This is a short discussion on the themes of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure season 6: Stone Ocean. From here onward, I will refer to it as “Stone Ocean.” The story revolves around Jolyne Kujo, the 19 year old daughter of one Jotaro Kujo. Jolyne is wrongfully convicted for manslaughter because of a plot in order to bait Jotaro into trying to save her. The main villain, Enrico Pucci, is a priest at the Green Dolphin Street Prison with connections to Jotaro’s past, and seeks Jotaro for information on how to complete his plan. Jotaro is knocked out and rendered useless for most of the story, so along the way Jolyne has to take company with some of the other inmates, including Hermes Costello, her cellmate, and Weather Report, a mysterious man who’s forgotten his identity.
The story and concept are particularly interesting because Jolyne is a female protagonist in an unconventional medium for the time, and the author, Hirihiko Araki was unsure how fans would process the mostly female cast due to half the entire season taking place in an all female prison, save for Jotaro’s few appearances and Emporio, a young boy who was born in Green Dolphin Street to a prisoner who had died there. The previous 5 seasons had an entirely male cast, and this season represented a major change in one of the major themes that runs through Jojo: That of family and fatherhood, and individual agency in their story versus how one’s birth shapes one’s destiny. Jotaro is a protagonist from earlier in the series and many fans know him and have seen how he’s changed over the seasons and how different he seems now that he’s a dad in this season. Jotaro abandoned Jolyne when she was young out of concern for her safety, worried that people associated with Pucci would come to find him and seek Jolyne as a way to get to him. Jolyne comes to understand this aspect of her father, and how he cared about her from a distance without getting involved. Jolyne feels stuck in a world she is not a part of, but only roped into by her dad’s involvement until the second half of the story where she willingly goes back into the prison and gives up a chance of escape to save Jotaro’s life. She moves from feeling unable to place herself in a strange world to being the master of her own destiny thanks to the family ties that bind the Joestar Bloodline.
Araki wants the readers to ask why Jolyne would make the sacrifices she does to save her father, who she believed to not care about her, and he wants to ask what Jolyne would be feeling during all these events happening so quickly and dramatically and why she changes her thoughts about her dad.