#but then i saw people complaining about VA and it made me ~inspired~ to continue

[shoechoe]

the moral inconsistence of vento aureo

(Warning: spoilers for Jojo’s bizarre adventure, part 5: Golden Wind/Vento Aureo.)

(Bit of an update here: As of writing, this post was made almost a year ago now. While I still agree with my general conclusions and most of this, I don’t really like my assessment of Bruno here anymore. I still mostly have the issues with him that I mention here, but I think I misinterpreted the way he was portrayed. That’ll probably be due for an update sometime in a future post lol.)

Vento Aureo is probably the part of Jojo that I like the most. It has some of my favorite characters in the series, the fights are amazing, the stands are well thought-out and fun, the jokes are hilarious, and a lot of the symbolism in its narrative is incredibly interesting which makes it really fun to analyze and dissect.

 That being said, writing-wise, the part also has a lot of things in it that kind of annoy me- whether it be due to some wasted potential of a plot point or general underuse of a character, under-foreshadowing of important events, etc. One of those things happens to be the way that the protagonists, Giorno, Bruno, and the rest of Bruno’s group, are portrayed in contrast to the main villain, Diavolo, and how the ending of the part, instead of being satisfying, ended up just sort of... leaving a sour taste in my mouth. In this post, hopefully I’ll be able to articulate why I think that is. (and I promise it’s not just because I like diavolo)

Bruno + Team Bucciarati

I’ll start by looking at the deuteragonist of the part, Bruno. After the initial battle between him and Giorno, he is portrayed as an almost saint-like moral high ground for all of the other characters. He’s portrayed as loyal, caring, kind, and helpful, has a great reputation with the general public, and is a sort of parental figure to the others (I mean, where did you think the “Bruno is a mom” fanon thing came from?) In other words, he is a character that we are supposed to look up to.

When the Boss is revealed to have been plotting to kill his daughter the whole time, Bruno is outraged and goes against him for the first time in the entire series. He loses his life fighting for Trish, an innocent fifteen year old girl. When he dies, he has a scene where his soul literally ascends to the heavens in gold, surrounded by cupids- a direct contrast to the demonic main antagonist, Diavolo.

The thing is... I have an issue with this portrayal of Bruno’s character. For a couple of reasons.

 Bruno, as a character, has done many incredibly iffy things, moral-wise. Was it supposed to be a good thing when he invited a seventeen year old (Fugo) to join the mafia after he was expelled from school? What about when he tried to murder Giorno, a fifteen year old, because he might have been involved with the death of Leaky Eye Luca (who is, on his own, a person who threatens innocents in order to gain money, so he’s not exactly a good person either?)  What about when he invited and helped Giorno (again, a fifteen-sixteen year old) to take over the mafia? (I mean, yes, sure, it’s anime logic... but if we’re going to hold Diavolo responsible for doing things like selling drugs to children, should we not also hold Bruno responsible for inviting children to join a dangerous criminal organization?)

Not to mention, Bruno is a well-known and respected member of the mafia, from what we’ve seen. He and the rest of his group were almost or completely loyal to the Boss up until they realized what his true plan was with his daughter. Sure, Bruno may have felt internally conflicted about the drug trade being open for children, but he continued to support and fight for the Mafia regardless of that fact. I can also understand his motivation to join the mafia initially for some guaranteed protection for him and his father, but he never seemed to show any real issue with the shady practices the Mafia makes him do up until he realized that drugs were being sold (at least, he didn’t seem to have a real problem with murdering Giorno, and the fact that he thought the Mafia was a solid enough idea that he invited multiple people to join it probably means something as well).

 Should that not be something to condemn this character for, or at least view him as morally flawed? The mafia isn’t just bad because the Boss wants to sell drugs or kill his daughter- people in mafias threaten innocents on a near-daily basis for the sake of money, fear-mongering and power. I don’t think it’s possible to be a good person with benevolent intentions and simultaneously attempt to kill minors and illegally threaten people to give you money through violence (and that’s just one example among the MANY other illegal things that mafias do). This is something that I feel is never properly acknowledged by Vento Aureo. (I also can’t help but feel annoyed at Bruno’s shock and horror in his backstory once he “finds out” that Passione has been operating the drug trade without him realizing. Like, dude... how are you surprised at this, exactly? It’s a mafia.)

  Bruno’s strange portrayal throughout the story is a symptom of a larger issue here, and that’s that Passione in general is very over-romanticized, I think. A lot of the inherently fucked-up, greedy and evil aspects of being in a mafia are completely glossed over in favor of portraying characters who would logically be dangerous criminals as unequivocally "the good guys” once they stand up to one evil deed that they perceive as “too far”.

 Sure, Bruno and his group are against killing an innocent teenager, but is that really where the bar is set? They still don’t seem to be against most forms of murder, torture, and attacking innocents (for example: remember when they mercilessly beat up a random civilian, and then after taking a moment to look and see that they were completely uninvolved with the mafia and were just some random guy, then proceeded to use him like a test dummy to see if their food was poisoned or not?) Most of their worse actions (i.e. the torture dance, Mista creeping on Trish, the scene where they pummeled an innocent civilian for no real reason) are just played off as jokes and are never mentioned again, nor do they end up ever questioning the goodness of their actions or facing any consequences for them- if you’re trying to portray your protagonists as anti-heroes who aren’t entirely good people, I really don’t think this is the right way to handle them. If Araki was trying to make them out as explicitly bad people, that wouldn’t make sense to me either (you can’t exactly show someone floating up to the heavens with their soul in gold and being surrounded by cupids and tell me that they’re actually supposed to be a bad person).

You could argue that some of their actions in the part were necessary for their own (and Trish’s) safety, and I would agree with that. For example, I think killing La Squadra was necessary for their own survival- their stands were too dangerous to just keep them alive and captured, and La Squadra was actively trying to murder them as well. They had to kill them for the sake of self defense. I have a very hard time believing that all of their criminal actions were completely unavoidable (or at least could’ve been lessened), though.

Not to mention, for Abbacchio, Narancia, Fugo and Mista, joining the mafia seemed to be portrayed as an almost positive turning point in their lives, and it’s just... what? Each of their backstories, the driving motivation of their characters, portrays them as all being beaten down by life due to some major negative event (Abbacchio accidentally causing the death of a fellow police officer, Narancia being betrayed by a friend he trusted and looked up to, Mista being sent to jail, etc.) until Bruno comes along and invites them to join an, again, criminal organization, marketing it as something to turn their life around and give their life a purpose. However, instead of really showing what should be the blatant moral dubiousness of this, it’s almost treated like a “found family” type situation, I think, which is... honestly extremely weird.

 Narancia was groomed into a life of crime by a manipulative gang that ruined his life, and you solve this by... grooming him into a life of crime by another manipulative gang? Abbacchio went into a depressive state because of all of the corruption he helped cause in the world, and he ‘solves’ this by entering a crime organization? That just doesn’t make any sense to me, and I hope you understand why I think that this is just... bizarre storytelling (and not the good kind). It is incredibly weird to portray a mafia member manipulating teens and broken people into joining his mafia as some kind of parental figure and savior. (To be honest, it almost feels like Araki forgot he was writing about a bunch of mafiosos and just wanted to write a cute family dynamic into Vento Aureo. To be fair, that dynamic is cute, but really not fitting for the setting in the slightest.)

Some members of the mafia are portrayed as unequivocally bad (like Leaky Eye Luca and Polpo), and some are portrayed as bad people despite having some form of understandable/decent morals at heart (like La Squadra). I think Bruno and his gang should’ve definitely been showcased in a more critical light like this. I just don’t think you can be an active mafia member and still be a completely good person. They don’t have to be entirely awful people, but what I think would’ve helped the story is if we saw Bruno and his gang question their actions a lot more, and make decisions (that aren’t just played off as jokes) that the audience is explicitly supposed to disagree with/have mixed feelings on. This would’ve added more nuance to the story and just make a lot more sense for the setting, in my opinion.

Diavolo, Giorno & VA’s Ending

I’ll start off the next criticism I have with the fact that, generally, I think almost everything we see about Diavolo makes his character out to be draconically evil. He is portrayed as essentially the root of most (or all) of the evil and corruption in Passione, and the main cause of all of the problems in Italy. He burned down his home village, killed his parents and abandoned his girlfriend on a dime to become the crime boss of Passione, and attempted to murder his daughter when he found out about her existence due to his paranoia. He murders anyone and everyone who even shows signs of wanting to find out about his identity. He sells drugs to children. He abandons both of the characters he’s ever shown to be close to (Doppio and Donatella), and leaves them to die. He murdered some of the most fan-favorite characters in the entire series (that being Bruno, Abbacchio, Narancia, and Polnareff). He only cares about power and nothing else. His name is literally “Devil”, dude. You want to despise him and root for the main cast in their attempted overthrowing of the mafia. He’s probably one of the most hated characters in the entire series. When he’s subjected to (seemingly, eternal?) torture in the death loop at the hands of Giorno, you’re supposed to cheer it on- he “deserves” it, after all.

I feel like a big mistake a lot of people make when discussing these issues with Vento Aureo is that they try to defend Diavolo’s actions far too much- painting him as “misunderstood” or “just doing what he had to do to survive”. I think that this is very false. Diavolo did not have to kill his family. He did not have to burn down his home. He did not have to sell drugs to children. He didn’t have to be a mafia boss. All of this was purely due to his lust for power and blatant disregard for the well-being of others- in other words, Diavolo is evil. My goal is not to defend his actions or paint him as “sympathetic”. However, I do dislike the way he is portrayed sometimes and his fate at the end of the story, and here I’m going to explain why.

First off... I feel like Diavolo is unfairly interpreted by the fanbase (and maybe even the series) to be the most evil/monstrous villain, and I just can’t see how this is true. He is evil, yes, but there are villains who have committed far worse atrocities than Diavolo, and have even worse intentions and motivations for their actions- for example, Kars genociding his entire race of people over a disagreement, Angelo sexually assaulting and murdering children, and DIO... well, being DIO.

Diavolo’s main motivation is to have his identity remain hidden from everyone else in the world (mostly for safety reasons- if he had his identity discovered, he would be in more danger of being attacked), and to remain in power as mafia boss of Italy. This doesn’t make the effects of his actions any less atrocious, but it is a much more understandable motivation than simply killing and torturing for the sake of enjoyment, like many, many Jojo villains do (say, DIO forcing a woman to eat her own baby for his own amusement, Kira murdering women for sexual pleasure, or Cioccolata torturing innocents for fun).

 We even see Diavolo express disgust at Cioccolata’s actions, so we know that he isn’t completely heartless, and has some form of moral standard, however low of a bar that may be. (Again, Diavolo is still horrible. I am only making the case that he is not the most monstrous person in the series.)

So, here is my problem: if Diavolo is far from the most evil villain... why does he, by far, get the most severe punishment out of anybody?

 This is something that I felt from the moment I watched through Vento Aureo- despite all of the atrocities we watched him commit, unlike every other Jojo villain in the series, watching Diavolo’s defeat scene didn’t make me feel any sense of justice or satisfaction. It just made me feel kind of... bad, honestly. I understand that Araki likes having severe punishments for his villains, but Diavolo’s fate was just way too overkill. It only left me feeling frustrated- why does a villain like Diavolo, a villain with hardly any screentime, a fairly understandable motivation and considerably less horrible actions than plenty of other characters, get tortured for seemingly eternity, but DIO, someone who is almost an objectively more monstrous character, get to die via an immediate, painless explosion?

I have seen some people argue that Diavolo’s death was a metaphor/form of irony relating to his stand ability. King Crimson has the ability to erase time, essentially (in his own words) removing the ‘action’ and keeping the ‘result’ of something. In that way, the logic behind the death loop makes sense. Instead of removing the action and keeping the result, it removes the result (death) and keeps the action (being killed).

I don’t think this is really the best argument, though. For one thing, how exactly is King Crimson’s stand ability something that Diavolo has any real control over? It’s not exactly like he can change the very essence of his soul. This is still overkill-levels of brutal, in my opinion- it doesn’t really make the ending feel any better to me. Plus, if we were going for cosmic irony, should that not apply to other monstrously evil villains, as well? For example, what if DIO was defeated by forcing his mind to stay in a “stopped time” state forever, or something along those lines? (Honestly, I don’t think I would have a problem with Diavolo’s fate if other worse villains got equally brutal-levels of punishment like this.)

I guess the real main thing that irritates me is how the guilt of the “evil” in Italy is concentrated on solely Diavolo as an individual, and the actual mafia is ignored as the source of the issues in Italy. Sometimes I just want to shake the story and go ‘dude, the mafia isn’t just bad because the Boss wants to kill his child or that he allows the drug trade to be open for minors, it’s bad because it’s a corrupt and greedy crime organization that shouldn’t exist in and of itself.’ Just killing the current Don and taking over the mafia for yourself would do virtually nothing to solve the problem (if you don’t believe me, just look up major mafia organizations and see the gigantic list of crimes that they do, way beyond just selling drugs).

Overall, I just didn’t care for the way Diavolo’s character ended out. Not only was it an unfittingly harsh punishment, but I also dislike the connotations of Gold Experience Requiem as a whole (which I will get to later). I feel like a better ending for Diavolo’s character would be something painful, but less... existentially terrifying? For example, I would’ve been fine with a death akin to Cioccolata’s or Kira’s, with him being finally exposed to the public right before he dies or being beaten to death by regular Gold Experience. That would’ve felt more justified to me and less needlessly cruel.

Then, finally, there’s the main focus of my issues... Giorno. Being the main character of the part and a Joestar, he’s presented as a sort of moral judge for the other characters, I think. We frequently see him decide which characters are “good people” or not, and use that to decide what amount of force he uses in attacking them. (This also leads him to mercilessly killing a large majority of the people he fights throughout the part.) This is what made him decide to spare Koichi and Bruno, but immediately murder characters like Polpo and Melone. He only decides to take over the mafia once he realized the things the Boss was doing, supposedly for the primary sake of keeping drugs away from children. Essentially, it’s pictured as if Giorno is only joining a criminal organization for benevolent reasons- there’s no need to question his morals, then, you might think.

But... here is the problem I have with how Giorno is handled in the story. For a start, I can’t really wrap my head around Giorno’s “make the Mafia honorable again by taking it over and becoming a ‘Gang-Star’” schtick. This plays into my romanticization issue with the part- when were mafias and gangsters ever a positive influence on anything, exactly? It only makes me think of Giorno as either naive and ignorant about the real nature of gangs, or as a kid who’s in denial about being power-hungry (mostly joking with the latter assumption, but you get what I mean).

 We see that his first experience with mafias were with another Don when he was a child, when he saved the Don’s life and was repaid with protection and making his bullying cease- this is portrayed as the thing that stopped Giorno from becoming just like his father. While this was a particular good deed on the Don’s part, it... isn’t really an excuse to glorify the mafia to the extent that Giorno and the story does, really. The dude is still a criminal.

 Additionally, it is demonstrated several times through his actions that Giorno isn’t exactly a saint either; being DIO’s son, he inherits a lot of his personality and methods of getting what he wants from him. He doesn’t hesitate to murder or torture “bad” people who are in his way (Melone, Polpo, Cioccolata, and Diavolo are good examples of this.) Essentially, he’s the “I will not harm you until you get in my way, then I will be as merciless as I possibly can” type of character. Not only that, but he doesn’t do anything about or even seem to care about his own team’s more immoral actions, either, nor does he seem to care about virtually anything the mafia does other than the drug trafficking.

So, I hope you can understand why the decided ending of giving Giorno (who is shown to have the capability to be as cruel as his father, given the incentive) a stand that puts people in death loops and making him one of the most powerful people in Italy as a crime lord... doesn’t exactly make me feel good?

I mean, think about it. If Passione continued to exist or even thrive under Giorno’s leadership as we are left to believe, just how many people would try to usurp him from the position and be thrown into the death loop alongside Diavolo? How many of those people were as monstrous as Diavolo or really deserved it? The only sort of guarantee we have to prevent that outcome is that Giorno probably wouldn’t willingly use that kind of force on people if he didn’t perceive it as needed, but it’s not even canonically specified if Giorno can really control if GER puts people into death loops- it’s shown to act pretty much on its own, after all. The stand attacked Diavolo automatically without Giorno’s full knowledge when he attempted to use King Crimson against him. That’s honestly a little scary. If anything, that’s an even worse reign than Diavolo’s.

I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with GER being a thing if Giorno didn’t become mafia boss of Passione by the end. (In fact, 90% of my problems would probably be either gone or so inconsequential that they wouldn’t matter if Vento Aureo ended with Giorno just destroying the mafia instead of taking it over. Why didn’t Araki go that route?) As it stands, though, I feel like it’s just way too much power (and an unnecessarily violent ability) being given to a very morally questionable person running a massive crime organization- I heavily distrust the notion that Giorno taking over the mafia will leave Italy at peace, or even get rid of the drug trade, honestly. There are still other crime organizations out there that can just take over the drug trade for themselves, after all (unless Giorno set out to stop those as well, which would probably just lead to even more undeserving people faced with the death loop...)

To me, Vento Aureo’s ending was just sort of... poorly thought-out in general? It gave me the impression that it was very rushed, and Araki was focused more on crushing together an ending that made sense in the moment and didn’t really stop to consider the full implications of it or if it really solved the issue presented from the start. I would’ve much preferred the ending I proposed where either Giorno just destroys the mafia, or the more radical solution of an entirely different setting for the story. I think it would’ve worked much more for what I think the part was going for.

In the end, I feel like Vento Aureo tries to have a black-and-white “villain is pure evil, heroes are good, heroes overthrow villain” story, but... sort of fails at it. Due to the nature of its setting, every character (with the singular exception of Trish) is very morally gray at best, I think. I can’t help but see them as a bunch of hypocrites, and I fail to see how Giorno being the crime lord instead of Diavolo changes... very much at all, really. (Maybe it’d be slightly better since drugs aren’t being sold to minors anymore, but that’s not enough to be what I’d call a “good ending”.) I definitely feel like a canonical follow-up or explanation of what happens afterwards would be a big help to the part.

I love part 5, but man it is flawed lol