#iron touch

In recent years, I feel there's been a push for villains and antagonists in fiction to be sympathetic to the heroes and audience, usually with the endgame of redeeming them by the end of the story. While this is a perfectly fine character archetype, my favorite type of villains are the ones that you love to hate. You understand why they do the things they do, but you do not want them to succeed or have a happy ending. Someone you can rally against and want to see the protagonist defeat. Whether they're a misunderstood friend or a brutal tyrant, though, the main antagonist of any given story must pose a challenge for the protagonist, and in the context of a JoJo part, I think the best way to do that is through fear.

While the Grand Marshal was also designed with these principals in mind (suppression and mind control are both Very Scary™), it's with Boney and Bad to the Bone that I think I best executed the concept of fear and intimidation in a villain. Besides, at this point, I consider Boney to be more of a """"main"""" antagonist than the Grand Marshal is.

When making a character/ability designed to invoke fear in a shonen story, there's two key concepts that you should keep in mind.

First of all, it needs to seem unbeatable. This isn’t just a villain we’re talking about, this is the main villain. Whenever the audience sees their ability in action, they should think "how the hell are the heroes going to beat that?" They should be a step above everyone else at first glance, otherwise it won’t feel like there’s as much of a threat for the protagonist to overcome. This is where I came up with Boney's resurrective ability. If you see someone die and die and die over and over again, to the point where they just casually kill themselves and come back fine later, how can someone ever expect to truly defeat them? That, and it had two bonus points going for it: it goes against a fundamental rule of Stands that Jotaro lays out ("no Stand can revive the dead"), and it parallels Diavolo's ultimate fate at the end of Vento Aureo.

The second thing is a little more complicated. The ability itself should invoke fear. Any superpower can be scary in the right environment; you can put a guy with super strength in a series where none of the other characters have any special powers and he'll seem scary by default. That's not what I mean. Something about the ability should be fundamentally terrifying.

To better explain what I mean, let's compare Dio and Dio. Err, I mean, Dio and DIO

Designing for Intimidation vs. Designing for Fear

I don't care what anyone says, Dio is a great villain. He's this perfect Satanic archetype that the story expertly frames and builds towards as a powerful adversary, the ultimate threat. He's egotistical, calculating, weirdly charismatic, and most importantly, scary. Both Phantom Blood Dio and Stardust Crusaders Dio convey the feeling of fear extremely well, but they both do it in different ways. You can best see this through their respective abilities.

The vampires in JoJo have some pretty scary abilities. There's the classic blood sucking and healing factor, but then you get the really weird shit like the Space Ripper Stingy Eyes. Compared to other JoJo parts, though, Phantom Blood is a much "lower level" story. That first fight with Dio in the mansion after he rejects his humanity perfectly shows just how strong and durable Dio has become after using the Stone Mask, but it's only as tense as it is because at that point in the story, none of the other characters have any sort of super powers. Put any Stand user worth their salt up against Dio there and suddenly the fight becomes much more even.

Also, really think of the powers that Dio has in Phantom Blood. Super strength, a healing factor, some ice abilities, laser eyes...none of these are really scary on their own, right? You can all find those abilities on an X-Men lineup. I'm not saying that makes them bad or Phantom Blood Dio a bad villain, but he's made scary through his actions and narrative framing more so than just his powers on their own. Dio isn’t an effective villain because he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, he’s an effective villain because he tried to poison the protagonist’s father and fed a baby to its newly zombified mother.

Ironically, I think the scariest of Dio's abilities are the one he neglects to use in combat. He hypnotizes/mind controls a guy at one point and he somehow creates a bunch of grotesque zombie chimeras out of different people and animals. He does send a bunch of these chimeras out after Jonathan, but most of the time they feel like generic grunts rather than imposing monsters or tragic victims.

Compare this to Dio in Stardust Crusaders. The World is as scary as it is iconic, and I think part of the reason that it is so iconic is because of how scary it is. While it does lose some of its fear factor after Jotaro realizes he also has the same ability, it remains a horrifying ability nonetheless.

Time stop goes beyond just intimidating the way something like super strength and laser eyes are. Even if Dio wasn't a vampire, he would still be terrifying with The World (his vampirism just adds some extra sauce to it by making him especially strong and sturdy). It stops everything, everywhere, with just a call of its name. There's nothing you can do against Dio; in fact, you won't even be aware of what he's doing until its already over with. Rewatch the scenes where Dio kills Kakyoin and stabs Joseph in the throat, or even when he surrounds Jotaro with a shit ton of knives. They're all helpless, oblivious to the fact that they're about to die. That is scary.

What makes it even better is that the whole part builds up to this reveal. As early as the Steely Dan fight, the Crusaders beg and bargain with Dio's cronies to reveal the secret to his Stand, and we even get to see little out of context demonstrations of it later on in the part (like when Hol Horse tries to shoot Dio or when Dio moves Polnareff down the stairs). The fan speculation surrounding what the hell The World's ability was must've been wild at the time of Stardust Crusaders' initial release. While the reveal doesn't have the same impact it once had, those early readers must've been blown away back in the day.

Dio is not the only JoJo villain that's framed like this. Killer Queen installs a certain paranoia that anything someone touches could literally blow up in their face, King Crimson weaponizes disorientation and the idea of not being fully in control of your body/actions, and Whitesnake takes the idea of wiping your memories up to eleven by outright stealing them. Even ignoring Stand abilities for a second, Kira and Doppio/Diavolo use the idea of a devil hiding in plain sight while Pucci and especially Valentine exploit their positions of power for their own gain.

Now, back to Boney. In addition to his resurrective ability, I wanted something that truly scared me on a personal level. After all, there are a bunch of ways you could bring someone back to life. Michelle even anxiously rambles some of them off in Chapter 35. But that wasn't good enough for me. It needed to be scary.

Transformational body horror is something that I've always been scared by. I think my first exposure to anything like that was that one episode of SpongeBob where he spends the whole segment slowly morphing into a snail (as I'm writing this, I'm wondering if this episode is also what gave me my fear of needles, given that a syringe is what starts the transformation). I'm 24 now and I still can't watch that episode. David Cronenberg's The Fly is the scariest movie I've ever seen purely because of the vile, nauseating body horror on display throughout most of the film. I remember accidentally stumbling across a transformation porn story on DeviantArt as a kid (I didn’t even realize it was a fetish thing until I was much older) and being completely revolted by it. This shit freaks me the hell out. Our bodies are our most personal aspects of ourselves; so having them be forcefully, non-consensually violated and mutated into someone else, something else is perhaps one of the most sickening experiences I can imagine.

So of course I had to put it in Iron Touch!

It was precisely that disgust and terror that I wanted to convey with Bad to the Bone. Boney doesn't just die, he doesn't just take you down with him, he forces you to become him. Against your will, you are forced to metamorphosize into an adult man, feeling every muscle and bone twist and contort into something definitively not your own, and that will be the last thing you experience before your soul is overridden and erased forever. That is scary.

I decided to have Bad to the Bone be activated by touch because it was specific enough for Boney to have control over while also being inconspicuous enough to feel like a threat in every day life. It's got that Killer Queen feel to it; anything Kira touches can turn into a bomb, while anyone Boney touches can turn into him. Since Iron Touch and most of its main cast was conceptualized in mid-2020, I wouldn't be surprised if certain current events at the time also influenced this aspect of the Stand.

Another thing I find interesting is that while JoJo does body horror a lot, it generally doesn't freak me out or make me uncomfortable. I can watch Rohan turn people into books just fine, I can watch Jolyne unravel herself into string without a sweat, I can watch Cioccolata dissolve people into mold no problem. Characters get dismembered, cut in half, stabbed, punched, crushed, burned alive, and even decapitated and I don't flinch. The only time the anime ever made me scared or uncomfortable through its body horror was when Dio's bone started turning everyone into plants in Stone Ocean (I remember some of the stuff with the Corpse Parts freaking me out in Steel Ball Run, but its been a while since I've read it and I don't feel like going back and looking for the specific panels that gave me the heebie jeebies).

I think what separates people turning into plants from something like Heaven's Door is the process between the two. There's no great effort of Heaven's Door turning into people into books, nor do they fully turn into books, their face just peels open like a book and they've got a bunch of pages underneath (oh, and Okuyasu's arm got all twisty I guess). That sounds a lot more graphic than it actually is. It's too instantaneous and fantastical to freak me out. Holes may start to show up in Jolyne's skin as she unravels herself into string, but she's also always fully in control of this ability and there's never any gore shown underneath the exposed skin. These abilities don't convey that sense of a forceful, even painful metamorphosis the same way that something like The Fly does, no matter how overpowered or deadly they are. That's what freaks me out about the plant guy in Stone Ocean. The sequence in the anime where his eye turns into a flower is expertly animated, but god damn it made me feel sick.

So, that's how I came up with Bad to the Bone. But that's just me. What does all this talk about fear and body horror do for you?

Official synopsis:

May 19th, 2009: the unthinkable has happened—Passione's prized Stand arrow has been stolen. The perpetrators appear to be a group of unidentified Stand users hiding their faces behind masquerade masks. Giorno suspects who one of the thieves may be, and it's the last person Polnareff wanted to get involved.

Or, in which Polnareff’s daughter goes on her own wacky quest and learns some self-love along the way. Hol Horse is there too, though he'd really rather not be.

Chapter 1: Revelations

Giorno had always considered himself to be a fairly competent man.

To most people, competent was an understatement; a blatant example of unwarranted modesty. From the members of Passione who had witnessed his growth as a leader firsthand to the rival gangs across the globe he had crushed underfoot to the kind old ladies he always offered help to, competent didn’t even come close to expressing Giorno’s natural ability to adapt to and overcome any obstacle that stood in his way. Even before having been blessed by the power of Requiem and thrust into the position of mafia boss at the ripe old age of 15, everyone had considered him to be wise beyond his years, complimented by street smarts and a silver tongue. Yes, competent was usually a perfectly acceptable way to describe Giorno Giovanna.

So it only made moments like this, where Giorno felt so completely incompetent, all the more embarrassing.

He still had a hard time believing that such a thing had happened right under his nose. A childish part of him prayed that none of this was real, that it was a nightmare or some kind of twisted joke set up by Mista as vengeance for putting him in a team of four on his last mission. The embarrassment of being so incompetent was already bad enough, but the potential ramifications for this one error were far more daunting.

Someone had stolen the arrow.

An uncomfortable, almost itchy feeling coursed through Giorno's body at the thought, like a snake slithering up his back and threatening to bite his neck. He fluffed the pillow behind him, swatting at it. This was wrong. It was all wrong. The room inside Coco Jumbo was supposed to be a place of cozy isolation, a place where he could relax and decompress between missions, not a place for him to have a borderline panic attack in. He hadn't felt this way since he was a child, hiding under his bead from his stepfather's screeching threats and leather belt. Although, no amount of privacy could spare him from the shame he felt. Nor should it, the arrow was Giorno's responsibility after all. It was his duty to get it back.

Besides, he wasn't completely alone.

Whilst Giorno sat on the couch fluffing pillows, Polnareff paced around the room's exterior. The cheap prosthetic legs that adorned his stumps never failed to catch Giorno's eye. It just looked strange for him to be walking around on them, like they ought to give out under the weight of the rest of his body. In lieu of the usual cheeky "my eyes are up here" response Giorno usually got for staring, he only got the faint sound of his footsteps clanging against the floor. Slight as it may be, the metallic sound of each step made Giorno's stomach turn. If only I got there sooner, he thought, if only I had gotten to the colosseum before Diavolo that night, I might've been able to restore your legs. If only I had got there sooner, you might still be alive and not chained to this room.

Even through his unkempt hair, wrinkled suit, and heavy bags that weighed his eyelids down, Giorno admitted that Polnareff undoubtedly looked worse than he did. All of his frustration was laid bare on his face; his brows arched upwards, eyes unfocused yet brimming with inner conflict as he surveyed the room, the occasional vexed sigh escaping his lips. Considering everything that Polnareff did in order to keep the arrow away from those who would misuse it, his reaction was justified. Additionally, when considering other recent revelations, Giorno figured that he would be just as distressed as Polnareff were he in his prosthetics. Tired of pacing around the same four corners, the Frenchman flumped into one of the armchairs and laid his head in his hands.

"Would you like to go over everything again?" Giorno asked mostly because the useless silence between them tired him. "Now that we've had the chance to sleep on it, we may discover something we had overlooked before."

After taking a deep breath to steel himself, Polnareff lowered his arms but did not look up to meet Giorno's gaze. "That sounds like a good idea," he responded.

Nodding in approval, Giorno began to sort through the mess of documents laying on the coffee table. The regretful, lingering stare Polnareff kept on two of the papers that had been brushed to the side did not go unnoticed as Giorno attempted to line up all of the relevant files in front of them.

“So,” Giorno began, “Tuesday, May 19th, 2009.” He shook away the self-reproach clawing through his thoughts. It had already been three days. “At 3:47 AM, a suspicious man was seen loitering outside of our base of operation. Tall, pale skin, mint green hair. Armed with a Desert Eagle.” In one of the images taken from the security footage, the man sneered at the camera, cigarette clenched between his pearly whites. Giorno couldn’t help but scowl his cheekiness. “He stayed outside the building, standing at the corner of the sidewalk by himself for eight minutes. At 3:55, two other individuals joined him, both wearing dark blue masquerade masks and hooded robes. Both are shorter than the other man, but given how tall he is, that doesn’t narrow anything down.”

He slumped back into the sofa. “It bothers me that only two of them made an attempt to disguise themselves,” he commented, “The fact that he got there first seems to suggest that he’s either their leader or a decoy. Given what ended up happening, I’d say it’s the latter, but,” Giorno glared at the knowing look that the man had flashed at the camera, “I have my doubts.”

He looked up at Polnareff, waiting for his consigliere to give his thoughts. About six seconds of silence passed before Giorno cleared his throat to summon Polnareff’s attention away from the stray documents. It took another moment or so after that for him to register that Giorno expected his input, after which he sat up a bit straighter and finally let his eyes scan over the other papers.

“He could’ve just been full of himself,” Polnareff added, his stare wandering back to those same two papers, “not every man is as committed to keeping themselves hidden as Diavolo was.”

“But you would think that he would at least be someone we knew if that were the case,” Giorno rebutted, “like someone from a rival gang or someone with the government. If he was someone new who wanted to make himself known, he did a laughably poor job.” Giorno grabbed an autopsy report from the table. “We have this man’s corpse but not so much as his name.”

Polnareff sighed. “That is also true,” he said, his voice tired.

“Either way, I had Sheila E use her Stand on the street corner the three of them waited at, as well as the rest of the area to see if they talked about anything. Unfortunately, it seems that they were prepared for that.” Giorno rested his thumb and pointer finger on his chin, deep in thought. “That alone is enough to raise suspicion. And, along with the fact that they knew exactly where the arrow was hidden, then as much as I hate to say it, at least one of the perpetrators could be someone from within Passione.” The very thought of a traitor within their ranks brought about a suffocating tension to the room. Giorno could practically hear Diavolo’s mad laughter ringing in his ears; how ironic that both of them would be undone by one of their underlings.

“We shouldn't forget that we've taken precautions in order to make sure that’s not the case.” At this point, Giorno was all but talking to himself. “It could just be that whoever we’re dealing with is very cautious. Even within Passione, most of our members don’t know the Stands of those outside their own teams. Sheila and her teammates are my bodyguards, if I can trust anyone, it’s them.” He hoped so at least, especially given that Giorno had left Mista in charge of affairs in his absence. “Their alibis are also—”

A sudden bump in the road caused the room to jolt. The papers on the table scattered on impact, turning the organized mess into a more standard one. Shaken from his trance, Polnareff nearly jumped out of his own ethereal skin from the unexpected force. Giorno sighed and began to reorganize the papers. After taking a moment to gather his bearings, Polnareff assisted him.

"Giorno," he said, putting some papers back in their folder for known suspects, "I understand we're traveling incognito, but we really should consider taking more comfortable means of transport in the future."

Giorno laid the timeline out once again and grabbed the basket of fruit that sat on the end table. "This was the best I could get for us under such short notice." He began to lay out the fruit on top of the papers, giving them extra weight to pin them in place. "I don't need to tell you that traveling via plane in these types of situations is a bad idea."

Polnareff observed Giorno take the two papers that called for his gaze and place them in his coat pocket.

Before he could interject, Giorno continued speaking. "Now then," he said, brushing some stray curls behind his ear, "at 4 AM sharp, our building lost power. Our security cameras, smoke detectors, laser grids…all of it shut down. We were the only building in the area to experience a power outage. Sometime soon after, the thieves blew a hole through the side of the building, about two meters tall and two meters wide, and broke in. Shards of glass were found near the scene even though all of our windows remained intact through the ordeal."

Giorno returned his attention back to the timeline. "From this point on the details are a little fuzzy, but we do know a few things for certain." He removed the apple weighing down the stack of autopsy reports, simultaneously taking the papers and a bite from the apple. "Eleven of the twelve guards on duty were killed via electrocution. The only guard who survived, his name was Mente Vettore, shot the green haired man four times in the head, just outside the hidden room where we keep the arrow. He died on the spot and never even removed his gun from his holster."

He took another bite of the apple. "Vettore fired two more shots, hitting the wall and a chair, but he didn't seem to hit the other two assailants. He would've had four more shots left, but there’s no evidence to suggest he fired any more bullets. Around the same time, another hole was blown in the wall, revealing our hidden vault. Just like with the other hole, shards of broken glass were found by the impact. The vault we kept the arrow stored in was also destroyed. At 4:15, the power came back on, and the two masked assailants were already long gone. Vettore has also gone missing. We arrived at the scene ten minutes later."

Giorno picked up the profiles of the two masked assailants they had drafted up. "From what I can tell, the power outage must've been caused by a Stand. That same Stand is probably what electrocuted the guards. My guess is that it's a Stand with the ability to steal electricity, store it, then channel it somehow. I don't think it's what blew holes in the walls though. I think a different Stand did that, and it's likely linked to the broken glass in some way." He placed the profiles down and retrieved an autopsy report. "Interestingly enough, the man with green hair doesn't seem to be a Stand user. We couldn't gleam anything else of note from his autopsy. His fingerprints have been sanded off, his blood and face don't match up with any on record, we couldn't even discern where his clothes are from."

Trading the autopsy report for a mission log, he choked down yet another bite of the apple. “I had Murolo send All Along Watchtower out for reconnaissance. He spotted the arrow yesterday just outside of Orléans, carried by another masked individual. We don't know if they're one of the thieves or someone else. They were headed north towards Paris, which is where we’re on our way to now.”

Taking a final bite of his apple, Giorno looked up to his consigliere. "So," he said, "do you have anything to add, Polnareff?"

He took a moment to examine the mess of papers, reorienting himself so he faced them head on as he ran a hand through his column of silver hair. Polnareff still seemed unfocused, perhaps even more so than before, though Giorno noticed that he made an obvious effort to hide it.

"We should've kept the arrow in the turtle," Polnareff quipped.

Giorno shook his head. "It would've been a bad idea to keep it here. It was starting to affect the turtle. We wouldn't have felt those tremors earlier if we had never put the arrow in here. This would've been the perfect hiding place for the arrow, but it's not worth risking sacrificing you over."

Staring at the ceiling, Polnareff groaned with uncertainty. "I guess," he muttered.

For a while, the two of them just stayed like that, with Polnareff's sights fixated upwards and Giorno looking back at him with concern. Only the faint sound of the engine and the occasional cluck of a chicken bleeding into the room from outside accompanied them. Though he normally strived for this quiet, almost contemplative atmosphere, Giorno figured it wouldn’t do to leave off the conversation like this. It was time to address the elephant in the room.

"There's also the subject of your family…"

Polnareff instantly locked eyes with Giorno, ready and alert. Chuckling at his immediate shift in attitude, Giorno pulled the two papers from his coat pocket, reading the names at the top.

MARYLOU POLNAREFF, NÉE DELON (DECEASED)

MICHELLE POLNAREFF (AGE 17, STATUS UNKNOWN)

"I can't believe you hid the fact that you have a wife and daughter for eight years," Giorno commented, shaking his head in disbelief.