The Bizarre Rhyme of JoJo's Steel Ball Run Universe

[00:00:00]Alternate universes in fiction are often implemented in a rather surface level way narratively speaking. Generally, there will be a distinct variation between one universe and another that will allow for new stories to be told.

[00:00:12]But both stories don't really engage with the themes and legacy of each other. Yet, there is one author who managed to reboot his series in a fascinating way that both recontextualizes his previous work and manages to stand alone as its own separate and masterfully told story.

[00:00:28]After concluding the original JoJo's Bizarre Adventure universe with Stone Ocean, Hirohiko Iraqi decided to take a bold step forward by starting from zero and creating a new universe that was completely separate from the original timeline. Though this new universe is not entirely within a vacuum within a meta narrative sense, we the audience are aware that the motifs and themes that underly certain names, designs, and dynamics still persist. Steelball Run is part seven of Jojo's after all. It's the gravity of JoJo's universe that allows parts 7 through 9 to be true continuations of the story, even if they are in a separate continuity. Because ultimately, the characters within Jojo's can never escape the organizing structure of gravity. To Iraqi, gravity is far more than a law of physics. It metaphysically anchors the narrative of his whole series. It is the structural force that ensures that identity is never arbitrary and that themes persist throughout the entirety of his story.

[00:01:25]Circumstances may differ and the world may be entirely different, but the fundamental mass of a character's soul will always pull their destiny back towards an indelible truth. Gravity is the reason that across the infinite expanse of reality, the Joestar bloodline remains one that is oriented towards justice, even if the Steelball Run universe might cause some characters to take a detour on the way there. This is why I believe that the Steelball Run continuity is so commonly misunderstood.

[00:01:51]Many people view it as a completely separate entity that has nothing to do with the original universe. In reality, it's a lot more disciplined and adheres to Iraq's philosophy of thematic consistency across all of his work. The reality is that the Steelball Run universe serves as an intricate thematic mirror or a narrative rhyme where the foundational archetypes of the original saga are structurally inverted in exceedingly clever ways that deepen the meaning of his work as a whole. Both moving forward and retroactively. In the Steelball Run universe, Iraqi strips some of his archetypal Joe stars of their innate and inherited nobility and cast them into the muck of reality, forcing us to ask a fascinating philosophical question. What kind of heroes are we left with if their entire character arc ends precisely where their original counterparts journey began? By examining the trajectories of Johnny Joar, Joke Higasha 8, and the early depictions of Jodo Joestar, we can uncover what I believe to be the thesis statement underlying the Steelball Run universe. It is a narrative canvas where virtues are no longer given baselines of fate. Instead, they're a brutal uphill climb to earn them. This is the rhyme of the Steelball Run universe, a rocky celebration of humanity within the gray and morally fraught realities of life.

[00:03:08]Most protagonists enter their stories at an acceptable baseline of human functionality, a place where they can live life for themselves without being entirely defined by a given setback. In Iraq's terms, they begin at zero.

[00:03:20]Protagonists like Jonathan Joestar are relatively healthy individuals operating within a standard moral framework set by proper parental figures and begin their story living in relative comfort until a sudden call to action forces them to rise to the occasion of resisting evil.

[00:03:36]But Johnny Joar begins his story completely separated from that healthy start. He is trapped within a spiritual abyss and left with a desire to see the light of life once again. When we first meet him in Steelball Run, he is the absolute antithesis of his original universe counterpart. Jonathan Joestar was an archetype of a privileged but responsible soul. Not just because of his family's wealth, but because his soul had been systemically cultivated by love, structure, and an innate sense of noble duty through his father, George.

[00:04:05]Jonathan begins his story at zero. He's a young boy who learns to the value of his father's legacy and chooses to preserve it by becoming a pristine gentleman who attempts to continually approach the world with grace and righteousness. Johnny, by contrast, arrives as a washed up and crippled ex- jockey, destroyed by the poor parenting of his father, George Joestar II, and one fateful day that took what little purpose in life he had away from him.

[00:04:30]Crucially, Johnny's negative state was never just a consequence of the bullet in his spine. Long before he ever arrived at the starting line of the race, Johnny was spiritually crippled.

[00:04:39]He was a prodigy who respected nothing, was driven by some kind of hollow vanity that served as a psychological coping mechanism to tolerate the lack of love he felt his whole life. He was entirely unmed from guidance, starved of genuine affection, and utterly consumed by a quiet toxic resentment towards a world that seemed to have discarded him the moment he stopped being useful to everybody. This desperate vulnerability is precisely why Johnny enters a steel ball run. He joins the race for a slim chance at getting his life back through some kind of miracle. And in chasing this miracle, his motivation is entirely transactional. The moment he touches Gyro steel ball and feels a temporary spark of life return to his legs, his entire worldview narrows into a singular obsessive fixation. If I can master that power, if I can walk again, I can crawl out of the abyss and finally get back to zero. To Johnny, zero is not a state of enlightenment, but it's the baseline of living. It is his singular desire to be able to look the world in the eyes and feel like he deserves to live in it. He just wants to get where Jonathan started. Because of this negative starting point, Johnny's path throughout part 7 is defined by a raw and dark state of mind that Iraqi explicitly labels dark determination. Unlike the original Joe stars whose stands and abilities manifest as extensions of their heroic resolve, Johnny's stand tusk evolves as a direct road map of his deeply painful and personal healing process. Johnny is somebody who is actively willing to bypass conventional morality and kill anyone who threatens his chances at getting to zero. He can be cold, self-absorbed, and frequently acts out of instinct like some kind of cornered animal. And it's here where we can observe the rhyme of Jonathan and Johnny Joar. Johnny spends the entirety of his 95 chapter epic fighting, learning, and growing to earn the right to exist at the exact baseline where Jonathan Joar's story naturally began.

[00:06:32]Johnny does defeat a serious threat in Funny Valentine, but this is incidental to his story. Steelball Run isn't written to be a clear repudiation of Funny Valentine in the same mythological way that Phantom Blood repudiates Dio.

[00:06:45]The story was written to get Johnny to a point where he can be a person that has the proper agency to finally grow beyond zero. The true devastating payoff of this inversion doesn't even occur within the pages of Steelball Run itself, but rather in the melancholic flashbacks of Jojolon. It's only long after the race has concluded, only after Johnny has successfully done the work of dragging himself out of negative and learned how to exist as a complete human being that we finally see him rise to the occasion of embodying the traditional Jonathan archetype. When his child is threatened by his selfish desire to pass off the suffering of his wife onto someone else, Johnny doesn't hesitate. He orchestrates one final and ultimate exchange, sacrificing his own life and taking on the fatal rock disease so that his family might be safe from such suffering. The tragedy and the ultimate beauty of Johnny Joestar is that he was never an evil subversion of Jonathan's soul. He simply had to travel the detour from negative to zero so that his gravity could make him the kind of person he was always meant to be. Like Jonathan, he established something crucial about the Joar bloodline, but within the Steelball Run universe.

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[00:08:07]>> He proved that no matter what circumstances might alienate a Joar from righteousness that they can always find their way back through great spiritual efforts. Where Johnny Joar's journey is a desperate scramble to reclaim the spiritual baseline of zero, Joke Higashkata's story in Jojolon represents how someone completely bereft of any sense of community and identity can develop it through an unyielding desire to find themselves. In the original universe, part four's joke Higashia is defined entirely by his incredibly strong roots that actively inspires his identity and compassion. And through this he serves as the immutable anchor of Morio. From the very first volume of Diamond is Unbreakable. Joke 4 possesses an unshakable and instinctive sense of himself. He is molded by a loving mother, a proud police officer grandfather, and a young man who saved him as a child which inspired his deep and wellfounded belief in compassion.

[00:09:03]His entire heroic drive is inherently defensive. He knows exactly who he is and dresses particularly to express his proud identity to everybody in Morio.

[00:09:13]Joke knows exactly where he belongs. And the conflict of Diamond is unbreakable is born from a deep protective urge to defend the peaceful status quo of his beloved home and community from the external rot of a depraved serial killer. Joke 4 has no need in searching for his place in the world because the world has already built a home for him at the very start. But when Iraqi brings us to the Morio of the Steelball Run continuity, he continues the Steelball Run universe's rhyming structure by alienating this universe's joke from all the things that gave his original counterpart purpose and allowed him to bring Morio together. Joke 8 does not begin his story with a home, a family, or even a name. On the contrary, he is discovered naked, buried beneath the earth near the wall eyes, and possessing nothing but two sets of balls, a sailor hat, and a blank memory. He is psychologically a ghost and is revealed to be an anomaly born from the merger of two separate individuals. Where Joke 4 was the ultimate expression of a stable identity, Joke 8 is the ultimate expression of identity displacement. His entire existence is a frantic question mark. Who am I? What am I doing here?

[00:10:25]Why am I here? Even before the merger of Yoshi Kagakira and Josephumi Kujo, Josephumi himself was unmed and felt like he didn't belong anywhere in the world after his mother left him to die as he was drowning as a kid. In whatever form he might have been in, Joke 8 never had a reason to take pride in who he was or never felt any compassion from others. That is until he meets Holly.

[00:10:49]It's here where his path towards the start of Joke 4's story really begins.

[00:10:54]Holly saving him was his equivalent moment of the delinquent saving Joke 4.

[00:10:59]It was the lifealtering instance where he realized the impactful nature of compassion and felt a pull towards paying his respects to that legacy in his own actions and his identity. This fundamental shift changes the entire nature of the narrative conflict. Joke 4 fights to protect his community because that's who he is. Whereas Joke 8 fights to assert his own identity in a world that he feels entirely alienated from.

[00:11:25]Every step forward in Jojolon is kind of like this weird forensic excavation of the self. This is the brilliant thematic inversion of the character. Joke 4's stand crazy diamond is an ability centered around restoration, fixing things that are broken and returning objects to a predefined known baseline of what they used to be. It's the perfect extension of somebody who loves his town and wants to keep it whole.

[00:11:49]Conversely, Joke 8 soft and wet operates on the mysterious and abstract ability of plunder. It temporarily steals properties from anything like friction, sight, and sound. And it's the weapon of a drifter who is trying to understand the nature of things to hopefully extract something to give his own life meaning because he felt so unmed.

[00:12:09]Because of this fluid starting point, Joke 8's heroism is a lot more complex and transactional than the easy, warm righteousness of Joke 4. He is capable of cold and unsettling pragmatism because he doesn't have the luxury of an established moral heritage. He needs to establish who he is through his investigation and what legacy he decides to perpetuate through his actions. Later in Joolia, the ultimate payoff of this rhyme comes when Joke 8 is forced to accept a heartbreaking truth. The past he is searching for is gone. And the person he used to be cannot be rescued.

[00:12:47]He never was Yoshikagi Kira, but he is also no longer Josephumi Kujo. He will never receive the clean, ready-made identity that Joke 4 was granted from birth. Yet, this realization doesn't break him. Instead, it empowers him. In the climax of his battle against the wonder of you, Joke 8 manifests go beyond, an ability born from bubbles that literally do not exist in this world, spun so infinitely thin that they bypass the very logic of calamity itself. This is the ultimate philosophical resolution to his arc.

[00:13:20]Joke 8 overcomes the crushing weight of wonder of you by weaponizing the contradictory and transformative nature of his own existence. He establishes that it is possible to create your place in the world from nothing. Where Joke 4 began his story knowing his place and fighting to keep it, Joke 8 spent his story in the dark, earning the right to look at a family that wasn't assigned to him and to finally say, "This is where I stand." The material world might say that Jose is functionally nobody. But the truth of his life shows that his identity goes beyond that to become something more. It's here where he finds out who he is and learns what he wants to protect. Jodio Joar situation from the Jojo Lands is pretty distinct from the previous two examples as it forces us into the darkest and most radical starting point that any of the steel run universes Joe stars started within. The evolution from a baseline of absolute systemic detachment and moral apathy to a potential baseline of genuine moral clarity. His original universe counterpart, part five's Jovana, enters his story as a prepackaged savior. He started out knowing what his morality was and served as a messianic anomaly born from a childhood of severe neglect who nevertheless possesses an unshakable and romantic dream to become a gang star. because of the inspiration he received from an honorable mafioso. At the start of Vento Ao, Jo already understands the structural rot of the mafia and he knows precisely how he intends to fix it. He enters Pacion to conquer the criminal underworld so that he might redirect the vast terrifying leverage of the mafia towards a noble vision of justice that the law had failed to provide. Jouro is a kind of saint operating in a sinner's world. a seemingly superhuman moral force who instantly begins inspiring every broken soul he encounters to be more than what life decided they could be. But when Iraqi introduces us to Jodio Joestar, we find that he rhymes with Jovana in an unsettling way. Jodio has noble dream and no romantic vision and definitely no enlightened moral core. He enters the narrative as a self-admitted diagnosed antisocial teenager operating as a cold, low-level courier in a narcotics ring. I mean, drugs. Jo could never, man. But this shows how Jodio doesn't look at the world through Jouro's lens of justice, whereas instead he looks at it through the lens of absolute systemic utility.

[00:15:51]To Jodio, the world can be reduced to a complex grid of mechanisms. these invisible unyielding legal and financial currents that dictate who gets stepped on and who gets to sit at the head of the table. He is entirely detached from conventional morality because he views survival and life as a whole as a sort of mathematical problem. If you don't control the mechanism, you'll be left at its mercy. And so his ambition is pretty simple. It's to become filthy rich by exploiting the mechanisms that dictate one's place in the world so that he might not be left powerless. This profound thematic inversion alters the entire spiritual weight of the protagonist. Joiovana used the mafia as a vehicle to manifest his innate and I think beautiful righteousness. Jodio Joestar begins as a literal cog inside of a criminal machine. Perfectly content with his own moral bankruptcy so long as he makes money and his family is safe.

[00:16:45]This transactional worldview is perfectly expressed through his stand November Rain, where Jordo's gold experience was an ability centered entirely around the miraculous divine spark of creation, turning inanimate objects into living things, creating body parts to heal the wounded, and accelerating consciousness itself. It was the perfect extension of an enlightened person who wanted to affirm life through his righteous actions.

[00:17:09]Conversely, November Rain manifests as a towering entity that unleashes a localized crushing downpour of a sort of localized gravity. Instead of creating to inspire and ascend like Jono's Gold Experience, it forces others down, establishing a sort of forced hierarchy.

[00:17:27]It forces objects and enemies down into the earth through sheer unyielding pressure. And I think it's a stand of a boy who understands the nature of hierarchy and that by forcing others down, he might stand above them. Because of this sociopathic starting point, Jodio's narrative traction is incredibly fascinating when it comes to theorizing about how Iraqi will make his story rhyme, as Johnny and Joke Aid did. Jodio is by no means a hero. Jodio is a self-admitted criminal and has a lot of room to grow to potentially get to Jouro's starting point. But if the trajectory of the Steelball Run universe holds true, Jodio's entire arc should be a slow, brutal, uphill climb toward the very moral clarity that Jouro Giovana simply started a story with. Jodio possesses the exact same tenacity, the same cold, ruthlessness, and the same calculating brilliance as Jouro Giovana.

[00:18:17]But where Jouro used those amazing traits to assert his unshakable sense of justice, Jodio will probably be forced to build a soul from scratch. He'll have to learn through struggles and consequence that true power isn't merely about controlling the mechanisms of life or accumulating personal wealth.

[00:18:33]Instead, it could be about realizing that when the systems of the world are fundamentally exploitative, that one ought not use their control to consolidate their own greatness. Rather, one might eventually step into their role as a protector that would restructure those mechanisms to orient them towards justice. Jodo Joar began his story in the abyss of systemic crime and I'm curious to see how he might climb towards the light just like Johnny and Joke 8 before him. When we step back and survey the massive generation spanning architecture of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure story, it becomes clear that Hirohiko Iraqi's decision to reset his reality was never a thematic retreat or reboot. It ended up being a chance to recontextualize his celebration of humanity in a more realistic and difficult world. In creating Steelball Run, he decoupled the series from the easy certainties of its own mythology within the original timeline. In the original six parts, heroism operated under a comforting law of spiritual inheritance. The Joar bloodline was a golden treasury of innate nobility and unyielding righteousness. Jonathan, Joke 4, and Joro Giovana didn't need to learn how to be heroes. The answer to that was in their blood and their upbringing. But in the Steelball Run continuity, Iraqi deliberately breaks this assumption and strips his archetypal protagonists of their inherited goodness, casting them into a muck of moral ambiguity. But this gives these characters the chance to travel the long detour to earn their virtues through absolute and agonizing willpower. This is the profound overriding thesis statement of the Steelbar Run universe. It's a narrative canvas where fate is no longer some kind of guiding hand, but a heavy mechanism that has to be survived, understood, and overcame. Johnny Joar had to spend the entire 95 chapter epic dragging his paralyzed body through the muck, weaponizing his dark determination just to climb out of the negative and reached a beautiful neutrality of zero, the simple baseline of human functionality and agency that Jonathan had from the start. Only after doing that brutal internal work could his gravity pull him to replicate Jonathan's ultimate sacrifice in Jojolon. Joke Higashkana 8 was discovered naked and buried beneath the earth, a psychological ghost that was entirely alienated from the stable loving home that anchored Joke 4. His story became a forensic excavation of a fractured self, proving that when the material world tells you that you are nobody, you possess the power to build an identity and community from absolutely nothing. Finally, Jodio Joestar seems to be a chance for a legitimately depraved character to grow beyond his actively evil beginning to become something incredibly powerful and inspirational like his counterpart in Jordo. But his story isn't quite done yet, so I suppose we'll see if my interpretation holds or not. Instead of abandoning the foundational truths of his original universe, Iraqi has elevated them by forcing his characters to begin their stories without their virtues as a given, he has traded a grand myth of effortless righteousness for something far more realistic and I think beautiful. It's the majesty of a soul that actively chooses to climb.

[00:21:43]Mark Twain famously claimed that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Which is to say that the cycles of life and history aren't some closed loop where nothing new can ever occur.

[00:21:54]We can instead think about time as an infinite spiral, creating rhymes or similarities, but always deepening and progressing. In this way, the Steelball Run universe becomes a deeper and more enduring rhyme about Iraqi's previous stories. It is Iraqi's newest celebration of humanity within the gray and morally fraught realities of life.

[00:22:14]And in understanding how the steel ball run Joe stars can reach their counterparts starting points, the original characters are further fleshed out, providing more interpretive context to their original stories. All this is to say, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure really is a masterpiece. Thank you for watching.