More from Ai Fairouz’s interview with SPUR Magazine:
“It was Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure that inspired me to become a voice actor. And of all the characters, Jolyne Kujo was the one I admired the most, but I was afraid to play her. So I wanted a ‘role who helps Jolyne.’ But I got Jolyne herself! At first I was too afraid to bring her voice to life.”
On starting with Part 6 (by mistake!):
“When I was in the first year of junior highschool, I used to surf the Internet a lot so I knew Jojo net slang like, “ORAORAORA!!” and “MUDAMUDAMUDA!!” So I looked this stuff up. When I went to the bookstore, I found a lot of books all lined up. I picked up what I thought was the first volume. It was actually the first volume of Stone Ocean. The number of volumes of JJBA gets reset during Stone Ocean, so I thought that this was the first volume of the entire series and I bought it.
“I think I didn’t really understand the story when I first started reading. Still, I felt that this girl named Jolyne was the most powerful and charming character I’d ever met. I want to know more about her, so I saved up my pocket change and started buying more volumes, starting from this first one.
“The scene in which she first appears is really shocking. I was amazed at the time, saying, "who is this amazing girl?!”
As you read on, Jolyne situation becomes clear. She’s being held in jail but is innocent of the charges she’s being held on. “I wondered how a girl who wasn’t much older than me would face this harsh situation, ‘What would I do if this were me?’ All of her actions lit up my imagination.
On women in the Jojoverse:
"Many girl characters’ roles and personalities in fiction are proper, and they’re protected by someone. There’s still a lot of things in fiction that haven’t been updated yet. But Jolyne was different. I was really attracted to that fact.”
Hirohiko Araki is an author who has been working in the shonen manga genre for a long time, but sometimes female characters that go beyond that ‘shonen manga’ framework appear in his work. In addition to Jolyne, there are many characters in the series memorable to Ms. Fairouz:
“I like Hot Pants (Part 7), Trish Una (Part 5), and Reimi Sugimoto (Part 4) … What they have in common is that they have an identity. They aren’t swept away by their surroundings, they’re devoted to being true to themselves.
"If you wear clothes that stand out even a little, you might be misunderstood by the people around you or laughed at maliciously. In such a case, when you think of the female characters of Jojo who are living out loud in their own way, you will be confident.”
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