Fridge / JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure | Phantom Blood | Battle Tendency | Stardust Crusaders | Diamond Is Unbreakable | Golden Wind | Stone Ocean | Steel Ball Run | JoJolion | The JOJO Lands

Fridge pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed and all examples folderized. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned

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Fridge Brilliance

• Jesus, after the Resurrection, went to North America, lived there, died there, and his mummified corpse was divided in pieces that were scattered across the country. Could the inspiration for this plot have come from the song "American Jesus", by Bad Religion?
  • Alternatively, it was a reference to the fact that the Chinese complained that Jesus did not tell them anything about God. So, now that He had a second chance, He did tell the whole world.
• The Saint is implied to be Jesus Christ himself, which would make Jesus both the first Stand user and a JoJo. His full name was Yeshua-bar-Yosef, or "Joshua, son of Joseph".
• Tusk, Johnny's Stand. Act 1 and 2 don't have legs, as Johnny is unable to move his lower body. Act 3 and 4 do. This is because Act 3's power is allowing Johnny to be teleported through the bullet holes he makes, while he actually becomes able to stand on his legs by the time he achieves Act 4.
  • Moreover, while Tusk Act 3 does have legs, they're disproportionately small and equipped with odd vertical cleat-like spikes on the bottom of them, which would involve learning to walk in unconventional ways. Tusk Act 4, while top-heavy, has a more realistically proportioned body (as can be seen more clearly in its All-Star Battle render), down to having human-like legs similar to Johnny's own legs.
• Another thing about Tusk the Stand that relates back to "Tusk", the song: The first line in the song is somebody asking "How are the tenders, Johnny?" Johnny is the name of Tusk's user.
  • Also, from the song, it features lines like "why don't you tell me what's going on?" and "why don't you tell me who's on the phone?", and what Stand does Tusk beat? "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Love Train". Tusk is about infidelity and beat the song about love.
• Tusk having four ACTs may seem a bit peculiar, since the original song wasn't split up at all... until one realises that "Tusk" was also the name of the album it was in, and said album was divided into two 2-sided discs, for a total of four parts.
• As noted in Funny Valentine's character bio, D4C, the shortened name of his Stand, is heavily death-themed. The word "death" starts with the letter D, Four Is Death, and C is pronounced "shi", like the Japanese word for death. Because of D4C's powers, Funny dies many times, relying on alternate versions of himself to carry him through.
• Why does D4C look like a rabbit? The Japanese word for rabbit is usagi, and in Japanese media, most rabbit characters or any characters with rabbit traits have names containing the word usa. D4C's user, Funny Valentine, is the president of the USA.
• Gyro spends the majority of the story without a stand. This means that he managed to curb stomp most of his fights with just his steel balls and rotational techniques that anyone can learn. Meanwhile, his opponents consisted of people who could alter the fabric of space and time, a hyperintelligent raptor, a man who can turn anything into a timebomb, and a man who can cross dimensions, mirroring the original Baron Zeppeli who, disregarding the Required Secondary Power of their respective parts (The Ripple/The Spin), was also a Badass Normal.
• Funny Valentine can only jump to alternate dimensions/timelines in which his father perished, seemingly the one constant in his past. Presumably, this is because in any timeline where Valentine's father survived, he turned out a completely different person, and in those timelines the original's Stand Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap has no "reference point" to latch onto.
• According to the wiki, Araki designed Tusk with the axolotl animal in mind. Now then, what happens to your nails after you cut them off again?
• At one point near the end, Diego Brando From Another World tries to use a group of Johnny's fans as human shields and is surprised when Johnny shoots into them. This makes more sense when you realize that that version of Diego Brando, being closer in personality to the original DIO, probably comes from a world where Johnny was closer to the original morally-upright Jonathan.
  • The thing is, Johnny killed those girls accidentally, for he couldn’t sense them before striking; AU Diego was mocking Johnny for their deaths.
• Why can Tusk ACT 4 move in the frozen time? Because it's powered by the Super Spin, which generates a gravitational force. And we already saw that a Gravity Master can counter time-stopping powers: after gaining gravity-related powers, Pucci was able to perceive things in the frozen time, and later to dramatically reduce the duration of Jotaro's time-stopping power.
• Everybody is using the Holy Corpse wrong. The Corpse’s ultimate ability is to redirect all misfortune to somewhere else. Jesus, the Corpse himself, was born to spread the gospel and become an advocate for all of humanity’s sins; so ideally, all sin (misfortune) should really be directed towards the user of the Corpse, for the benefit for everyone else. However, this would result in a self-sacrifice and the users of the Corpse never consider sacrificing themselves to achieve their goals: Valentine wanted to redirect all misfortunes from United States to everywhere else in the world and used the Love Train ability to redirect all of Johnny and Gyro’s attacks to different places in the world, causing fatal accidents, AU Diego was a psychopath who stole the Corpse and put it in an unbreakable safe in order to receive the power he would get from the corpse, not giving a damn if anyone else was killed or hurt, and then Part 8 revealed that after the events of SBR, Johnny stole the corpse out of desperation to heal his wife from a rock disease, despite knowing that it would be transferred to somebody else, but unknowingly transfers the disease to his own son. However, unlike the other two, Johnny learns from his mistake and transfers this disease to himself before dying from a rock crushing his head.
• D4C's power is to push people into other timelines through being crushed between two objects, which Funny Valentine can do by throwing a flag over himself and lying on the ground, thus phasing through the ground and resurfacing on the other side in another timeline. Who made the song Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, again? And where are they located? The Land Down Under. Valentine can send himself to a land down under; another timeline.

Fridge Horror

• If not for the head going into her womb Lucy would have been raped by Funny Valentine.
• This arc combines this with Religious Horror, when it becomes apparent that the cross-country race used to frame the story is just a cover for President Valentine's agenda of collecting the scattered corpse of Jesus. When he succeeds in gathering all the parts into one vessel, Valentine's powers evolve and create an effect which draws good fortune toward him and casts misfortune away. When Johnny Joestar tries to shoot him, this effect protects Valentine, but the misfortune has to be re-directed elsewhere, resulting in children being killed on the other side of the world. Given the source of this power, it casts dark, dark questions on the miracles in the New Testament.
• At the beginning of Steel Ball Run, when Johnny's trying to tame Slow Dancer, he's got a large chunk of wood lodged in his leg. Obviously he can't feel it, but given the time between that and when he shows up to the starting line, one must wonder if he had time to get it removed and treated correctly.
• In the Tubular Bells arc, Lucy believes Funny has only one Corpse Part when really he has three. The more Corpse Parts you have, the more powerful your Stand becomes, so how can you make D4C even more powerful? Just add Requiem next to D4C.
  • One wonders if this might have happened if Valentine had taken the corpse parts into himself instead of Lucy becoming a vessel for them. Or alternatively, D4C: Act 2!
• In the climax, the President of the United States is killed and buried in an unmarked grave. Yes, he was a villain, but hardly anyone knew about it. Imagine the panic of the president (or the leader of any nation for that matter) disappearing suddenly with no confirmation on whether he's dead or alive.
  • Something like that actually happened to Australian PM Harold Holt. (Although he was confirmed as dead in absentia.) His body was never recovered after disappearing from Cheviot Beach.
• When Johnny gets his infinite rotation turned around on him and is slowly dying, he thinks that even his soul will be destroyed in the process. The idea of a Stand having the power to do that itself opens up to a ton of fridge horror, but remember that just a little earlier, Johnny unwittingly killed some of Diego's fangirls with said power, meaning Johnny just unintentionally obliterated some completely innocent women from existence.
• Realizing that he was going to most likely be killed by Johnny, Valentine found an alternate version of Diego while suffering from the infinite spin and gave him the task to get the Holy Corpse from Johnny, because he respected the ambition shown by the Based World Diego (who got killed fighting Valentine) and believed he’s the only other person besides Valentine who worthy of the Corpse. However, this version of Diego turns out to be a sociopath on par with DIO from the original universe of Parts 1-6; Valentine was a horrible person, but he at least had the goal of keeping his country from harm, at the cost of the rest of the world. But AU Diego is a psychotic monster, one who almost got the power of the Son of God. One could only imagine the Hell the world would’ve been in if he had won…

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