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For a manga series that’s been running since 1986, there’s a lot to dissect
from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. I started getting into the series this past January
after my friend sat me down to watch the first episode of the anime, and it’s been an
absolute trip ever since. JoJo is certainly one of the strangest franchises to ever
emerge from Japan (yes, stranger that Evangelion, I’ll admit it), considering that
some of its plot points include a guy who can turn into a velociraptor ( Part 7:
Steel Ball Run), a baby being fed its own shit (Part 3: Stardust Crusaders), and an
amnesiac with four testicles who’s actually a fusion of two different characters
(Part 8: Jojolion).
The “bizarre” aspects of JoJo are arguably part of the reason why Hirohiko Araki’s
work has been so successful, encompassing everything from the general absurdity of a
narrative that requires its readers to suspend their disbelief to a rich and colorful
cast of characters whose aesthetics frequently blur the lines of masculinity and
femininity. The gender dynamics in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure are some of the most
recognizable — yet frequently overlooked — characteristics of the series as a whole.
On one hand, you’ve got a bunch of Arnold Schwarzenegger-sized men running around
using their supernatural abilities to beat up vampires, zombies, sharks, and the
occasional plate of spaghetti. On the other hand, they tend to do it while
sporting crop tops and neon shades of lipstick.

But this parody of action hero-style masculinity isn’t the topic I’ll be delving into
today. Instead, I wanna talk about the women of JoJo — the roles that they play and
how they’ve been portrayed throughout the series. To put it bluntly, if there’s one
fundamental flaw with JoJo (aside from Araki’s mass grave of forgotten plot points,
let’s be honest) it can be found in its history of undermining, underwriting, and
marginalizing female characters. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and
it’s grown into a lengthy conversation I’ve been having with myself. In the spirit
of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (and to save all of you from eye-fatigue), I’m going to
break my analysis into two to three parts.

First, I just want to give you a basic idea of what the gender representation
of JoJo has looked like throughout its run, comparing the number of narratively
significant female characters to narratively significant male characters in each
part, plus some notes on the roles of these female characters. And by “narratively
significant,” I mean that the character meets three or more of the following
criteria:

 Have a name
 Have a speaking part
 Are recurring (featured more than in
one chapter arc)
 Serve a key purpose to the plot
Basically, if you can’t replace a female character with a sexy lamp and have the plot
be totally unaffected (beyond someone asking, “What’s that lamp doing here?”), you’ve
got a narratively significant female character.

(Click here for full-sized image.)

For the most part, JoJo has been a pretty tightly packed sausage-fest. Even the
female-led Stone Ocean is only about 54% female (and that was being generous by
including minor, recurring characters such as Gwess).

It’s understandable why some of the earlier parts (namely Phantom Blood) were so
heavily male. JoJo started out running in Weekly Shōnen Jump — whose target audience
consists of young male readers — until 2004, after which it was moved to
the seinen (older-male) focused Ultra Jump in 2005 (x).

Additionally, Araki’s admitted to struggling with depicting female characters. While

one of his earlier works, Gorgeous Irene (1984-1985), focused on a female
protagonist, Araki’s stated he’s embarrassed of the way he wrote Irene, believing it
reflected “his ignorance of women” as a younger mangaka (x). It’s understandable why
a creator would be hesitant to centralize their stories around a character whose
gender identity differs from their own. It’s an intimidating feat, and doing justice
to representation often seems much harder than just sticking to what you know. Of
course, that isn’t an excuse for skipping out on diversity, but Araki’s lack of
confidence in writing female characters does provide some explanation as to why women
are so underrepresented in the earlier parts of the series.

It’s also important to note that Araki has made attempts (and relative progress)
towards giving female characters more important roles throughout JoJo. The most
blatant example of this is, of course, Jolyne Kujo, the sixth JoJo. I admittedly
couldn’t find the precise source material for this, but tumblr
user @everydayduelist posted that Araki created Jolyne in hopes of rectifying his
past failures at female protagonists in the series (x). Even if this isn’t
necessarily correct, centralizing on a female lead in one of the most
popular shōnen/seinen manga series of all time was nonetheless a bold move, and one
Araki wasn’t able to get away with doing until part 6.
Araki’s also claimed that the manga industry itself held him back from expanding upon
female characters in JoJo. The series’ first main female character to possess any
sort on in-universe combat powers was Battle Tendency’s Lisa Lisa, the Hamon master
who trains Joseph Joestar and Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli for their fight with the Pillar
Men. (Yours truly also cosplays her.) Lisa Lisa was meant to convey Araki’s fondness
“for female characters who are capable of fighting for themselves” ( x), and she stood
in stark contrast to the idealized female characters in similar male-focused series
at the time by simply being an intimidating, warrior-type of character (x). As
progressive (and arguably unheard of in Japan) of a female manga character as Lisa
Lisa was in the late eighties, Araki still felt he was “held back” from delving
further into her character with an “uncommon realism” for female characters in
a shōnen title (x).
And this takes me to what I see as a pattern of faults surrounding female characters
in JoJo, which I began to notice with Lisa Lisa herself. One of the earliest things I
picked up on in the series was the realization that practically every major female
character was either a wife or a mother to a JoJo: Erina Pendleton becomes the wife
of Jonathan Joestar and the grandmother of Joseph Joestar, Lisa Lisa is actually
Elizabeth Joestar and the mother of Joseph, Suzie Q ends up marrying Joseph, Holly
Kujo is Joseph’s daughter and Jotaro’s mother, so on and so forth.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and JoJo is (in its simplest form) a story about
a family line. But when you compare this to the roles of other significant male
characters in the early parts of the series, it’s hard not to believe that
wife/mother relationships were a sort of crutch-trope for including women in JoJo.
Furthermore, being a wife or a mother tended be a central aspect for many of these
characters. With the exception of Lisa Lisa, they don’t do much of anything in terms
of engaging with the story’s action. They’re more or less off to the side,
domesticated women.

On the topic of Lisa Lisa, there’s also the matter of her fight with Kars — or
rather, her lack of a fight. Up to this point in Battle Tendency, we hadn’t seen
Lisa Lisa use the extent of her powers. She didn’t engage in any fights, and the only
way we know she’s as powerful as other characters claim is simply because she
ruthlessly trains Joseph and Caesar.

Her one-on-one fight with Kars was supposed to be the first time we saw her in
combat. It was supposed to depict Lisa Lisa as being the strong female character
Araki intended to depict. Instead, Kars tricks her (which is super low, not to
mention comes out of NOWHERE) and stabs her in the back before their fight can even
properly start.
Was this really necessary, character-wise or plot-wise? No. If it does anything at
all, it just undermines Lisa Lisa’s character by depriving her of the chance to
engage in combat rather than coolly observe.
This may seem like a standalone example of Araki pulling the rug out under a female
character, and since Battle Tendency, we’ve been able to see subsequent female
characters get their fair shot at a fight.

But then we get the end of Stone Ocean.

As mentioned, Stone Ocean and its respective JoJo, Jolyne Kujo, were supposed to
compensate for Araki’s previous fumblings with female characters. This is great and
all, and I genuinely love Stone Ocean for what it does with its leading ladies
(especially in starting out with a frank dialogue about female masturbation, but take
that as you want). And yet not only does Jolyne end up dying in the end, but she
fails to stop the arc’s villain, Father Pucci. The character who gets that honor is
Emporio, the little boy side-kick who really wants to play baseball for some reason.

While Jolyne may not be the first or only JoJo to die at the hands of an antagonist
(I love you Jonathan and you deserved better!), there’s really no discernible reason
why she had to be defeated. If Jotaro can inexplicably jack The World’s time-stopping
powers to defeat Dio, Jolyne easily could’ve pulled some ridiculous new Stand-ability
out of her ass to overcome Made in Heaven.

Regardless of Araki’s intentions for Jolyne’s (and Lisa Lisa’s) defeat, the result is
ultimately frustrating. Despite how much I hate using the term “glass ceiling,” it
certainly feels as if there’s some invisible barrier preventing the women
of JoJo from achieving their full potential as characters.

As a female fan, I want to see myself fairly represented in a series that I love.
When I make gender-based criticisms of the anime and manga I enjoy, it’s because I
see their potential to be even better.
Again, I want to make it clear that as far as I’ve observed, JoJo has made steady
progress towards including more female characters whose roles are better expanded
upon than in the series’ past parts. The eighth and current story arc, Jojolion, has
done a fair job of this with its roughly 50:50 male-to-female-characters ratio. I
have to give Araki credit for improving this aspect of his series.

Anyways here’s an actual illustration by Araki where Giorno has three legs.

Posted on 18 July 2016, at 5.09pm, with 118 notes

#anime feminist #Anime & Manga #jojo's bizarre adventure #jjba #jojo no kimyou na bouken #hirohiko araki #lisa
lisa #jolyne kujo #female characters #feminist critique #gorgeous irene

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