"Are these girls insane?"
"That's not even weird. A lot of fangirls act exactly like this in front of their idols."
"JOJO's bizarre luck with women…"
A lot of viewers grumbled under their breath, but the moment the story moved forward, their attention was pulled right back in.
As Jotaro was heading downstairs at school, a sharp, inexplicable pain suddenly shot through his leg. His body tilted, and for a split second he nearly tumbled down the stairs. Fortunately, ever since awakening his Stand, his reflexes had become something abnormal. He corrected himself in mid-fall and landed without completely losing control.
Only then did the figure who had been lingering in the corner step forward.
Henry, playing Kakyoin, walked over with quiet composure and handed Jotaro a towel, introducing himself with perfect politeness. On the surface, his tone was gentle, even considerate. But there was something in his eyes - cold, sharp, vicious - that sent a chill through the audience almost instantly.
That was what made the moment so unsettling.
When Alex had first released the cast stills, Kakyoin's promotional images had been shown alongside Jotaro, Joseph, and Avdol, characters already recognized as allies. Naturally, the public had taken it for granted that this red-haired transfer student was another member of the team.
So what was with that look?
It was not the gaze of a companion.
It was the gaze of someone who had already decided to kill.
Jotaro had not been seriously injured, but the skin around his knee had split open, so he still decided to stop by the infirmary.
The moment the familiar soft voice rang out, quite a few viewers jolted.
There she was - Emily.
She was dressed in a white coat, a stethoscope hanging loosely around her slender neck. But the coat was left unbuttoned, and the sweater underneath clung tightly enough to make her figure impossible to ignore. The shot was framed in a way that made the effect even worse, and countless male viewers nearly forgot how to breathe.
Elsewhere, Rebeca Verne, who had already returned from America, could not help muttering a curse under her breath when she saw Emily playing the school nurse, all charm and effortless provocation wrapped in such an ordinary role.
Of course she knew Emily had joined Alex's company after leaving her previous agency. And of course she knew Alex treated her well, always finding chances to give her screen time. Still, Rebeca had heard Emily was busy filming another drama recently, which meant this school nurse role was probably just a cameo. That thought, at least, made her feel a little better.
"All right, don't move. I'll cut the fabric and treat the wound."
Emily smiled gently as she raised the medical scissors.
The moment she bent down, the audience's imagination began running in every possible direction. A school infirmary. A beautiful nurse. Pants about to come off. The setup alone was enough to derail the minds of half the viewers watching.
Some had already started wondering whether this school nurse might actually be the female lead.
Then the scene twisted.
Emily's face changed without warning. Her eyes rolled white, and with terrifying force she drove the scissors straight toward Jotaro's cheek.
The violent turn came so suddenly that all those male viewers who had been drifting into entirely the wrong kind of fantasy nearly fell out of their chairs.
"What the hell? How is she that strong? Don't tell me… a Stand?!"
Jotaro caught her wrist in time, preventing the scissors from sinking any deeper, but the blade still sliced into the side of his face hard enough to draw blood. Pain flashed across his features, and in that instant a thought connected itself with brutal clarity.
That transfer student.
That strange look.
That sudden pain on the stairs.
"Kakyoin!" Jotaro barked, his voice sharp with realization. "Was this your doing?!"
"Exactly."
The answer came with smug delight.
Kakyoin, who had made his first appearance barely minutes earlier, was now perched on the infirmary windowsill as though he belonged there, like a quiet, elegant piece of the scene's cruelty. There was malice all over his expression, yet because of Henry's almost delicate features, the result became strangely captivating instead of ugly.
"The school nurse is already under the control of my Stand, Hierophant Green."
He manipulated invisible strings with the casual air of someone operating a puppet he had long since stopped thinking of as human.
"If you attack my Stand, you'll hurt her. I've already sworn loyalty to that man. So I'm going to kill you, JOJO."
The moment the words fell, the white-eyed nurse let out a shrill, almost inhuman scream and lunged again with the scissors.
And in that same instant, Jotaro noticed it.
Something was hidden inside her throat.
His left hand twisted her wrist, pinning the blade, while his right pressed against the small of her back to steady her. Then he leaned forward and sealed his mouth over hers.
The reaction from longtime JOJO fans was immediate. The comment feed erupted in chaos, flooded with gleeful callbacks to one of the most infamous moments from Phantom Blood.
"So your first kiss wasn't with DIO - it was with this JOJO!"
"As expected of Jotaro! He did what none of us could ever do!"
"Now I understand exactly why Emily was cast in this role."
"So Alex is abusing his authority now, huh?"
The jokes came in waves, but the scene itself did not linger in embarrassment. Jotaro's Stand bit down on the head of the grotesque creature hiding inside the nurse's mouth and tore it free.
Kakyoin's Stand emerged at last.
From Jotaro's lips was dragged a strange, shining green form, its appearance almost absurdly vivid, like some luminous malformed fruit given a will of its own.
"Hmph. Pulled out into the open, it looks like some glowing melon," Jotaro said coldly. "Just a filthy Stand that hides inside other people's bodies."
Then he slipped both hands into his pockets, blood still staining his face, and fixed Kakyoin with that same crushing stare.
"I'm going to beat the hell out of you, tie you up, and drag you back to the old man. Brace yourself."
Kakyoin's face had already gone pale from the damage being done to Hierophant Green, since any attack to a Stand would also affect its user. Even so, what appeared on his lips was not fear.
It was a smile.
A deeply unsettling one.
"You'll regret pulling it out, JOJO."
In the next second, liquid began to seep from Hierophant Green's palms. It dripped first, then poured, then surged downward like twin streams of water gathering into force.
Jotaro's eyes narrowed.
"What the hell are you trying to do?"
Kakyoin's smile widened, and then his voice cut through the room like a blade.
"Take this, JOJO - Emerald Splash!"
The effect detonated.
A torrent of deep green projectiles burst from the cascading streams, firing forward like a storm of gemstone bullets. They slammed into Jotaro and his Stand with terrifying force. His broad body was hurled into the wall behind him, and when he hit the ground, the impact landed with another heavy crash.
"I told you," Kakyoin said as he stepped down from the windowsill and walked toward him at an unhurried pace, "you'd regret pulling it out."
Then he stopped in front of the fallen Jotaro and looked down at him from above, as calm as a judge delivering sentence.
"JOJO, if it weren't for you, that nurse wouldn't have gotten hurt. If you had just let me kill you quietly, no one else would have been dragged into this. JOJO… this is all your fault."
The audience almost lost its mind.
Even with Henry's face carrying the role, even with all the elegance of his screen presence, that twisted logic made people's fingers curl instinctively. Plenty of viewers felt their fists tighten on reflex. They were genuinely getting angry.
And then Jotaro stood up.
Blood covered him. His uniform was stained. The room behind him was in ruins. But when he rose to his feet, the atmosphere shifted in an instant.
Because his theme had started playing.
For longtime fans of Alex's productions, that was the signal. The moment the music arrived before the man even moved, everyone knew what was coming. The protagonist was about to turn the scene upside down.
Jotaro lowered his eyes and began to speak, his voice low and even, every word landing heavier than the last.
"I, Jotaro Kujo, have always been seen as a delinquent."
As he spoke, fragments of the past flashed across the screen.
"When I get into fights, I hit hard enough that some people still haven't made it out of the hospital."
More images.
"The teachers who liked throwing their weight around? After I taught them a lesson, they never dared come back to school."
And more still.
"When I get served disgusting food in a restaurant that isn't worth the price, walking out without paying is practically normal for me."
With the score building beneath him, the montage rolled by like a confession delivered without shame: fights, violence, authority challenged head-on, rules casually broken as if they had never deserved his respect to begin with.
Then Jotaro clenched his fist so tightly that the veins in his hand stood out.
"But even someone like me," he said, teeth gritted now, fury sharpening every syllable, "can still tell the difference between what's right… and the kind of evil that makes me sick."
Some viewers were left completely speechless.
Others burst out laughing from sheer disbelief.
The comment section exploded again.
"So what he's saying is: I fight, beat up teachers, and dine-and-dash, but I'm still a good kid?"
"You really think you're qualified to lecture anyone?"
"Jonathan's coffin lid can't stay shut anymore!"
"Joseph, how exactly did you raise your grandson?!"
"Don't ask. It's called gentlemanly conduct."
Everyone was stunned by the absurdity of it. Jotaro's reasoning was not even that far from Kakyoin's in structure, and yet somehow the sheer force of his conviction made it impossible to ignore. That was exactly what pulled people in. Characters like Jonathan, righteous to the core, had dignity and moral clarity - but to a modern audience, someone like Jotaro was simply harder to look away from. Rougher. Stranger. Sharper. A mess, but a magnetic one.
Kakyoin sneered.
"Evil? No, you've got it wrong."
His voice was steeped in ridicule now, almost amused by Jotaro's stubbornness.
"The loser is evil. The winner is justice. The one who survives until the end is justice. The process doesn't matter."
He raised his voice sharply.
"The one who loses is evil. Let me finish you off."
Hierophant Green brought its hands together again.
"Emerald Splash!"
Another storm of green bullets tore through the room.
"What?" Jotaro repeated under his breath, almost like he was testing the shape of the logic in his mouth. "The loser is evil?"
Then, at the exact moment the projectiles reached him, Star Platinum threw its arms up in front of its body and flexed with explosive force.
The Emerald Splash shattered.
Every single projectile was pulverized into dust.
Kakyoin's face changed.
"What?! That's impossible! You crushed the Emerald Splash - "
Jotaro's arm shot out, finger stabbing toward him like a sentence being handed down.
"Then that means," he said, voice turning cold enough to freeze the air, "you're the evil one."
Star Platinum moved.
It burst forward with terrifying speed and seized Hierophant Green by the throat. Its other fist drew back, iron-hard, gathering such monstrous speed that the audience could barely follow the motion. Then, for the very first time, that battle cry rang out.
"Ora Ora Ora Ora Ora Ora Ora - !!"
The roar struck like a shockwave.
And with Jotaro's declaration cutting through the scene -
"The one who will judge you… is my Stand!"
- Star Platinum's fist barrage landed.
Kakyoin and Hierophant Green were torn apart by the storm of blows, hit so many times, so fast, that their bodies looked as if they had been riddled through by an invisible machine gun. Blood burst outward in waves. The force of the attack was so violent that the very air detonated around it.
Boom.
The sonic shock shattered every window in the school.
Across the building, students and teachers screamed as glass exploded outward in every direction.
When the barrage ended, Kakyoin collapsed to the floor, limp and broken, and managed only one final, breathless line.
"What an unbelievably powerful Stand…"
That was it.
The comments detonated harder than ever.
"Holy hell, that was way too cool!"
"Alex was absolutely right to leave Hamon behind. Stands are insanely cool!"
"That Ora Ora battle cry is ridiculously addictive. It reminds me of DIO's iconic lines from Part 1."
"If Stands had shown up earlier, the first two parts wouldn't have felt so weak."
"New fans, please don't trash the older parts just to praise this one."
"Exactly. Hamon was amazing too."
"Don't overdo it either. Part 2 was still strong. Part 1's biggest job was laying the foundation for everything that came after."
And beneath all the arguing, all the excitement, all the noise, one thing had already become undeniable.
A new era of JOJO had truly begun.