For those familiar with Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, regardless of if you’re caught up with the manga or you’ve only made it as far as the anime with part 5: Golden Wind, you probably already know that there are a good few stands that just really don’t make any sense, no matter how much Araki power-levels the series to make it seem like everyone’s on an even playing ground.
One could argue that Crazy Diamond and Heaven’s Door really kind of broke the Stand system, but it’s undoubtedly broken by the time we decide to bring any sort of requiem Stand into the mix. But let’s take a dive into the series as a whole to break down some that just absolutely don’t make any sense.
10 Heaven’s Door
Rohan is a really fun character and a pretty obvious self-insert for Araki, but that doesn’t mean that his stand makes any more sense than you would expect, especially because Araki decided to make it ridiculously overpowered for no reason.
He can essentially turn anyone into a book and then make them do whatever he writes inside them, even if it doesn’t make any sense like when he sent someone to a hell he wasn’t sure about the existence of. If he can do this, why didn’t he just have some random lead the group directly to Kira?
9 Whitesnake
The problem with Whitesnake, the stand of Father Pucci in part 6, isn’t necessarily the fact that it has a swathe of ridiculously powerful abilities, but more that it seems like a lot of the abilities are shoehorned in to make the story progress more easily.
He’s able to create illusions that can make a character lose all track of the material reality around then, and if that weren’t powerful enough, not only can he remove people’s memory in the form of a stand disc or a memory disc, but he can also extract specific senses in disc form if it’ll benefit him at any given moment. Abilities are just piled on.
8 Strength
Strength as a stand isn’t exactly broken because of the abilities of the stand, it’s more because it’s able to work with the user it has, which doesn’t quite check out.
In the case of Pet Shop, another stand wielded by an animal, the concept makes more sense because it mainly contends with Iggy, another animal, which makes much more sense than a random orangutan wielding a stand that allows him to control an entire boat than he’s mysteriously ended up on, being the only possible stand user there. How did Dio make a deal with an Orangutan?
7 20th Century Boy
20th Century Boy is mostly a defensive stand, really allowing for no offensive capability whatsoever. The only thing it really does is protects the user while he’s crouching, which makes it almost entirely useless. The other caveat with the stand is that the only real way to counter it is just to make sure that the user is standing somewhere where his stance can be disrupted, such as if he were on a rope bridge or something like that.
But if he can maintain his crouching posture while falling through the air and land like that, is there really anything you can do to defeat him? While Araki allowed for a workaround, there really shouldn’t be one.
6 Thohth
The issue with Thohth, the stand of Boingo, part of a duo of stand-using brothers is the inconsistency of its predictions. The stand purports to show reality in the future as it will happen with absolutely no derivations if the art in the book is followed to a T by the person who wishes to make the future work out in their favor.
The issue with this is that while most of the plan not working out is explained away with misinterpretation, there are plenty of times when for whatever reason, the prediction was just wrong. It’s also visible to non-stand-users, which is a pretty uncommon thing and isn’t ever really justified.
5 Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap is the stand of the antagonist in part 7, Steel Ball Run. Part 7 is the first part that takes place after the universe reset that takes place in Stone Ocean, meaning that everything should be pretty nerfed right? Not nearly as dangerous to the foundation of all of reality and spacetime? Nope. That’s not the case.
Funny Valentine is able to travel through dimensions and absorb the memories and emotions of any of the versions of himself that exist in other dimensions. Good job Araki. You immediately broke the universe again.
4 Heavy Weather
Heavy Weather is a ridiculously powerful stand, doing basically exactly what it says on the box. The user is able to control the weather in whatever way he sees fit, which ramps up more and more as we find out more about the nature of the stand.
For some reason, towards the end of part 6, we see the extent of its power when heavy weather is used to turn everyone in the world into snails, and to make snails appear to be falling out of the sky. Even though the stand is just modifying atmospheric pressure, for whatever reason, people are duped into thinking they’ve actually become snails, which isn’t ever explained.
3 Stray Cat
Stray Cat is a stand originally wielded by, you guessed it, a cat. This cat is no ordinary cat because it can shoot powerful air bubbles that are able to carry things away, be used as projectiles, or to form a shield around certain things.
It also, for some reason, has the ability to reincarnate, the first time we’ve seen anything remotely this powerful from a world-breaking perspective. Part 4 is kind of the beginning of the end as far as leaning towards the universe reset in part 6 goes, so it only makes sense that this stand is here. That being said, if it can reincarnate as something nearby, why something as limited in use as a plant?
2 Oasis
Oasis is a stand that was paired with Green Day, a stand that creates a fungus that can cover large amounts of terrain and people. The lower you are, the more it spreads. This works really well with Oasis, which is a suit that the user wears, allowing him to travel through solid matter by shooting through it as if it were a liquid.
That being said, Bucciarati and others note that it’s still hard, and retains the qualities of the solid asphalt he was traveling through. This doesn’t really make any sense unless we assume that Oasis was turning solid matter into a non-newtonian fluid.
1 Metallica
Metallica, perhaps the most creatively named stand in the series, is a stand that basically allows the user to have the powers of the most over-powered Magneto from X-Men you’ve ever seen. It can pull the iron out of pretty much anywhere in its immediate vicinity, and that includes out of the blood of its opponents, making it extremely powerful and able to pierce one’s skin.
It can also make iron pieces cover the user, resulting in a cloaking capability that makes him invisible. That being said, to get iron particles that fine is nearly an impossibility, and at best, he should have minor light displacement abilities.