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duhragonball · 4 months

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JoJolion Ch. 77-82

This is the "Doctor Wu and Awaking III Leaves" arc. I just want to say that Awaking III Leaves has gotta be one of the dumbest Stand designs in this arc. It looks like the lampshade from the leg lamp in "A Christmas Story". Like Araki watched that movie and saw the leg lamp, and thought the shade was the most interesting part of it. Which does sound like him, I have to admit...

So last time there was another Stand Battle at the Higashikata orchard, and Jobin set the orchard on fire in a desperate gambit to pit his enemies against each other while he swiped the Locacaca branch. This seemed clever in the moment, but in the opening pages of the very next chapter, Rai Mamezuku immediately suspects Jobin of starting the fire. Josuke doesn't catch on, but Rai could tell just from how the Higashikatas each reacted as he explained to them who he was and what just happened. I could talk about what a keen observer Rai is, but in this case it's not very hard to piece this together.

Rai knows it wasn't Josuke, because Rai was with him in the bunker when it started.

Rai knows it wasn't Norisuke, because he's the one who asked Rai to help Josuke locate and secure the branch.

Rai knows it wasn't Poor Tom or his allies, because his plan was to eliminate everyone with his remote Stand ability. He only came to the orchard in response to the fire.

Rai knows it wasn't Hato, Joshuu, or Daiya, because they're all idiots who don't know what's been going on.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure Rai doesn't even know about Jobin's past dealings with the Rock Humans, which make him look even more suspicious. He just saw Jobin trying to keep Tsurugi calm every time Rai spoke about the Locacaca branch, and it seemed obvious to him.

On the other hand, Josuke is more concerned with the people in the ambulance who took the branch. What Josuke doesn't know is that it was the wrong branch. Tsurugi used his Stand to pull a switcheroo for Jobin. The people in the ambulance realized it was a fake as soon as they left Tsurugi's area of effect, but Josuke still believes the next move is to track down that ambulance.

Now at this point, you might be wondering: What happened to Mitsuba? Or you might even be asking: Who the hell is Mitsuba? Well, she's Jobin's wife and Tsurugi's mother. She appeared very briefly in the scene where Josuke met the Higashikata family for the first time, but she hasn't said or done anything since... until now. That's right, Mitsuba Higashikata finally makes her move in the Great Game, and... oh, she's just going to the doctor.

Okay, so I think it's pretty clear that her physician, Dr. Wu Tomoki, is a bad guy. His ridiculous hair, his two ID badges that say DoC ToR on them in obnoxiously huge letters. He looks like a standard JoJo villain with an outlandish fashion sense, but he had to rein it in because of the hospital's rigid dress code.

Mitsuba's purpose in this story seems to be to illustrate just how the Rock Humans can use the Locacaca to exploit carbon-based humans. Damo's smuggler ring was just selling the fruit to wealthy buyers, but Ryo Shimosato spoke of grander plans than this. He and Poor Tom are dead, but their colleague, Dr. Wu, shows us some of what they had in mind. Mitsuba's been receiving Locacaca treatments for a while now. First she had her breasts cosmetically enhanced, but her teeth turned to rocks and she started drooling all the time. That's why she never said anything or showed her face in her previous appearances. Later, she had her teeth restored to normal, but now her right ear is "like a rock", and she can't hear out of it. So she's come right back to Dr. Wu for treatment, never suspecting that she's been getting the same treatment over and over, with different results. And she's been paying handsomely each time.

Dr. Wu agrees to treat her yet again, for 200 million yen. That comes out to 1.2 million US dollars, just to give you an idea. See, that's the kind of grift that the Four Doctors can pull. Damo's smuggler group was a one-and-done thing. His customers were probably told up front that this would heal one body part in exchange for another. That's why the major league pitcher didn't care about losing his jaw as long as his shoulder recovered. But he never would have gone back for a second purchase, for fear of losing his pitching arm.

But Dr. Wu can string his patients along indefinitely. He just never tells them what the treatment is or how it works, or that it causes a new ailment in an unrelated part of the body. And they keep coming back to him because he did such a good job on them the last time. And this all works because everyone trusts him as a doctor to be concerned for their welfare.

Anyway, as it turns out, Yasuho is here at the hospital too, because of menstrual pains. I guess that's just a coincidence, although you can't rule out Paisley Park unconsciously directing her towards the plot. There was an old rule from Part 3 or 4 about how Stand Users are fated to come into contact with other Stand Users, but Yasuho's specific Stand Ability only seems to intensify that principle. So she's there to notice Jobin's wife being rolled through the halls in a wheelchair, and her legs and feet appear to have been turned to stone.

About this time, Josuke calls Yasuho asking her to help him track down the ambulance. Yasuho tells him about Mitsuba, and he warns her that the enemy is probably in the hospital, so she should probably clear out of there until he can link up with her. But Yasuho's curiosity gets the better of her, and she does have those menstrual pains to deal with, so I guess she's not in a big hurry to leave. She tracks down security cam footage of the ambulance and gets a look at the guy who stepped out to pick up the branch. And she quickly recognizes him as the doctor who was pushing Mitsuba's wheelchair.

Yasuho follows them into the examination room, but only finds Mistuba, alone, with no sign of Dr. Wu or the wheelchair. Also, Mitsuba's legs are fine now. Less fine is Mitsuba's state of mind, as she seems to have some sort of memory problems. It's like she doesn't remember why she came here, or that she was even in a wheelchair a minute ago.

Yasuho finally locates the wheelchair in a desk drawer. See, this is one of those bullshit JoJo visuals where something weird happened but there's no plausible explanation for it. A Stand User could dismantle a wheelchair in a few seconds and hide all the pieces in a desk drawer. But once we see the specific Stands we're dealing with, it doesn't make much sense at all. As for Dr. Wu, he's apparently hiding inside Mitsuba's body, which is why she's acting so weird and doing all his strange habits, like chugging an entire 2-liter bottle of water and eating what looks like a phonographic record.

Yasuho quickly recognizes this Stand power as similar to the one the hair clip used against her when she was a child. I'm not sure how accurate the comparison is, since we know so little about the hair clip and its powers. Just to cut to the chase, Dr. Wu's Stand, named... uh... "Doctor Wu"... allows him to turn his body into tiny fragments of himself. It's kind of like Stone Free but with dust instead of string.

That's how he got inside Mitsuba's body, although it's unclear whether this is why she's acting so strangely. Is he controlling her like a puppet, or is this some sort of weird side-effect of his mere presence inside her body. His Stand profile image said that he could interact with the brains of the people he inhabits to make them do certain things, but I don't know what the extent of that is.

The main problem with this arc is that it's Yasuho and Mitsuba teaming up, but Yasuho keeps asking Mitsuba what's going on, and Mitsuba either doesn't know or won't answer. To her credit, Yasuho knows enough about the Locacaca and Dr. Wu to make an educated guess, but Mitsuba seems oblivious to everything.

Actually, maybe that's by design. I never understood what happened to Mitsuba's legs in this story. The Locacaca exchange is unpredictable, but this means Wu had to give her two doses in one visit. Maybe more than two, but for some reason he decided to move her to a different room while waiting for her legs to get back to normal.

But it occurs to me that this might be standard procedure for Wu. He has to keep the Locacaca treatment a secret from his patients in order to keep stringing them along, and he can't send her home with no legs. That would be too conspicuous. So he probably has to run through multiple doses of Locacaca until he settles on an equivalent exchange that works for him. But that would arouse the patients' suspicions, so he uses his Stand power to inhabit their bodies during the process. This allows him to suppress their memories of the treatment. Yasuho just happened to walk in on the final stage of the process.

Now, while Yasuho tries to make sense of all of this, some Dr. Wu fragments get inside her body and attack her. I'm not quite sure how they attack her, but she knows she has to remove them before they can kill her. So she summons Paisley Park, who somehow interfaces with the MRI equipment and locates the foreign material in Yasuho's head.

I'm not entirely sure how any of this works, but the X-Ray view of Yasuho's skull through Paisley Park's hand is one of my favorite visuals in this Part. Also cool is the way PP smashes open a storage cabinet of syringes and pulls off the needle sheath with her mouth. Normally Paisley Park doesn't seem to have a mouth, but she's got one here and it's this cute li'l line on her face. Paisley Park rules.

Then she just stabs the needle into Yasuho's eye (!) and fishes out the offending object. That... seems like it would hurt like hell. Also, this fragment looks like it's made of rock, so I don't see how you could spear it with a metal needle. But it's out, so I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

At last, Dr. Wu reveals himself more properly, and he offers to spare Yasuho but insists on finishing his business with Mitsuba.

His plan is to inhabit Mitsuba's body like he was doing before, then use her to infiltrate the Higashikata property. There, he can find out more about her son Tsurugi, and find out what he knows about the Locacaca branch that Poor Tom tried to steal.

Fortunately, the girls manage to escape Dr. Wu with Mitsuba's own Stand, Awaking III Leaves. She can place arrows and direct force in that direction. They take shelter in an elevator car and Mitsuba uses her power to purge the Dr. Wu fragments out of her body.

Unfortunately, this also includes the petrified fetus in her body. Mitsuba recently learned she was pregnant, and it sure seems like the last round of Locacaca treatment restored her entire body, but at the cost of her unborn child.

Then Wu catches up to them. The thing is, his ability allows him to blow in through any ventilation in any room, so I'm not sure it's possible to just go some place else. He repeats his intentions to use Mitsuba's body, but he also insists that he's the good guy in all of this, because the Locacaca's secrets are for the public good. Therefore, any action he takes to study them is justified, and anyone who opposes his agenda must be evil. As for the fetus, he considers this inconsequential, because it was only in the 14th week of gestation.

Mitsuba repels him again with her Stand, and then they start taping down his body with medical tape. At first I couldn't understand what good this was supposed to do, but then it became clear that the fragments stuck to the tape couldn't get loose, and they wadded them all up into a ball to trap his head.

I think that's Dr. Wu's main weakness. He can do a lot of damage to a person's body as a cloud of dust, but he doesn't have much physical strength in this form. He can't whip himself up into a sandstorm, for example. So if you can get enough adhesive on him, you could...

... Throw him out the window, for one thing. This doesn't actually work, as we'll see, but it does keep him occupied for a bit.

As they leave the elevator, Yasuho runs into an old acquaintance, Toru. They used to date in high school, and now he works part time at the hospital. Looks like he just moves laundry around or something. Yasuho asks him to find Josuke in the lobby and tell him to find her on the third floor. He agrees, but makes some crack about how wet she got when they had sex or something. Yasuho's like "What the fuck, man?" Seriously, it's like Josuke is the only man in this town with any chill at all. And he's a weirdo who sleeps under mattresses, so what does that tell you?

The girls discover the secret room where the Locacaca plants are being kept, and there's some sort of instructional video Dr. Wu made to explain how they should be used for treatment. The main point of the video is that there's no way to predict which part of the body the fruit will attack as part of the equivalent exchange. It always heals an afflicted body part, so that seems reasonably easy to control. For example, with cosmetic surgery applications, like Mitsuba's boob job, they just have to make some incisions or some other damage to the area they want to work on, and that's enough to direct the Locacaca effect to that part of the body, as long as nothing else is wrong.

The problem is that there's always a strong chance that the Locacaca will attack the brain. I mean, there's other vital organs, but maybe those are spared because you literally end up worse off without them, so the exchange wouldn't be equivalent. With the brain you can lose certain chunks and still be alive, I guess. Anyway, that risk would make the Locacaca too dangerous to use, but Dr. Wu promises he has a technique to keep the drug away from the brain during the process. That technique, however, is just his own Stand, which only he can use.

So there's Locacaca fruits here, and it's up to Mitsuba to decide if she wants to use one to try to restore her unborn baby. Oh, if you're wondering how she got it back inside her, her Stand can do that. The point is that without Dr. Wu to assist, there's no guarentee of how her body will be affected by this next dose. But Mitsuba chooses to take her chances. Unfortunately, Dr. Wu is here to "assist", because he managed to get back in the hospital through the water supply, and onto the Locacaca fruit through the irrigation system in this lab. So Mitsuba gets possessed again, and Yasuho is stuck fighting both of their Stands now.

Also of note, Wu's research shows that the Locacaca doesn't work on diseases caused by pathogens like viruses and bacteria. There's some samples of infectious diseases in the lab, and Wu tries to shove Yasuho into them to make her sick, but he also tells her that it was Holly Kira who made this lab. Wu says she "failed" in her research of the Locacaca, which makes it sound like she must have been working with the Four Doctors, and perhaps her present condition may be the result of some botched experiment with the Locacaca.

But Yasuho manages to use more tape to redirect Mitsuba's arrows, which turns the tables on Dr. Wu. She expels Wu from Mitsuba's body, but then Wu does... something to the Locacaca fruits, like he's trying to spray them with the juice or something and... do what exactly? Yasuho's healthy, so would the Locacaca even have any effect on her?

But before things can get too bad, Josuke steps into the room and captures all of Wu's fragments with soap bubbles. Yasuho breathlessly warns Josuke about Wu's powers, but Josuke's already dealt with it.

That's because Josuke had medicinal cement in his bubbles when he fired them. Basically, it's the same idea as the medical tape Yasuho used in the elevator, except this time Wu is soaking in it, and the stuff hardens so he can't escape. I'm pretty sure that suffocates the bastard to death, but the point is that he's been defeated for good.

My only question is: How did Josuke know to do this? Yasuho's phone had been destroyed earlier in this arc, so she couldn't contact Josuke and tell him about Wu's Stand. Toru passed along Yasuho's message, and maybe the mess in the elevator might have given them a clue, but that's about it. Maybe Paisley Park contacted him without Yasuho knowing.

As for Mitsuba, her unborn child is restored, and it looks like the Locacaca took in exchange... her nose, which is a small price to pay considering what else it might have done to her. And this is probably suitable for her character arc, since her troubles started when she came in for a boob job, and then she worried about her mouth, and then she came back today because she was worried her son might notice her bad ear and start asking questions. Mitsuba's been obsessed with her good looks, and now she's stuck with this stone nose because another dose of Locacaca might be dangerous to herself or the baby. But she seems to be at peace with it, so she's learned her lesson.

Overall, this is one of those arcs where I had trouble keeping up with the action. I still enjoy it because it features Yasuho, and the chase through the hospital is fun, but I think I'll enjoy it a lot more when the anime version gets made. Well, assuming an anime version does get made. Hopefully, that anime version won't have all these unseemly upskirt shots of Yasuho. I don't know what got into Araki during this one, but it's like he wanted to draw Yasuho's underwear and this was the arc where he got it out of his system. It's not great.

#jojo's bizarre adventure #jojolion #jo2uke higashikata #yasuho hirose #rai mamezuku #wu tomoki #toru #mitsuba higashikata

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