Warning: Mentions of Sexual Assault and Police Brutality
Jojolands is the most unique manga I’ve ever seen with topics about law, corruption and crime life. So far the series has been running for 2 years and since those two years, 24 chapters of action between
The story starts with the two teenage brothers in the Joestar Family, Dragona and Jodio Joestar dealing with corrupt law enforcement and their role in drug dealing. Each has a relation with the current generation of today. Starting with Dragona being the first-ever transwoman in the series attaining the stand, Smooth Operators. Jodio Joestar is the main character of the series, an introverted teenager with a psychological disorder; he tends to do the right thing but in the most inhuman way ever with acquiring the stand: November Rain. Either way, both are helping their single mother to make sure she has a good life because of their life of crime.
Then the boss of the two brothers, Meryl Mei Qi, tasked them to steal a Natural Diamond from a Japanese tourist with the help of two members: Paco Laburantes and Usagi Alohaoe. As they travel to their destination, they discover the power of the Lava Rock: the power to manipulate mechanisms of society to bring fortune by using misfortune to bring power to the carrier of the lava rock. When Meryl Mei Qi was brought info about this, she planned out a way to use this power to take out a billion-dollar corp called Howler Company.
Jodio Joestar, along with being the main protagonist of the series, is also the narrator for Jojolands. He is a quiet teenager who is shown to be very ruthless due to his troublesome actions against police enforcement or furthermore the misfortune of their family. With his stand, November Rain is able to make one specific location constantly showered by raindrops enough that can flatten anyone.
What makes Jodio a good character is how far he’ll go to protect or support his family, especially for Dragona, his older brother. For starters, at the beginning of the story when Dragona was getting sexually assaulted by the police officers he used his stand to turn the officers into pancakes. He later burns the car to make sure that there’s no evidence against him and his brother to get put behind bars. To further back this up, we see that he is able to support his mother by paying people to walk her over to her job in the airport and have a nice talk.
Another part of how he’s such a good character is how he’s in this awkward position of seeing his family getting torn apart due to back-to-back misfortune. When he was 11-years old, he discovered that Dragona was getting bullied by a girl who was basically just petty because she was with a rich family. Jodio uses November Rain to damage the girl’s eyebrow to excuse the siblings away from the trouble. He later questioned Dragona on what happened with only them to downplay the situation and describe that she was joking.
We later get to see the two brothers at night time sleeping and we see Dragona crying in her sleep while Jodio is wide awake and coming up with a plan to pay back against the bully. The next day, he ends up burning a bus with gas bottles under the seat, just to kill the person who hurt his brother. He ended up extinguishing the fire with his stand when he realized that there was innocent life not because of the fact there were other people on the bus but because of a bird panicking for help. Dragona realizes and tells him what he did was insane but they thank him for doing that because their heart was on the verge of dying. But despite all that, Jodio ended up affecting their mother’s life with her announcing that their father left due to paying ten times the normal insurance for the bus company he was working for.
Overall, Jodio Joestar is a great protagonist and curious to see how his future will turn out for him. Also, to top it off, his character development could make him either a hero or even a villain.
What makes this manga good is that the main characters and the side characters have backstories relating to how society isolates them or how law enforcement broke them. Besides Jodio or Dragona, A character showing that example is Charming Man. Charming Man lost his brother when they were biking from the volcano. The only thing we figure out is that his brother was last heard inside a lava tube. When Charming Man was able to bring the police to help him find his brother, the police officers were being unhelpful to finding his brother. They were downplaying the investigation and asking unrelated questions that have no context relating to his brother’s disappearance. Charming Man is clearly shown to gain no help on finding his brother from the police.
In conclusion, this manga is an excellent manga, telling how society can isolate or tear down people in our generation. Besides that, lovable characters and outstanding stand battles, Better yet, the manga is still running with a lot more chapters, and perhaps even new characters that will make this story better. The future of Jojolands will make the story an absolute cinema.
