http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Awesome/JoJosBizarreAdventureBattleTendency
Spoilers Off applies to all "Moments" pages, so all spoilers are unmarked!
In short,
Battle Tendency practically
runs on
Crazy Is Cool, with nearly every waking moment of the part being jam-packed with greatness. However, since the folks at TV Tropes can't just put down "all of it" and leave it at that, here are some select moments that truly exemplify how awesome
Battle Tendency is.
- The opening for Part 2
is colorful, campy, and bloody glorious, very much like the story arc it's adapted from. - Joseph may never be as strong as Jonathan with Hamon, but he's a damn lot more cunning and creative with it. Highlights include:
Joseph: But did you think I'd completely rely on a gimmick like Hamon all of the time? (swings a hand grenade on a string from his pocket and pins it onto Straizo's scarf as he flees) I'm also very fast!
Straizo: Wha-?! How did you pin that grenade on my scarf? (
swats it away)
Child's play! (
Straizo looks behind him, revealing that said hand grenade was tied to the pins of a load more hand grenades on his scarf, yanking them all out at once)
Straizo:
You son of a-! (
screams in absolute horror as the cluster of grenades all aimultaneously explode, incinerating him)
- Turning his Eye Beams against him with a tumbler glass.
- The sheer fact that he won against Straizo so early on. Dio was powerful enough to be a Big Bad and, unlike him, Straizo had years of martial arts training, could shoot Eye Beams from the start and had a way to deflect Hamon energy through his scarf... and Joseph beats him as a Starter Villain!
- The way he starts off the fight, pulling a Thompson submachine gun seemingly out of nowhere to immediately hose him with bullets. It doesn't work, but it lets you know how awesomely crazy Joseph is. Straizo's smug demeanor beforehand only makes it better.
Straizo: Even if it is in plain sight on these city streets, Jojo... I'll take your life long before you ever become a danger!
- Defeating an assassin with a cactus filled with Hamon.
- His fight with Santana involving allowing himself to be absorbed in order use the Hamon inside his body and using a well's reflective light to turn him to stone.
- Force-feeding Caesar a live pigeon during a Magic Kiss. One pigeon was all that was needed to defeat him!
- Causing Wamuu's first head wound in several millennia with clackers. Children's toys.
- Using friction in order to get up the hell climb pillar.
- Kills Esidisi using a rope trick.
- Using Kars' obsession with the Red Stone against him, using the artifact as a sort of shield.
- Cancelling Wamuu's Holy Sandstorm by breaking his arms with yet another rope trick!
- Using a third rope trick — his most complicated in the series, which involved setting his scarf on fire as a distraction — to rescue Lisa Lisa and set up Kars for a Hamon Overdrive and a ton of Impaled with Extreme Prejudice. Seriously, what was Kars thinking when part of his Sadistic Choice involved giving Joseph one end of a rope?
- Causing Kars, now an Ultimate Life Form with The Power of the Sun and an Adaptive Ability, to be blasted into space through honest luck and a nearby volcano. The icing on the cake is that Kars was convinced he planned this all out beforehand. He didn't, but he played along just to mess with him.
Joseph: Let me guess, you're going to say "Did you plan this too, JoJo?! Tell me!"
Kars: How do you always know... (gets slammed by volcanic rocks) ARRRRRRRGH! Did you plan this too, JoJo?! Tell me!
- As the above is happening, we get the triumphant return of "Sono Chi no Sadame". After spending most of Part 2 watching Kars modify his backstabbing on the fly in response to the heroes' efforts, this serves to tell the audience that Kars is not getting out of this one. His control over life is useless here, Joseph's own adaptations and bravado are sending him into a Villainous Breakdown, and oh yeah, his ass is getting blasted into space on a Hamon-amplified spout of high-pressure lava. You don't even need to stay for the narration to be convinced Kars is gone for good. This moment has become so iconic in the anime that when the much more popular Stardust Crusaders didn't reuse the theme for its final victory, fans decided to add it themselves.
- The narrator gets a moment of awesome too for delivering a monologue about Kars' Fate Worse than Death over dead silence. It's not loud or exciting, but hearing this is enough to tell the viewer that yes, the finale is over and that the last of the Pillar Men is gone forever. "He wished for death, but there was nothing out there to kill him. The spark of thought within him went dim, and then... silent". Damn.
- When a mobster begins racially mocking Smokey in the restaurant (in the manga, he threw a glass at him), Joseph stands up for him and Erina gives her blessing for the beat down.
- When Joseph tells you what you're going to say and you say it anyway, you're going to fail miserably at whatever you're doing, and Joesph is going to have an awesome moment at your expense.
- The whole "next line trick" is awesome. Basically, he knows what you will say. So he knows what you think. So he knows what you will do. So he knows how to counter it.
- Joseph doesn't throw a single punch. He defeats the mobster with his words and judicious use of a hat stand.
- After Joseph defeats the mobster and boasts he can predict and counter anything the idiot tries, the rest of the restaurant gives Joseph a round of applause. Best dinner and a show ever!
- Caesar managing to get the upper hand by kissing a woman and using bubbles.
- Caesar surpasses his trainer in a sparring match. Beforehand, he saves Joseph's life when he stalemates Kars.
- Caesar nearly killing Wamuu with his improved Hamon, as he used his bubbles to fill the room with sunlight — which would've happened had he not blocked the sunlight, allowing Wamuu to turn the tables and kill him instead — but even while dying, he still manages to turn defeat into some small amount of victory, using his last breaths to snatch and seal Wamuu's lip-ring inside a bubble, which had the cure for Joseph's poison inside it. Wamuu even admits that had Caesar been fighting Kars instead, he'd have won.
- Rudolf Von Stroheim sacrificing himself to stop Santana, while quoting Plutarch on the nature of man's courage in the face of peril. It failed, but it showed his inner strength and determination, doing all he could against the Pillar Men in spite of his powerful fear of them.
- When Kars and his vampire army have Joseph on the ropes, Stroheim and his Nazi soldiers, of all people, show up as The Cavalry!
- The beautiful Lisa Lisa, Hamon coach, has her own amazing moments:
- In her first appearance, she humiliates Joseph with minimal effort, showing off her mastery of the discipline.
- When confronted with a vampire, just wraps her scarf around him and burns him to death with Hamon. Jonathan did something similar, but only after a massive buff by a dying Zeppeli. Lisa Lisa had to claw her way up each step of the way to gain that sort of vampire-killing prowess.
- Lisa Lisa shows that she can defeat vampires with a mere kick when they attempt to rush her during Joseph's match with Wammu.
- She curbstomps Kars during their duel. The whole thing is one move and five seconds. Sure, it was only a Body Double and the real Kars defeats her quickly with a cheap shot, but it makes one fact perfectly clear: Kars thought such a precaution was necessary. He was scared.
- In the backstory, after hearing about her husband George Joestar II's death, Elisabeth calmly puts Joseph to bed, looks at the camera and then sprints to the scene of the crime. Where she annihilates the vampire responsible with a single blow. Although it causes her
to get caught, you have to admit, it took guts.
- Santana's establishment of the Pillar Men as a massive threat. It's a special kind of villain that makes you freak out at a Nazi Mook Horror Show.
- AWAKEN, MY MASTERS, a perfect way to introduce Wamuu.
- In his very first appearance he kills one of the Nazis with his horn, while still completely encased in stone, uses his blood to block UV lamps that was supposed to prevent him from escaping, melds the hands the rest of the Nazi squad together so fast, that they don't even realize it, and proceeds to drink the flesh of the entire squad through the head of the commander. Perfect introduction indeed.
- Wamuu defeating Caesar's bubble technique with mini tornadoes made from his braids.
- When Burning Colosseum, aka Wamuu's Leitmotif plays, you can bet some crazy stuff's going to happen.
- Using wind to create armor that reflects sunlight away from him. Ingenious!
- Midway into his fight with Joseph, Wamuu gets his arms broken by one of Joseph's rope tricks. How does he respond? Gouging out his own eyes.
- Kills the vampires that tried to interfere in his fight with Joseph as a head.
- How did he do so as a head? He put his head into one of the crossbows, uses his hair to pull back the string (keep in mind that it took all of Joseph's strength to pull the string back), and fires himself at the vampires, caving through about a dozen of them with his horn.
- Esidisi himself has some awesome moments:
- Kars being the creator of the Stone Mask. While Dio is more infamous for causing a lot of the tragedy throughout the story the entire story began with Kars' ambition to be the Ultimate Life Form. Made more impressive when he finally does so!
- To contrast with Dio's infamous Kick the Dog moment with Danny, Kars kills some drunk drivers because they were going to kill a dog, and still comes off as menacing. It's not everyday someone manages to be intimidating by rescuing a cute puppy.
- Kars effortlessly slicing through Nazi soldiers and a cyborg Stroheim with ease. Stroheim was upgraded enough to be able to fire faster than Santana's healing rate. Kars still beats him after getting shot multiple times.
- Kars, nearly beaten by Joseph, is about to be finished off by Stroheim. He pulls the Red Stone of Aja and a Stone Mask at the last moment and makes the beam that would certainly kill him make him far, far stronger.
- His Ultimate Lifeform state. He makes Nazi-murdering squirrels from his own body, shoots his scales at a plane and turns them into piranhas which can eat through the plane, and survives a lava flow by creating heat-proof armor from crab shells and compressed air. He also gets Hamon far stronger than Joseph's, that is actually lethal to humans. His actions in the final episodes of Battle Tendency were basically Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot cranked up to the highest capacity!
- To this day, Kars stands atop the pyramid of JoJo villains as the strongest of all. Even among Stand users, very few could stand a chance against him, much less defeat him.
- Jonathan's Dying Moment of Awesome at the end of part 1 becomes even more awesome since it's revealed that in addition to saving his wife and unborn child, the girl Erina saved from the sinking ship was Lisa Lisa, who grew up to not only become a Hamon master and the mentor of both Joseph & Caesar, but also turns out to be Joseph's mother. Part 2 simply would not have happened if it wasn't for Jonathan's heroic final moments, as there wouldn't have been anyone to fight the Pillar Men.
