked out of him means that now Rohan is part of the regular crew. Hooray??

The other big scene for this fight is the flashback to toddler Josuke back during the craziness that was Stardust Crusaders, while he was afflicted with DIO FEVER and granted his eternal love of pompadours by being saved by Mysterious Pompadour Stranger. It’s about as goofy an explanation as any other for Josuke’s great love of meatloaf hair, and the anime makes it even goofier by drawing the mysterious stranger as basically Josuke. Given the usual Stand bullshit in this series, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this implied some sort of stable time loop business going on in Part 4, but this is actually not the case. It really was just a mysterious pompadour man. Maybe Kuwabara cut his way into the JoJo-verse with his Jigen-To?

Dorarara-bservations

• I’m so used to seeing Rohan “summon” Heaven’s Door in games and such that I forgot he started out being unable to do that. And, uh, spoilers I guess…
• I believe the excuse for Rohan being able to travel to other countries and speak perfect French / Italian in the spinoffs is because he uses Heaven’s Door to just write into himself that he speaks those languages.
• When Stardust Crusaders is mentioned, the subs properly refer to the villain as “DIO” in all caps. DIOOOOO!!
• New OP! I don’t particularly like this one, actually. The visuals are as striking as ever, but the song sounds like a Bleach OP from 2006.