Professional Rat

TW; my opinions, some sensitive topics discussed including rape, sexual harassment, childhood abuse, this is very long

Let me preface this by saying people are allowed to think and mold a character however they want. If we didn’t have our own interpretation of media then we wouldn’t have half of the popular stories and movies we would today. Art is supposed to be personal, and everyone is going to have different feelings about everything. That being said, I’m also allowed to say I don’t necessarily LIKE a lot of people’s interpretations on something, and find it surface level or straight up in bad taste (at the end of the day I just block and move on if it’s bad enough, no need for harassment) Everything here is just how I see stuff, as someone who’s always been interested in deep diving into character psychology. 

When I think about going deeper into Melone’s character, I try to use every piece of media we have with him. The short story, the manga, and yes, the anime. I see people usually ignore the anime and I don’t really blame them, I do have *some* issues with it but I don’t like to straight up ignore it since it’s still a major piece of media tied to him and JJBA in general.

Melone is a side antagonist from part 5 of JoJos Bizarre Adventure, and while I do love him (go me for liking the weirdest insignificant characters) I do have to admit that we don’t really have a lot of canon characterization on him, which leads a lot of people to do either or both 

A) Make surface level judgements on him 

B) Make assumptions on his character that come from absolutely fucking nowhere (fanon version essentially)  

As for the first one, I see people always getting mad at these people and just engaging in what I’d call an endless fight about it. For those of whom have only seen the anime, what they saw in there is what they get from him and they WILL make judgements based on that. Getting your panties in a twist constantly over someone not bothering to go deeper on a side character because god forbid he makes them uncomfortable (which they are in fact allowed to feel) or they personally don’t like him is just weird. 

(Let me reiterate — you are ALLOWED to get annoyed, upset, or just cringed out at people’s opinions. Hell, I'm technically complaining right now! But I do think there needs to be at the very least a surface level acknowledgement and acceptance that what you don’t like will always be there and keeping that In mind when voicing your opinions.)

The second of the previously mentioned options is essentially just what fanon versions of characters are. They have always existed, and in my opinion, have always just sucked. I hate them. They take a random character trait that could be slightly accentuated in the original story and just go absolutely in on it until they’re beating a dead horse. They just make really weird impressions based on whatever the hell and just flanderize the absolute shit out of it. 

I don’t know if this sounds pretentious and god I really hope it doesn’t, but I feel like a lot of people just aren’t really mature enough to discuss and analyze media or characters these days in most spaces. The “IT'S NOT THAT DEEP” or “too long not reading that” crowd are the crowned rulers of this take of mine. Just refusing to read anything at all and holding the belief that going deeper into art (stories, a painting, movies, etc) is cringy and a waste of time shows that we really are, in fact, in a media comprehension crisis.

Of course, not everything is black and white. There are always exceptions to this (and most things in general) and keeping a staunch opinion on something even after looking, acknowledging, and saying “yeah no” to another opinion is something I do a bunch. I can’t control what people do or what they think at the end of the day.

But in the end, this is fiction, and fiction should be explored. Dark aspects and all.

Greyness in personality is going to be a big topic in my vision of Melone’s character. I think it’s a major overlying aspect in a bunch of part 5s characters.

When I look at Melone’s ‘fanon’ personality, I see people placing him as this horned out, sex crazed himbo who doesn’t think twice about doing literally anything and he’s a part of the big happy family of grown ass assassin men working for the mafia.

Or, it’s just “guy with rape laptop lol” 

I'm going to be real, whenever I see the first one I can’t help but recoil in my seat and have the urge to wipe whatever I just read out of my memory. Unfortunately, I know where people got those outlooks from and it’s the anime only scenes. I said it earlier, but it’s one of my biggest issues with how the anime treats Melone. There is no doubt in my mind the guy is perverted (more on that later, I’m not talking in the normal way) but turning him into the ‘traditional’ pervert did so much damage to how people perceive him. But, I still like to try to find a way incorporate it in some way because I’m weird like that 

From all three pieces of major media he’s in, I like to combine the aspects of all of them to get a bigger picture of who he is personality wise, again as I said earlier. The mad scientist schtick of the manga, the perversion of the anime, and the deeper, more emotional side that’s presented in the short story. Combined, and you get a rather interesting character to look at.

When I say Melone is a pervert, I don’t mean in the fact that he’s just vying to look up skirts or something along the lines. I mean it in a way where he has an extremely perverted sense of curiosity. It doesn’t exactly come from somewhere sexual mentally, but it very well ends up being sexual in subject because it’s just what he’s fixated on. I also think he’s someone who will go to very large lengths to satiate these curiosities/intuitions (within his own unique moral sphere) that would absolutely make the average person uncomfortable. From scenes outside of using babyface, Melone strikes me as someone who’s rather even tempered and doesn’t lean into any extremes, compared to Ghiaccio who seems to have a tendency to let his anger/annoyances get the best of him. That’s not to say Melone is emotionless, I don’t think he is at all. I just think outside of what really interests him and drives him to be passionate and animated, there just isn’t the need to be extra about everything. If it doesn’t pique his curiosity, why should he go the extra mile for something, you know? 

Using what I’ve seen from everything (the nervous laughter after he was caught staring at that one ladies feet by his teammates, him literally just freezing up when faced with a direct threat to himself,  the fact that his stand involves 0 actual confrontation with his target, and even then he advises it to be stealthy and flee rather than take any risks, his rather sheepish and skirting-around-the-issue attitude he has with Ghiaccio on why his hit is taking too long in the short story) id say he leans more introverted and non confrontational than bubbly and always talking. Melone doesn’t seem to take any direct confrontation well at all, emotionally or physically. I don’t think he’s a pushover in any way. He’s a grown man and knows to stand his ground when necessary, but he does seemingly get a bit nervous about doing so when face to face with a perceived danger.

It makes me curious on how someone who's so far removed from the process of actually killing someone became an assassin in the first place. Stands are a manifestation of your fighting spirit and essentially your soul. Your stand represents who you are as a being. Going through 50 different steps to create a proxy child to sic on your target and ensure that you can’t be tracked back or harmed is just fascinating for an assassin. 

Going more into the child part of his stand, I think what’s behind it is a morbid sense of interest along with a genuine desire to nurture something and watch it grow. I think he’s fascinated by the aspect of how a child can turn out by nature, and is willing to indulge in not only the logical parts of child rearing, but also more metaphysical aspects (blood type, astrology sign) of a human to determine what a personality is going to be like. And oh boy, he’s certainly willing to make people uncomfortable about it. 

People tend to say Melone “has to be weird” for his stand to work. And in my head I respond, “his stand wouldn’t be like that if he wasn’t weird in the first place”. I’m not going to whitewash his personality and the gross side of him. He breaks into a random women’s train compartment, sexually harasses her by licking her hand and asking about her preferred sex position, and impregnates her without consent via his stand. I want to add that that his stand does not ACTUALLY rape people. I don't think what goes on in his head is actually sexual and a ‘turn on’. But you cannot deny the fact that the way it’s framed in the manga and the anime does leave a lot of people in an “ok hold on” moment. Many argue that there’s a rape allegory somewhere and I can’t exactly blame them for seeing it as such. 

Going back to the point at hand, is that he’s not an average person. He’s eccentric, a bit mad scientisty, and is willing to fuck over people he doesn’t know and doesn’t care about to satiate his curiosity or to just do his job. But I think that’s not the only reason why his stand is like that.

Melone seems to be someone who is *genuinely* attached to the idea of being a parent. Being a good parent is something he takes pride in! He gets offended at Ghiaccio insinuating he’s a bad dad even lmao (“ Who are you calling useless dad?!”). He’s never actually threatened to physically hurt his juniors (in fact he even lowkey reprimands Ghiaccio for wanting to do so in the short story) and he’s never even seen verbally berating them and calling them useless, etc. He acknowledges that being a parent takes patience, and that children can sometimes be completely unpredictable in what they do. He does nothing but praise the juniors when they do a good job and generally seems to prefer the carrot in the ‘carrot and the stick’ idiom. 

I do somehow think all of this is rooted in past childhood or adult experiences. He heavily strikes me as someone who did not come from a great household, and I personally use the mirroring he had with Giorno and his stand to back that up a little. Giorno even commented on the fact that their stands are very similar in the manga.

While Giorno's stand creates life from inanimate objects, Melone’s is the inverse and seems to make life into inanimate objects. But at the core, they are both *technically* creating life, with Melones creation of the juniors being his main ability. The mirroring reminds me a bit of Kanao and Douma from Kimetsu No Yaiba. Spoilers if you haven’t read the manga, but neither of them exactly came from great homes. Douma's parents groomed him into a cult from a young age and killed each other in front of him, while Kanao was physically abused and was planned to be sold into slavery. They both came out of those childhoods emotionally repressed and stagnated. Where they diverge though, is that Kanao had people help her out of that pit she was in, who loved her and encouraged her to grow. Douma stayed in the same environment that caused him to be in an isolated echo chamber of pity with no light at the end of the tunnel. While Kanao started to flourish as a flower does, Douma stagnated and withered mentally, similarly to ice’s effects on living things. 

Essentially, I’m saying that Giorno and Melone probably came from extremely similar backgrounds. Giorno had a neglectful mother and an abusive step-dad, and was thought to be a lost cause by literally everyone around him until the unknown gangster inspired him to trust again. He was able to grow out of an impossible situation, and have a renewed outlook on the world. For Melone, I think it’s the inverse once again. Abusive mother, neglectful dad. But he didn’t have an unknown gangster to help him, no act of god to pull him out of a bad personal life. He built on top of a broken mindset, and never really got the opportunity to be above his circumstances. I’m not sure what exactly I think transpired in his home life above 'abusive mom neglectful dad', I haven’t really decided on it. All I’ve concluded is that it’s most likely a heavy foundation as to why he is the way he is.

For Melone to have a stand that pretty much makes him a parent towards his stand and to be seemingly extremely passionate about it, I don’t think he exactly hates the idea of being a legitimate parent. But would he actually want to be one? I have no idea. I’ll always keep in mind that his stand is the way it is for a reason though. 

Side rant that has nothing to do with what I’ve previously mentioned, but I’ve always seen Melone as someone under the Asexual spectrum. I don’t think he's completely devoid of sexual desire, but he’s damn near close to it. I don’t think he’d really care about anything in that realm unless he met someone that checked off every single specific internal requirement he wants out of someone. And if you do somehow meet it? Have fun, because he’s never going away. 

Anywho, to me Melone is someone who is strange, eccentric, and belongs in the left field. He has his own sense of morality and ethics and isn’t afraid to push boundaries to an uncomfortable degree to get what he wants out of most people. He kills people for a living, he has no qualms about hurting others, and is overall just not a good person.

But that’s not to say he’s completely evil. 

He shows clear comradery with his team. His hand starts shaking when he sees Pesci and Prosciutto's dead bodies in the manga. He cares about and is close enough with Ghiaccio to be somewhat vulnerable around him. I think there is a genuinely nurturing and parental side of him that comes out with his stand (he literally baby talks to it and whips out a giant children’s book to teach it come on)

And then there are the little parts about him which I like to look at.

He’s an analyst at heart, and is a keen observer. Despite being an assassin, he doesn’t like direct confrontation and freezes up like a deer in headlights when faced with danger to himself. He gets meek when someone points out something he genuinely feels vulnerable about. He’s interested in pseudosciences and has apparently read the Kama sutra. He’s a smart man! There’s no need to reduce him down to horndog boner boy.

Sorry if this was extremely long, I just had to get my thoughts out on melon man. I love his character and have thought about writing something like this for a long time, but my thoughts always wind and dolphin around topics so it’s hard to stay on one thought about him.

I don’t expect anyone to 100% agree on my take, just once again, it’s how I see him and how I interpret him from what we have. It’s fine if you don’t like what I have to say, just don’t attack me because of it. 

I wrote this all in like 5 hours so sorry if it seems repetitive LMAO

i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom

as well as the three laws of fandom:

the crazed look? 🖤👌