Silence, disguised I watch you

 Maybe I should come up with a name for these pointless trivia posts that are focused on debunking common misconceptions or myths. Ah well. This time it's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Despite all the music references in the series, the "JoJo" nickname for the main characters did not come from the song "Get Back" by the Beatles. Araki used to have meetings and work on his manga at a restaurant called Jonathan's, and he named his main character Jonathan Joestar in honour of the restaurant. The JoJo name came from that.

In relation to the above, it's commonly stated that Stands are named after classic rock bands or songs. It's more accurate to say they're named after bands or songs in general - there isn't really any apparent preference for one genre or time period over any other, and there are some Stands named after more (comparatively) modern or non-rock acts, such as Limp Bizkit and Born This Way. Also, it's important to keep in mind that the series only started getting anime adaptations a few decades after the original manga came out, so what seems like a dated reference now was current at the time of the manga.

It's often said that Kishibe Rohan is based on the author, Hirohiko Araki, or even that he's a stand-in for Araki himself. However, Araki has denied this, citing differences between him and Rohan (for instance, Rohan hates Josuke, but Araki considers him his favourite character). However, Rohan's philosophy regarding creating manga is based on Araki's own.

It's common belief that Avdol was supposed to permanently die after being shot in Part 3, but was brought back due to how popular he was. In fact, his death was always meant to be temporary, and he was never that popular, consistently ranking fairly low in popularity polls. 

Contrary to popular belief, The World was not originally intended to have the powers of all the other tarot-based Stands combined. People tend to think this because DIO uses a very Hermit Purple-esque ability early in Part 3, which never gets brought up again. Araki has confirmed that the Hermit Purple-like Stand, colloquially named Hermit Purple II, was actually the Stand of Jonathan Joestar, whose body DIO had taken over. Araki also stated that Star Platinum and The World were the first Stands he created for the series, and he wanted them to be the Stands of the protagonist and antagonist from the very beginning.

It's a very common belief that in Part 4, Josuke went back in time to save his future self, but this is not true. For one, Araki confirmed that the mysterious saviour in the past may or may not have actually looked like Josuke, as his appearance is based on Josuke's memory of him. Secondly, people often claim that the reason the mysterious saviour is injured in the past is that Josuke came back in time after his fight with Kira, but the stranger's injuries don't match up with the injuries Josuke suffered (the stranger has a visible nosebleed and the corner of his lip is split, while Josuke never got a nosebleed and was bleeding from inside his mouth), not to mention Josuke was beaten so badly he could barely stand after that fight (and his body had been pierced all over by shards of wood), while the stranger still had enough strength to not only stand, but to push a car, and had no shards of wood stuck in his body.

DIO's line when he stops time using The World is commonly quoted as "Toki wo tomare!", supposedly meaning "Time is stopped!". This, however, is grammatically incorrect, and could be most closely translated as something like "To be able to stop time..." The actual line is "Toki yo, tomare!", which means "Time, stop!" - as in, addressing time as if it's a person, and commanding it to stop. The reason for the mistake is that many people are more familiar with the more common particle "wo" rather than the comparatively less common and more archaic "yo", and because "yo" tends to become "o" when spoken after a vowel, just like "wo" so "toki yo" sounds more like "toki o" which could be misinterpreted as "toki wo". Also, "The World" is just the name of the Stand, the actual ability is called Time Stop (though this is muddled somewhat by Jotaro naming his own time stop ability "Star Platinum: The World"). It's never implied to be spelled as "Za Warudo" either, that's just how it's pronounced when converted into katakana. 

It's often claimed that Part 7 is set in the alternate universe created by Made in Heaven at the end of Part 6, but this is false. Made in Heaven explicitly backfires at the end of Part 6, resetting the timeline instead to a world where Pucci never existed, the other characters are much happier and Jotaro is a better father to Jolyne. Araki confirmed that Parts 7 and 8 take place in an already-existing alternate universe within the JoJo multiverse.

Despite how he comes across, Alessi is not a paedophile. He's just a serial killer who's a coward, so he turns his victims into children so they can't fight back. It can often come across that way because of his creepy demeanour and the fact he spends most of his fight chasing around a naked de-aged Polnareff, but the nudity there was a coincidence (Polnareff shrunk out of his clothes, and then later was attacked while bathing), not to mention that nudity of children in non-sexual situations is not considered taboo in Japan.

A lot of people believe that Joseph Joestar is Jonathan Joestar's son. In fact, he's Jonathan's grandson, with Jonathan's son, George Joestar, being his father. This is easy to confuse because George is an incredibly minor character - he only appears in one flashback and gets killed off, so most fans tend to forget he exists.

Due to the popular Flash animation mudah.swf, a lot of people think that DIO exclaims "Wryyyy!" after using his Roadroller-Da! special move in the game JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future. In fact, in the actual game, he just laughs. The "Wryyyy!" soundbite from the Flash animation was taken from Shadow Dio's Charisma! super move.

And speaking of which, in the initial manga translations the most common spellings for a vampire's cry were either "Ureeeeyy!" or simply "Reeee!" The "Wryyyy!" spelling was used, but rarely. It became the most commonly-used among fans after the aforementioned mudah.swf animation popularised it, and once JJBA started really taking off in the West with the anime adaptations being released, official media adopted it as the most common spelling. The game Heritage for the Future spells it as URYYYYYY! in the name of one of Shadow Dio's supers.

Despite it being a common fan nickname for them, the group of main characters in Part 3 is never officially referred to as the Stardust Crusaders. That's just the name of the part, and even that was given retroactively: in its original publication (when it was serialised in Shūkan Shōnen Jump), it was titled JoJo no Kimyō na Bōken Dai San Bu: Kūjō Jōtarō -Mirai e no Isan- (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 3: Jotaro Kujo -Heritage for the Future-).

People will often say that Cream was the first Stand to have a music-based name (unless you count Tenor Sax, which is the only Stand to be named after a musical instrument specifically). But actually, in the original publication of the Part 3 manga, both Cream and Tenor Sax were unnamed - in fact, none of the Stands in Part 3 were actually named in the original manga. Their names were first given in the artbook JoJo 6251: Araki Hirohiko no Sekai, which was published in December 1993, roughly a year and a half after the Part 4 manga began serialisation. In other words, the actual first Stand to have a music-based name was Crazy Diamond, in Part 4.

Despite it being a common theory, Epitaph is not a separate Stand belonging to Doppio, who shares a body with King Crimson's user Diavolo. Epitaph is merely an extension of King Crimson, just like Sheer Heart Attack is an extension of Killer Queen, and Diavolo merely occasionally allows Doppio to borrow Epitaph's power (something he explicitly states in the series, even) whenever Diavolo needs to use the power but can't blow his cover.

Fan works (especially memes) often portray Gold Experience Requiem as having the power to create time loops. While that is what it does in its one and only appearance in the series, that's not its actual power. Its actual power is basically to nullify the actions of those who oppose it - the reason it creates a time loop in the series is that it's specifically nullifying King Crimson's time skip ability. King Crimson would attempt to skip forward in time, but Gold Experience Requiem would prevent King Crimson's actions from becoming reality, resulting in Diavolo becoming trapped in a time loop as he essentially became "stuck" trying to skip forward to a destiny he would never reach.

And on the subject of King Crimson, the prevalence of the "It just works" meme has led many people to think that its ability is insanely complicated and hard to explain. Actually, while some aspects of the finer details can be hard to understand, the Stand's abilities themselves are pretty simple to explain. It essentially has two abilities: Time Erasure, which allows it to erase up to ten seconds of time, and Epitaph, which allows it to see the immediate future. Whatever is seen in Epitaph's visions is fated to happen and thus cannot be changed, though it is possible to misinterpret the visions, as well as change actions and events around them in order to minimise damage. However, Diavolo is able to change his own fate by using King Crimson to erase the specific time frame, but this only works for his fate specifically, not anyone else's - for example, if Epitaph's vision showed both Diavolo and Giorno getting stabbed, Diavolo would be able to use King Crimson to prevent himself from getting stabbed, but Giorno would still get stabbed. As for Time Erasure, although the period of time itself is erased (resulting in others having no memory of what happened during it), anything that would have happened during said time period is treated as if it still happened, and time continues as normal from the end of the erased period, akin to a video skipping forward (this is why the ability is sometimes, though slightly erroneously, referred to as a "time skip" ability rather than a "time erasure" ability). However, Diavolo alone remains fully conscious during the "erased time", and is able to envision what would have happened during it and change his actions accordingly. He cannot actually attack during erased time, but he can move to avoid attacks and position himself in the opponent's blind spot. The abilities themselves are fairly easy to understand when explicitly laid out, but the fact that they're never really given a concrete explanation in the series and the fact that it's difficult to understand what's actually happening just by seeing it makes the Stand seem a lot more complicated than it actually is.

Stands are not psychic projections. It's explicitly said many times in the series that Stands are physical manifestations of a person's fighting spirit and life energy, hence why they can manipulate things and attack/hurt people. When Jotaro is introduced, he's shown having books in his jail cell titled "ESP", "Occult" and "Mysteries and Magic", implying that Stands are not psychic-based.

It's often claimed, jokingly or otherwise, that Araki forgot about Hamon after Stands were introduced in part 3, with some even reporting that he admitted it himself. However, Hamon does continue to feature in the series even after Stands are introduced. DIO mentions Hamon by name a few times in part 3, Joseph attempts unsuccessfully to use Hamon to separate Empress from his body, and in the final battle Joseph wraps himself in Hermit Purple and imbues it with Hamon as a defense against DIO, which is why he switches to throwing knives. It does get phased out of the story after part 3 ends, mainly because it's already served its purpose of defeating the Pillar Men and their vampire derivatives, but that doesn't mean Araki forgot about it.

And on a related note, Hamon does not only work on vampires or other monsters that are weak to sunlight. It's shown throughout the series that Hamon can be used for a variety of things - the very first appearance of it in the series has Zeppeli using it to destroy a rock. Hamon is also shown many times to be able to harm or affect humans, such as in part 2 where Joseph uses it to slice up a cop's fingers and Caesar uses it to hypnotise a random woman. Even Hamon users themselves aren't immune to Hamon techniques, as shown in Joseph's fights with Caesar and Ultimate Kars. Also, Hamon isn't the name of a martial art as some people think - the actual martial art is called Sendo, whereas Hamon is the name of the energy specifically.

Despite its appearance, the Space Ripper Stingy Eyes attack isn't eye lasers, it's actually stated to be a high-pressure spray of vitreous humour (in other words, pressurised bodily fluids), explaining why it doesn't get reflected by mirrors.

Though it can seem that way, the woman travelling with Dario Brando while he was looting the Joestars' carriage is not Dio's mother. She was an unrelated woman whom Dario met at a bar that night, who briefly acted as his partner in crime before ratting him out to the police once they went their separate ways. The confusion is understandable, since Dio's actual mother never appears onscreen in either the manga or the anime and Dario only makes one passing mention of the woman being "some girl from the bar", which wasn't translated properly in some scanlations of the manga and was omitted from the anime entirely.

A common misconception is that Kars playing air guitar on the unconscious Lisa Lisa's legs wasn't in the script, and was improvised after Kars's voice actor Inoue Kazuhiko decided to make guitar sounds instead of saying his lines. This is a result of information getting muddled over time. While there was improvisation involved, Kars does actually make guitar sounds in the manga too. Where the improvisation came in was that Kazuhiko wasn't told what song Kars was supposed to be humming, so he improvised something that sounded vaguely like "Roundabout", the ending theme to the series. Even TVTropes stated this misconception as a fact for years, and it doesn't help that the most popular English fan translation replaces the joke with Kars commenting about how nice Lisa Lisa's legs feel, making it seem like that was the original line and the guitar sounds were the ad lib.

There are some who criticise Part 2 for showing the main character becoming friends with a Nazi, claiming that the series portrays Nazis sympathetically. In truth, Joseph and Stroheim were never really friends - they just happened to both have a common enemy in the Pillar Men. They do grow to somewhat respect each other over the course of the series, but they never become particularly close, with Joseph seeing Stroheim more as another force against the Pillar Men to even the odds a little, rather than any kind of friend or comrade. The series also doesn't portray the Nazis or the Wehrmacht as sympathetic - while they do fight on the same side as the good guys, they're explicitly shown to only be doing so for their own benefit and that of the Nazi empire, rather than out of any sense of greater good. Stroheim himself was also pretty consistently portrayed as a comic relief villain rather than a hero - his job was to show up, brag about his superiority, and immediately get defeated by the Pillar Men. He never showed any real heroic qualities, even when he was allied with the good guys.

With the amount that they get shipped together in fan works, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Jotaro and Kakyoin have an almost homoerotically close friendship in part 3. But in fact, out of all the other characters in the main group, Kakyoin is probably the one Jotaro has the fewest direct interactions with, and most of them were during Kakyoin's intro when he was still a mind-controlled antagonist. Even Araki once described their relationship as "not particularly close". The reason shipping them together is so common is more to do with the fact that they're the pairing that makes the most sense - they're the same age, come from similar backgrounds, neither have any romantic partners, there's no real obstacles preventing them from getting together, and they both fulfill most of the archetypes of a seme/uke pairing.

People often assume that Jotaro's favourite sea animal is dolphins, given that he wears dolphin pins during part 4. In fact, he never specifically says what his favourite sea animal is, and the epilogue to part 4 states that he wrote his marine biology thesis on a starfish that he found in Morioh.

One of the biggest points people bring up as a supposed "plot hole" in part 4 is the fact that Joseph never used Hermit Purple to search for Kira, despite the fact that he came to Morioh specifically to help track down Akira. However, it was shown early in the part that Hermit Purple was unreliable at finding specific people due to Joseph's old age (with him trying to use spirit photography to take a picture of Josuke, only for it to show Angelo instead). Not only that, but Joseph didn't come to Morioh to track Akira specifically - what he actually planned to do, as Jotaro explains in the manga, was have Hermit Purple search Morioh's power grid, which would have easily located Akira (as his Stand, Red Hot Chili Pepper, was using the power lines to move through the town) but would have been absolutely useless at finding Kira. People tend to forget this since the gang managed to beat Akira before Joseph got to enact his plan anyway, as well as the fact that Jotaro's explanation was omitted from the anime.

Many people think that Rohan says his famous line "Daga kotowaru!" ("But I refuse!") during his battle against Cheap Trick. He actually says it during the battle against Highway Star. People often get this mixed up because the Cheap Trick fight is entirely focused on Rohan, while in the Highway Star battle, Rohan is just being held hostage so Highway Star can get to Josuke.

Since Part 5 introduces the concept of Automatic Stands (Stands that operate on their own with no range restriction and don't return damage to their user), many people think that Sheer Heart Attack is an Automatic Stand, and get confused as to why Kira gets affected by Echoes ACT3 using its 3 Freeze ability on it. But the fact is, Sheer Heart Attack isn't a Stand at all - it's just an extension of the actual Stand, Killer Queen, which is not an Automatic Stand. The fact that Kira doesn't sustain damage when Star Platinum attacks Sheer Heart Attack might be a source of this confusion, but that's simply due to Sheer Heart Attack's armour, not what type of Stand it is.

Despite what Viva Reverie's But Really Really Fast series may have you believe, Polnareff doesn't actually become Coco Jamboo after his soul is placed inside the turtle at the end of Part 5. While he did briefly become Coco Jamboo thanks to Chariot Requiem swapping their souls around temporarily, at the end of the part he actually becomes a permanent resident of Coco Jamboo's Stand, Mr. President. Coco Jamboo himself is still alive and still in control of his own body.