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maxwell-grant · 2 years

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Jojo bingo: Father Pucci

And that brings us our second bingo

If Jonathan and Dio are my favorite characters sharing a kind of number one position together, Pucci is in a bloody contest with Jolyne and Jotaro for number two. I would even argue that he's the best JoJo villain. Even with his significantly more nuanced and calmer personality compared to them, he’s just as gloriously over-the-top and ridiculously funny at points as the other main JoJo baddies. He has two of my absolute favorite Stands in the series (Whitesnake alone deserves a separate post for how much it’s personality and powers add to Pucci, who is already complex and fascinating and horrifying even without a Stand that has an entirely separate personality), he’s pro-active and vicious as a main villain to an extent the series hadn't seen since Phantom Blood Dio, he grows in power and scope and personality over the part, he’s psychologically disturbing and fucked up to an extent I'd argue surpasses Kira (y’know, the fetish-based serial killer), he adds a ton to Dio's character and his story culminates in him growing into a bigger, badder and better villain than DIO and, just, Pucci is incredible. There couldn't be a better villain to wrap up the original JoJo saga. One of the greatest villains of all time ever.

I feel like out of all the main JoJo villains, Pucci is the only one who does pull off being morally grey (Valentine really isn’t, he’s a silver-tongued imperialist torturer and J.Geil-tier disgusting creep who’s just good enough at appropriating heroic imagery that he’s convinced himself and a good chunk of the readership (and the Eyes of Heaven writers apparently) that his deeply selfish and unfathomably monstrous plan is noble and selfless and patriotic. He’s a good and layered villain, but morally grey he isn’t). Having significantly lesser crimes compared to the others, more human reasons and more concrete goals, all of which doesn’t do that much to make him sympathetic, quite the opposite. Pucci is horrifying for a myriad of reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that we’re allowed to understand him and his backstory and his goals, and get in his headspace in a way that’s only really reserved for protagonists. Pucci is one of the best examples of how audience sympathy can be used to make villains more resonating and even more horrifying. Pucci is horrible, awful, even described as “the evil that doesn’t know that it’s evil, the worst evil there is”. And we walk through his journey every step of the way.

Sometimes this moral greyness gives way to people arguing Pucci wasn’t so bad or that he was the only JoJo villain not motivated by selfishness, which I kinda disagree with. Because while it’s true Pucci doesn’t think of himself as selfish and genuinely believes he’s doing everyone a favor, Pucci’s plan is monstrous, and to pull it off he commits the most unfathomably selfish deed in the entire series. He quite literally breaks the universe and rebuilds it again in order to strip agency from everyone, HIMSELF INCLUDED (even if he does have more power over it than everyone else), so that everyone will accept the fate that’s decided for them and never try to defy fate. This, he argues, is born of “resolution eradicating despair”, which further cements Pucci as a Joestar-gone-wrong, in that he quite literally turns the driving ethos of the series against itself, against the universe and the Joestars. And he wins.

No one has any agency, no one's decisions matter, no one’s at fault for anything. Pucci rewrote the universe so that he’d fundamentally never be responsible for his sister's death, by making it so that she not only never really existed to begin with (since the dead do not carry over with their souls and personalities intact), but even if she did, she would have just learned it’s inevitability ahead of schedule and accepted it and be happy for it, just like everyone else, nothing anyone (certainly not him) could have ever done about it. And this? I find this to be a level of ghastly selfishness somehow scarier than anything DIO did, because it’s so much more human, so much more tragic, and so much more fucked up existentially.

(People have argued a bit over whether or not this goal fits DIO’s character and there’s room to argue both ways, but even putting aside Eyes of Heaven (which is thankfully non-canon, but it’s take on Heaven DIO was designed with input from Araki himself, which counts for something), the plan outlined in DIO’s Diary was always meant to be fulfilled by a friend and not DIO himself)

And I think this is part of why I’m so strongly in that “Everyone is wrong about them” camp because, people consistently mischaracterize Pucci as only a couple of steps above the average DIO flunky, or someone motivated by a romantic love towards DIO (putting aside the age thing, DIO’s Diary quite literally states that Pucci would have been the wrong person if this was the case), or even non-canon spin-offs that depict Pucci as someone who’d immediately abandon Heaven if DIO was still around to boss him. I fundamentaly disagree with this because Pucci adheres to the same theme of legacy that defines Jolyne. And much like Jolyne, who has to battle for the sake of her lineage and the universe, needs to be better than Jotaro, needs to succeed where Jotaro failed (which she does through rescuing Emporio), Pucci has to be better than DIO. Stone Ocean is the glorious apocalyptic book-end to Phantom Blood, with Jolyne, at the end of the world, forcing herself into becoming the final Ultimate JoJo and wrangling along whatever reality-warping weirdos she can, as she desperately tries to catch up to the new Ultimate Evil who's running away with the plot so fast nobody can catch him until the end.

Pucci surpasses DIO, in terms of power (he attains a Stand that surpasses all other time-based Stands, including the one that defeated The World), scope and accomplishment (he single-handedly disabilitates DIO’s arch-enemy with relative ease and then kills him by turning his time stopping power against him, as well as the current JoJo and the entire supporting cast that accompanied her, and recreates the world into one where the Joestars cannot do anything against him, and only loses because he, like Dio, goes too far and targets an outsider ally to the Joestars). Pucci isn’t DIO’s 2nd in command or partner or flunky, or DIO-lite, Pucci is superior to DIO, he’s DIO’s ultimate accomplishment, the supreme power he attains over Destiny and the Joestars, within the text. When they do JoJo mega crossovers like Jorge Joestar and Eyes of Heaven, they downplay Pucci’s agency and beef up DIO’s powers to be some multiversal world-challenging menace, just so he won’t be lagging behind Pucci, who already is that in-canon.

Pucci is horrible because he makes use of every resource at his disposal, everything that the protagonists have, everything that the Joestar bloodline has used over the centuries, Pucci turns against them. Enrico Pucci’s endgame is to rewrite the history and ethos of JJBA itself so he may wrench defeat from the jaws of victory forever, and he succeeds, and I love that this is not at all an exaggeration of what he does.

Pucci is horrible because everything he does stem from his complete inability to analze himself and admit wrongdoing, to even recognize his cruelty and malice as such, he has such a gargantuan moral and personal blind spot that even his Stand, the rageful melting spectre he bosses around to corrupt and kill people and strip away their memories or give them dangerous powers, is shown to be more introspective and reflective and humorous than the human who wields it, who has to yell at it occasionally to get things done.

He compartmentalizes everything that comes his way and interprets everything so that he never has to have his worldview challenged, never has to question himself, never has to regret anything that ever happened to him or that he ever did. Everything was fated to be. Everything is a test that everyone, including him, must pass, ergo, he’s on even odds with everyone else. If he fails or fucks up, he’s being tested, ergo, he will eventually succeed. If others fail or fuck up, they’re to be disposed of, such is the order of things. If he succeeds or something goes his way, it was fated to be. If others get the upperhand, he’s being tested by fate, and since fate demands him to survive and complete his mission, he’s got permission to destroy and kill whoever’s holding him back.

If he does horrible things, well, what’s a few corpses, or a hundred thousand, for the good of the entire world? Would you make their sacrifices meaningless by stopping him? Everything is fated to be, and fate is on his side, not yours. He’s DIO’s God’s chosen. If The Lord wanted him to stop, he’d have chosen someone else, he’d have died by now, but he didn’t, so it falls on him to drag mankind kicking and screaming into the better tomorrow his friend showed him. He barrels through the story with this mindset and even dies screaming it, screaming at Emporio and the vengeful power of the brother he murdered that they just don’t understand anything.

His backstory is so fucked up because we see how he was wronged by fate and circumstance time and time again, how he was just confused and looking for answers, but for all intents and purposes he was a good kid trying to do what was best for everyone. He went to a seminary to find answers, to alleviate his guilt over his (at the time) dead twin brother, to learn about how to find happiness for himself and others. A horrid situation was thrust into his lap by no fault of his own, and he tried to handle it with the least amount of harm to all parties, and he fucked up catastrophically. And that moment, that awful moment, where he finds Pearla’s body and has a moment of self-realization, where he briefly understands he is to blame and, is on the cusp of kickstarting the path that should have lead him to becoming a better person, a morally responsible person, and then

fucking

DIO

who immediately provides Pucci with the escape hatch out of the Painful Moral Growth path, who fills his head with poison and stunts his growth by giving Pucci absolution on the terms that Pucci wanted, not the terms that Pucci needed. What started as seemingly the most benign thing DIO had ever done for anyone (healed a young priest’s malformed foot and left him some parting words) spiraled into the actual end of the universe as said priest, well, no longer needed God, once he figured that DIO could play the part for him, could provide him the answers the church wasn’t giving him, could alleviate his guilt and teach him what brings people together and alleviate his guilt and teach what makes someone happy and alleviate his guilt and alleviate his guilt and alleviate his guilt and alleviate his guilt and

As much as I stand by the idea that Pucci is DIO’s superior and his ultimate legacy, because this is DIO we’re talking about and all evil in-universe springs from him (Araki said as much in the post-scriptum for Vento Aureo that DIO embodies Destiny and Fate), Pucci is also, to an extent, a victim of DIO. This is also part why I fundamentally disagree with the idea that Stone Ocean softened DIO. I don’t agree with the idea that his pursuit of Heaven was out of character either (it was essentially what he’d always been looking for, trying to attain happiness by taking control over his destiny in increasing bids for power and self-transformation), and I don’t agree with the idea that this was out-of-character. I’d argue DIO’s much-vaunted manipulative charisma, while always present, had never once been depicted as horrifyingly thoroughly as it is here, when he truly lives up to the dark messiah image his followers in Part 3 described and when we see how thoroughly he was able to corrupt Pucci, even while doing seemingly nothing but being the priest’s friend at a time of need. Stone Ocean, I’d argue, makes DIO scarier and more godlike in a way no other part (and certainly not those crossovers that did push Dio into actual godhood) did.

I think Pucci is one of the few religious villains I’ve seen that I like because he’s much more interesting than just a condemnation of particular priests or the church as an institution, and he doesn’t go the obvious route of being an old white bigot (quite the opposite, since those types killed his family to begin with). Rather, he embodies so many kinds of thinking you see within religious circles or mindsets. “He works in mysterious ways”, “He saves all of us in the end”, “only His will matters”, “humans cannot possibly claim to understand His design”, “there is a point to the suffering”, “the suffering will be worth it if you trust Him”, “look out for His signs even if you don’t understand what they are for”, “your suffering on Earth will be nothing compared to how much better your life will be in Heaven”, “trust those that He sends your way to guide you”, “trust not those who fall into the path of evil, the path that is not His”, “your enemies deserve salvation as well even if they don’t know it”, there’s just, so much you could dissect here, in terms of how Pucci speaks to the experience of religious thinking, or even just believing in the existence of God even if you’re not specifically christian or religious (...see why I put up there why I’m a little scared to admit I relate to, or at least kind of get, Pucci? Sometimes I think of Pucci as almost a big Mr.Hyde to the collective experience of everyone who grew up religious and had that shape their worldview whether they wanted or not.).

Pucci, a man every bit driven by the same unsatiable black hole that DIO has (just replace “ambition” with “guilt”), takes all of these, and drives them to an unfathomably horrifying, yet entirely plausible, conclusion. Spearheaded by tangible proof that yes, Fate is real, Heaven is real, and he can make it happen, no, he’s the one assigned by higher powers to make it happen, so long as he just does this and that and gets rid of some vile enemies of his that would rather have all of mankind suffer before letting him win. But, no matter, the sinners always get their due, in the end.

I hate that Netflix’s release schedule killed the Stone Ocean hype but, no matter, nothing can take away from how great it is and how great Pucci is. Not quite my favorite but one I’d easily argue is the best villain in the series, the perfect apocalyptic pilgrim JoJo needed to bring the end of all things and the birth of countless new ones.

Also, I always read Stone Ocean and applied DIO’s OVA theme to Pucci’s scenes. I love his anime theme, but I will always think of this as Pucci’s theme first and foremost.

#replies tag #character opinion bingo #jjba #jjba part 6 #stone ocean #jojo's bizarre adventure #enrico pucci #dio brando #whitesnake #made in heaven #that scene where he finds the body is so fucked up man #he comes SO CLOSE to getting the epiphany he needed #he was just a lost and confused 15 year old #Dio ruins everything even when he doesn't really do anything #I love Pucci but he fucks me up

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