If someone asked what single trait set JOJO apart from so many other works in pop culture, fans would probably give all kinds of answers. Some would talk about the bizarre art style. Others would bring up the absurdly iconic poses. Some would point to the unhinged lines, the unique battle mechanics, the theatrical atmosphere, the sheer visual audacity.
But Alex would not hesitate for even a second.
The emotional knives.
That was it.
In his eyes, JOJO existed in a league of its own when it came to stabbing the audience right through the heart. Not even Dragon Ball, which he personally considered one of the greatest action series ever made, could truly compete with it in that regard.
Sure, the Dragon Balls were basically a broken plot device from early on, but at least in the beginning there were still limits. A person could only be revived once. So when moments like Krillin's death happened, or when Goku sacrificed himself to defeat Raditz, the audience still felt the full weight of it. It still hurt. It still felt final.
But later on, even that stopped mattering.
Died? Bring them back.
Died again? Bring them back again.
Eventually, death stopped carrying any real emotional force. The audience just became numb to it. If everyone was coming back anyway, then dying no longer meant much of anything.
Then there was the opposite example, the almost textbook case of Fairy Tail.
That one was even more outrageous. It did not matter how hopeless the situation became. It did not matter how impossible the odds were, or how desperately the story tried to suffocate the viewer with tension. A character would announce they were about to die... and then casually bounce back like nothing had happened. It practically felt like the show was mocking the audience.
Back in his previous life, Alex had watched it more than once and found himself thinking the exact same thing every time.
My God... that still didn't kill them?
JOJO, on the other hand, played dirty for real.
When it was time for someone to die, the series did not flinch. It did not back down. It did not make excuses. It did not reach for cheap escape routes. Important characters, characters built with care, history, charisma, and presence, were simply ripped out of the story without mercy.
And they stayed dead.
No Dragon Balls. No miracle reincarnation. No forbidden resurrection technique.
That was exactly why every ally's death in JOJO felt so brutal, so heroic, so impossible to forget.
"Kakyoin... Kakyoin..."
At that moment, countless fans were still drowning in the shock and grief of Kakyoin's death. The sorrow hung in the air like a physical weight, suffocating and inescapable.
"DIO!"
Joseph's roar finally dragged the audience out of that grief and forced everyone's eyes back to the screen.
"Purple Hermit!"
With a sharp swing of his arm, Joseph lashed out with the purple vines of his Stand, wrapping Dio up like living serpents and locking him in place.
"Now take this! The energy of the sun! Hamon!"
"You useless old man! Your Stand is the most pathetic one of them all!"
Before the Hamon could even spread through his body, Dio shattered the vines apart with a violent flex of both arms, reducing them to scraps.
And with that over-the-top expression on his face, paired with such a brutally accurate insult, the effect was immediate.
A huge number of viewers who had still been crying over Kakyoin just a minute earlier were now laughing so hard they were practically choking. The tonal whiplash was so absurd that there was no way not to react.
The truth was, throughout the series, Purple Hermit had mostly been used for information gathering and support. Compared to the Stands of the other Stardust Crusaders, it really did look limited, almost painfully underpowered.
Until now, that had just been a running joke among fans outside the story.
But hearing the final boss say it out loud?
That doubled the comedic impact instantly.
Even so, Joseph knew exactly what kind of fight he was trapped in. He was no match for Dio in a direct battle. So the only thing he could do was run, retreat, buy time while his mind spun at full speed.
Kakyoin... even at death's door, he had managed to uncover the enemy's secret.
But what did smashing that clock mean?
Why the hands?
Why force the clock to stop?
As he fled, Joseph pushed his mind to the limit, piecing every clue together in desperation.
"Kakyoin... even in that situation, you really did uncover the secret of Dio's Stand? You used Emerald Splash to destroy the clock... made the hand stop... made the clock stop... st-stop time... d-don't tell me...!"
His face twisted with utter disbelief. Then he turned and looked over his shoulder, staring at Dio as he advanced with that monstrous grin on his face, every step dripping with predatory arrogance.
"Dio's The World... its ability... is to stop time?!"
The scene shifted.
The story cut back to the moment Kakyoin had set his trap and unleashed his final attack.
"Take this, Dio! Twenty-meter radius Emerald Splash!"
The instant the audience saw that scene again, countless fans felt their chests tighten all over again.
Seriously?
Alex was really going to make them relive it?
"Za... Warudo!!!"
That bizarre pronunciation of English, paired with Dio's grotesquely triumphant expression, exploded across the screen.
Then came the impact.
A terrifying force, something impossible to properly describe, burst outward from Dio's body and swallowed everything around him. The world itself seemed to be dragged into a supernatural silence. Color vanished. The sky, the street, the buildings, even the air turned into a black-and-white landscape frozen inside a dead eternity.
And in that world where the flow of time had come to a halt, only Dio and his Stand, The World, retained their original colors.
Only they could move.
Only they were still truly alive inside that stillness.
"This kind of visual direction... no ordinary creator could ever come up with that..."
Ninety-nine point nine percent of regular viewers were completely overwhelmed by the sheer horror of that absurd ability. It did not just feel powerful. It felt unfair. Like an illegal move made flesh, like a cheat code turned into a weapon.
But the people who actually understood visual storytelling, the industry insiders who knew what they were looking at, were even more shaken by the way Alex had chosen to depict it.
Turning the entire world black and white while leaving only Dio and his Stand in color...
It was simple.
Elegant.
Brilliant.
The perfect way to make the audience feel time stopping rather than merely understand it.
On screen, Dio slowly removed the cloak from his shoulders and tossed it aside. Then he walked toward Kakyoin with calm, ceremonial cruelty. At the same time, The World advanced and began slicing through the strands of Hierophant Green's barrier one by one.
That was why.
That was exactly why Kakyoin had sensed no delay.
That was how he had figured out the secret of The World.
"This is The World. But in a world where time has stopped... you can see nothing. You can feel nothing, can you?"
Arms folded across his chest, posture proud and contemptuous, Dio stared at Kakyoin's frozen face with absolute disdain. Then his lips peeled back into a warped, vicious smile.
"Die, Kakyoin!"
As the audience cried out in horror, The World drove a fist straight through Kakyoin's abdomen.
"You won't even know how you died."
Then Dio followed it up with a brutal kick to the chest.
Only then did the viewers fully understand what they had seen earlier, when Kakyoin had suddenly been blasted away. It was not an awkward cut. It was not strange editing. It was the horror of stopped time.
"I get it! Kakyoin! The message you left us with the last moments of your life... I received it! I understood it completely!"
Joseph, now fully aware of the truth, saw Kakyoin's face rise in his mind.
But there was no time to grieve.
Not now.
The only thing that mattered was passing that information on to Jotaro, the only one in the group who still had any real chance of standing against Dio.
But understanding the enemy's secret and defeating him were two completely different things.
Joseph managed to deduce that Dio's stopped time could not last long, maybe three or four seconds at most. But even with that limit, the gap in raw physical power was still overwhelming. Even without factoring in their Stands, Joseph simply did not have the body to keep up with Dio.
In the blink of an eye, he was caught.
A blow sent him crashing out of the air and slamming hard onto the ground.
That was when Jotaro finally arrived.
"Old man!"
"Don't come any closer, Jotaro!"
Still unable to get back on his feet, Joseph dropped to one knee and thrust out a hand toward his grandson, shouting with urgency,
"Dio's Stand! The true ability of The World is to stop ti - "
"Za Warudo!!!"
Joseph never got to finish.
Dio descended from above and, still in midair, roared that same hypnotic, sinister phrase again.
And in country after country across the West, especially in places where English was the native language, countless overseas viewers watching online found themselves completely swept up in the moment. Before they even realized it, they had thrown their fists into the air and shouted along with the same distorted pronunciation.
"Za Warudo!"
There was no going back now.
Everyone had been infected.
Once again, the world fell into black and white.
The image froze Joseph with terror written all over his face and Jotaro with a look of hard, rising dread.
In that world where time had stopped, Dio realized Joseph had wrapped his body in Hamon. So rather than touch him directly, he stepped into a nearby restaurant and grabbed a table knife.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no!!!"
Inside Aurora Entertainment, Mark, who played the younger Joseph, was already flailing both hands, his voice trembling so badly his words nearly tangled together.
Beside him, Bruce Walts, Samantha Burnes, and the others all stared in stunned disbelief, eyes wide and faces gone blank.
This time, Alex had truly gone off the deep end.
He was not even sparing the protagonist of the previous generation.
"Muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda muda... MUDA!"
Dio's signature war cry rang out once more.
Inside the frozen world, the knives he threw hung suspended in midair, less than an inch from Joseph's throat.
"Joseph, grandson of Jonathan... now you're finished."
Dio smiled coldly. Then he turned toward Jotaro, raised one finger, and spoke with a pleasure so poisonous it was almost sensual.
"One second left..."
"Zero~"
That low, malicious laugh slid from his lips like something demonic.
Then the world began to move again.
Color returned.
And in that same instant, the knife pierced Joseph's throat.
"Old man!"
On the far end of the street, Jotaro truly panicked. His body moved before his mind could catch up, and he lunged toward Joseph at once.
"D-don't... come here... Jotaro..."
With the knife still lodged in his throat and blood spilling from the corner of his mouth, Joseph forced one hand up and gestured weakly for him to stop.
"Keep your distance... stay back... o-or else..."
His voice kept fading.
The focus in his eyes grew dimmer with every passing second.
Strength was leaving his body in silence, like sand slipping through open fingers.
"Or else... there won't be... any chance of winning..."
Then his hand fell.
Heavy.
Lifeless.
At the same moment, the thorny vines of Purple Hermit wrapped around his arm began to disintegrate into ash and scatter into the wind.
And right then, the ending theme began to play.
That was the end of the week's episode.
"No!!!"
Mark nearly sprang out of his seat in sheer shock.
Everyone else was frozen too.
Did that really just happen?
Did he actually kill Joseph?
The backlash exploded immediately.
"Alex, you bastard!"
"Damn it, it's only been two weeks! The main crew only had six members, and four are already dead!"
"It's Joseph, for God's sake! The protagonist of the previous generation!"
"Please stop with the emotional knife twists! I'm actually getting traumatized!"
"I've got a terrible feeling. Next week he's going to kill Polnareff too!"
"Book me a train to Kyoto right now! I swear I'm going to smash the windows at Alex's company myself!"
Joseph's death set off another full-scale uproar across the domestic anime and film fandom.
This time, the shockwave was even more violent than before.
Because at this point, it no longer felt like mere narrative boldness.
It felt like a massacre.
It was as if Alex had made up his mind to strip the audience of any sense of safety, any ground beneath their feet, any illusion that things might somehow turn out all right.
A huge portion of the audience was left completely shattered. Another part erupted into pure outrage. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, one conclusion started spreading like wildfire:
He's not seriously trying to pull a Game of Thrones here... is he?
Because at this rate, there was only one thing left to do.
Kill everyone.
And leave only the protagonist standing.
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