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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable
Episode 16

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 16 of
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable ?
Community score: 4.5

Jotaro Kujo's got a new look, meaning that his bling is all orange now instead of yellow. "Josuke, I'm going hunting. Come with me," he says in the first five seconds of the episode. It turns out that Akira Otoishi, Red Hot Chili Pepper's Stand user, confessed to his crimes and revealed that there's a literal feral rat among the stray Stand users of Morioh. Jotaro's plan is to track the wild animal and kill it before it can cause too much trouble.

Their search takes them to the outskirts of the city, amongst the hills and farmland. Their strategy is to use their Stands to fling metal pellets to kill the rat, since their natural fighting abilities would be too slow for the animal. They do track down a Stand-using rat and kill it, but it turns out that there were two of them! The second rat, the more elusive and cunning of the pair, gets nicknamed "Bug-Eaten" by the JoJos in reference to it's chewed-up ear. The episode continues on until it's practically a game of psychological warfare. Bug-Eaten is hiding out in the hills and using its Stand, a strange mechanical figure that fires projectiles, to lure our heroes out into the open. If Bug-Eaten's Stand hits its target, then it will start to melt the victim's flesh away in traditional censored-for-TV JoJo fashion.

The main hook of this episode is that it features Jotaro and Josuke almost exclusively. The rest of the cast are nowhere to be seen, leaving this hunting task up to the two strongest and most able-bodied of the group. Since defeating Dio and unlocking Star Platinum's time stopping ability, Jotaro is probably the most powerful character in the series by a long shot, with Josuke likely to close the gap at some point before the end of Part Four. Obviously, conflicts in the JoJo universe are rarely matters of raw strength, as is the case with this tricky rat, but Jotaro is often smart enough to meet the challenge either way.

We don't see these two characters problem-solving together often, but it seems like a natural fit. Jotaro and Josuke have near opposite personalities, but that's never a point of contention between them. They have a mutual respect for each other that makes scenarios like this unfold fairly easily. The conflict with Bug-Eaten eventually gets solved with Jotaro walking out into the open, trying to lure the projectiles towards himself so that Josuke can identify the rat's location and kill it. There is no ego that determines who gets what role, it's a simple answer to the limitation that Josuke can't use Crazy Diamond to heal himself if he's the one who gets hurt.

In another story, these two opposites might be at each other's throats in a shallow attempt at drama, but JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has confidence that allows its characters to just be good at what they do, trusting that the result will be suspenseful and entertaining all the same. This is a fairly usual one-off episode that wraps itself up by the end, but I think it's a good example of how the series often works. JoJo is a series that gets by simply by being interesting, whatever form that ends up taking.

Rating: B+

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach writes and records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw


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