Application | rubycity_rp

[starmark]

PLAYER
Name: Alex
Age: 18+
Personal Journal: alexclusive
E-mail: gloriousrikkaidai (at) hotmail (dot) com
AIM/MSN/etc: AIM: GloriousRikkaidai

CHARACTER
Name: Jotaro Kujo
Canon: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Age: 17
Timeline: Episode 48: "Long Travels, Goodbye My Friend"
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: Not Applicable!


Personality:

When we're first introduced to Jotaro Kujo, we're shown that he is the very model of generosity and charm; the sort of individual who always has a friendly, open expression on his face and a willingness to help anyone who seems to be in need of it.

...And then we stop viewing him through the unreliable perspective of his mom, and get to see him for the standoffish, rude jerkass he is.

The true Jotaro Kujo, however, is neither of these two extremes. He's certainly not the sweet and angelic individual his mother imagines him to be; we're told early on that he's the type of person who puts people in the hospital when he fights them and threatens teachers to the point where they're afraid to come back to class just because he doesn't like them (and, perhaps most heinous of all, who leaves without paying if he doesn't like the food in a restaurant). He smokes despite being underage, uses rough language, and treats even his own family members with very little apparent respect, referring to his mother as "you bitch" and insisting on calling his grandfather "old man" instead of something more deferential, as well. There's no denying that Jotaro is the sort of person who's very accustomed to being seen as the baddest motherfucker in the room and who's learned from experience that solving problems through brute force and intimidation is one easy way of getting things done.

However, even before his Bigass Road Trip of Heroism (and Character Development), Jotaro's personality and actions hinted at the unusual sense of personal honor concealed beneath his rough exterior. When he thinks he's being possessed by an "evil spirit" (which eventually proves to be his Stand, a psychic manifestation of his fighting spirit similar in nature to a Persona), his response is to lock himself in an empty cell at the jail and refuse to come out until he's managed to figure out what the "evil spirit" is. Though this absolutely demonstrates a stubborn and reckless nature, it also raises the implication that Jotaro isolated himself to ensure that the "evil spirit" would be unable to hurt anyone while he attempted to figure out what it was and why it was haunting him. Shortly thereafter, while doing battle with Noriaki Kakyoin at school (during which Kakyoin has used his own Stand to possess and seize control of an innocent female classmate to attack Jotaro), Jotaro snaps that while he's absolutely no poster child for goodness and morality himself, even he draws the line at people who tread on innocents for their own gain, especially women. And in fact, this belief holds true even after he defeats Kakyoin, when he takes him back to his house and discovers that Kakyoin is being controlled by one of the big bad's flesh buds, a mind-controlling parasite that had turned Kakyoin into the unwilling pawn of Jotaro's ultimate enemy, Dio. Though he's told repeatedly that the process is dangerous, reckless, and quite possibly futile, Jotaro ignores all warnings to the contrary and uses Star Platinum to perform impromptu brain surgery, freeing Kakyoin and ultimately gaining him as a new and willing member of the Stardust Crusaders.

A willingness to do the impossible despite all odds, and relatedly an unwillingness to accept that some things are truly impossible, is a trait that Jotaro carries with him throughout the entire series. Like the rest of the Stardust Crusaders, he departs on a moment's notice to pursue Dio after his mother falls ill from the effects of her own rapidly appearing Stand; all of the Joestar bloodline's Stands are linked to Dio's acquisition of his own Stand, thanks to Dio's theft and possession of the body of their ancestor, Jonathan Joestar. Though Dio is an effectively immortal vampire with a massive power base and scores of devoted Stand user followers (many of whom follow him willingly, unlike Kakyoin and Polnareff), Jotaro never hesitates nor falters in his determination to find and defeat Dio in the fifty days his mother has left to live. Through plane crashes, ambushes, deception, peril, occasionally being stranded in really awkward places including but not limited to the desert and at sea, and having to listen to his grandfather insist that you really can learn how to ride a camel just from watching Lawrence of Arabia a few times, Jotaro never once doubts or questions what he and his friends have set out to do, nor does he show fear about what might be waiting for them once they reach Cairo.

However, in pursuing the impossible, Jotaro demonstrates that his capacity for problem-solving extends to far more than just "hitting it really hard with Star Platinum's fists"; quite frequently, Stand users are defeated on his watch through creative use of his environment and capabilities, as opposed to just brute forcing them. Though he absolutely has his reckless moments of "act first and come up with a plan later" — as in the case of his competition with the younger D'Arby brother, when he agrees to take on a proclaimed master of video games at his personal favorite game despite Jotaro having never once played a video game himself — Jotaro is highly adept at thinking on his feet, responding and adapting to unexpected situations, and applying his unfailing determination to the problem at hand in order to come out on top. Sometimes this comes in the form of recklessly jumping out of a suspended aerial tram car as a means of evading a Stand user who has him cornered, in the case of his battle with Yellow Temperance; other times, it's simply maintaining an absolute perfect mask of stoicism to psych out the elder D'Arby during a poker match and turn one of his own Stand's properties against him, forcing a win against an opponent he doesn't have the skill to beat outright. Occasionally, it even means sacrificing his pride and submitting to the humiliating demands of a Stand user who has his grandfather held hostage, trusting that his friends will resolve the issue without him if he can endure long enough to buy them the time to do it. What matters to Jotaro is getting the job done, and he's incredibly creative and versatile when it comes to achieving that goal.

...Coincidentally, he's also a gigantic nerd. Lest anyone take away the impression that Jotaro is actually some kind of ultra badass determinator protagonist, it's equally important to point out the fact that after the events of Stardust Crusaders, Jotaro goes on to become a marine biologist — and later a professor of the subject, having successfully completed his thesis on the topic of starfish. He can apparently perform a trick in which he flips five lit cigarettes inward into his mouth without burning himself or using his hands; he says himself that he "can't sleep at night when he's worrying about really minor things", and attributes this to the fact that he liked Columbo a lot as a kid. At one point, while engaging in underwater combat with a Stand that's effectively the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he unironically snaps, "I can't hear you; we're underwater, so speak up!" He wears uniform pants that he claims cost 20,000 yen, and when his uniform coat is destroyed in a fight with a Stand user, he goes out of his way to disappear just long enough to have a local vendor craft another, identical one for him out of sheep's wool. Suffice to say, Jotaro Kujo is a massive nerdlord, and while you should absolutely take him seriously as a threat, that doesn't mean you should take him seriously in any other capacity.

Shenanigans aside, though, Jotaro isn't without his faults. One very apparent blemish on his stunning personality is that he isn't exactly what you'd call a people person; he's stoic to the point of being a veritable statue at times, and he doesn't have a lot of patience for antics he finds frivolous or stupid. Though his relative good looks and "cool and mysterious rebel" demeanor have made him fairly popular among the girls at his school, his response to their attempts to flirt with him (and their internal competing for his attention) is to yell at them to shut up and stop annoying him. Even his customary catchphrase, yare yare daze, roughly translates into something along the lines of "good grief" or "what a fucking pain"; he's not particularly sociable and doesn't have the easiest time connecting with people. We're told that one of the reasons he doesn't tend to emote a lot is because he thinks people should already be able to tell what he's feeling just by looking at his face; he doesn't go out of his way to show his feelings because he assumes they're already out there for the whole world to see (which, being a phenomenal lineface, they really aren't). Finally, further installments of canon reinforce the idea that Jotaro can be incredibly stupid when it comes for demonstrating his legitimate concern and affection for people. He truly does care about his mother, which would seem to align poorly with his constant use of slurs when referring to her, and he later thinks he's doing the right thing by his daughter by effectively abandoning her so that he can protect her from afar. By Jotaro's logic, it's better to keep his distance because then any potential threats that find him won't also find his daughter; as pure logic goes, this is fine, except that it completely ignores the fact that his daughter is a person who's being emotionally cut off from her own father in his attempts to keep her safe, which isn't exactly the most parental of outcomes, either.

Finally, there's simply no denying that Jotaro is a seventeen-year-old kid who's been dropped into a bloody family legacy he never asked for, and who's seen and done some serious shit because of it. The lengths Jotaro is forced to go to in order to defeat Dio once and for all in Cairo are, quite frankly, the stuff of nightmares. Following the deaths of two of their longtime companions at Dio's mansion, a third is sacrificed to learn the secret of Dio's Stand, The World, whose power has up until this time remained a massive unknown. That message is carried to Jotaro by his grandfather, who Dio kills via a knife to the throat directly in front of Jotaro. As Dio begins to fight him directly, Jotaro is forced into a battle where he is consistently at a disadvantage against an enemy that not one of his companions had stood a chance of defeating — one who can control the flow of time itself, and launches his attacks during the brief periods when time is outright stopped, rendering them all but impossible to defend against. Unlike his companions, though, Jotaro alone is capable of remaining conscious during Dio's periods of stopped time, which allows him to perceive the attacks that are coming, but which also renders him frozen and effectively powerless as those attacks are set up. For a period of several seconds, Jotaro remained suspended in time and staring down the blades of several dozen knives that Dio had thrown at him, all of which would continue their momentum and stab through him the instant that time restarted. Later, backed into a corner and desperate to give Dio the impression that he was in fact dead, he used Star Platinum to stop his own heart so that Dio's vampiric hearing wouldn't be able to perceive the sound of a heartbeat in his enemy's chest while he played pigeon on the ground. Finally, Dio's finishing move involved nearly crushing Jotaro under a steamroller on one of Cairo's bridges, an imminent death he only barely escaped — and by such a close margin that for a time, Dio really did think he'd been crushed. And perhaps most lastingly traumatic, albeit in a subtle, fridge-horror sort of way, is the fact that the reason Jotaro was capable of keeping up with Dio at all during those periods of stopped time is because his own Stand, Star Platinum, possesses the same power that Dio's The World did. That same ability to stop time that facilitated Kakyoin's death, his grandfather's mortal injuries, and quite frankly the vast majority of the entire shitshow that was the confrontation with Dio in general, is now Jotaro's alone to control — and no one currently living knows that he can do it, unless he chooses to tell them himself. Pun intended, the weight of The World is now solely on his shoulders, and it's at least one way that his old foe will never entirely stop haunting him.

Suffice to say, Jotaro Kujo is a kid with a lot of facets. He's rude; he's abrasive. He cares about his mom and will fight tooth and nail for the sake of his friends. He's been through horrors the likes of which many couldn't even imagine, and he's the type to carry them alone and silently like he thinks he's the — well, you know, Batman. He's bad with people but he really likes marine biology, and he's precisely the kind of dork to say that his favorite color is "anything translucent, as long as it has clarity — like the reflection of light over the ocean, or the facets of a gemstone". And he's someone who never asked for the responsibility that his family legacy has placed on him, but who's seen the call of that blood through to the end, defeating his great-great-grandfather's mortal enemy and laying to rest the century-old grudgematch that started between Dio Brando and Jonathan Joestar. And the reason Dio lost? Well, there's just one reason. Just one.

Turns out, it has nothing to do with heroism. It's just that he really pissed Jotaro off.


Background:

▶ Jotaro on the JJBA Wiki
▶ Stands and how they work
▶ Star Platinum, Jotaro's personal Stand
▶ Episode Summaries for Stardust Crusaders


Abilities:

Jotaro's predominant and most obvious ability is the use of his Stand, Star Platinum, which will be given its own section and covered separately below. Aside from Star Platinum, however, there are still a few personal abilities that Jotaro possesses that are worthy of note, including:

✔ An Accomplished Fighter: Even without Star Platinum's help, Jotaro himself has been in a lot of fights, and he tends to win them through advantages in size, strength, and general tenacity. This is also canonically shown to be a skill he's possessed for a long time; even when an enemy Stand reduces him to the physical age of seven years old, Jotaro doesn't hesitate in rolling up his too-large sleeves, making tiny fists, and beating the ever-living daylights out of an enemy six times his age. He's also shown to be pretty athletic, with good stamina and muscle control, and survives a fair number of jumps from particularly high places without injury like any good shounen protagonist would.

✔ An Excellent Poker Face: Self-explanatory; though he's not necessarily a particularly creative liar when it comes to bluffing, he's downright unnerving when he wants to give the impression that he's absolutely committed to something.

✔ This Ain't Sea World, This is Real As It Gets: Jotaro's particular nerdy area of interest happens to be marine biology. Though he hasn't started studying it in any real capacity in the form of higher education (yet; he will within a year or two in canon), it's definitely one of his pet interests and as such he just kind of...is really into oceans. And fish. Please let him try to befriend the kraken.

✔ General Knowledge: Though not nearly the Encyclopedia Britannica that Kakyoin can be, Jotaro does have a wider breadth of knowledge than he tends to let on, and will independently do research on his own into areas of interest if there's something he's trying to make sense of, as was the case when he was trying to work out an understanding of what his Stand was at the beginning of Part 3.

☆ STAR PLATINUM ☆
In the interest of full disclosure, most of the abilities I'm going to discuss here can already be found (and better covered) on the Jojos Wiki entry for Star Platinum, giving more exact specifications of what Jotaro's Stand is capable of. However, I'll also provide a more general summary here as an overview.

Star Platinum is what the series calls a "close-range Stand", meaning that it is confined to an area with a radius of around two to three meters from Jotaro at any given time. He's a large, humanoid Stand that's both incredibly strong and incredibly fast, capable of punching people with enough force to blow them through a building and with reflexes quick enough to catch a bullet fired at his user's forehead at point-blank range. His primary form of attack is an "assault rush" consisting of a flurry of extremely fast, machine-gun punches accompanied by his iconic "ORAORA" cry; unlike most other Stands in the series, we are not made aware of Star Platinum's signature Stand power until the final battle against Dio, in large part because Jotaro was as yet unaware of the range and scope of Star Platinum's abilities, himself.

Star Platinum's signature Stand ability is Time Stop, a power identical to that of Dio's The World. For a duration of no more than five seconds (a measure that the series itself recognizes as a little paradoxical, measuring the duration of a time stop in a period of time itself), Jotaro is capable of using Star Platinum to stop time around himself at a given radius. During the battle with Dio, it's shown that this radius is fairly small; at one point Jotaro and his grandfather are on opposite sides of a street, and Dio remarks that he's close enough to catch Jotaro's grandfather in the boundary of stopped time, but not Jotaro as well. It's also worth noting that Jotaro can never be as proficient in the use of his time stop as Dio was, because performing it is immensely taxing, and Jotaro doesn't have the benefit of vampiric stamina, healing, and relative immortality to sustain repeated uses of it in rapid succession. Jotaro's absolute upper limit of the ability is five seconds of stopped time; later canon also shows that if he doesn't stay in practice with the ability, the duration at which he can maintain it will diminish.

As a note, I saw in the F.A.Q. that time travel abilities may be nerfed or nullified entirely in Ruby City; though it's not time travel, I do recognize that as a time-related power, Jotaro's Stand ability may be subject to nullification or nerfing, and I'm happy to work with the mods to bring Star Platinum into line with whatever standards you think are best for the game. o/

The fight with Dio also somewhat inexplicably shows that through use of Star Platinum, Jotaro can apparently go Super Saiyan and fly with the help of Star Platinum, so theoretically speaking that's probably some kind of...enhanced jumping or aerial maneuvering ability, plus the related but additional ability to sort of float or swim through space while time is frozen. (I seriously have no idea what to call this one, it's pretty much "he does this because Rule of Cool and we've all been waiting fifty episodes for this fight so disbelief is firmly suspended and literally no one's going to question this because that's hype as hell", but I figured I should put it out there anyway.)

Additionally, Star Platinum is apparently capable of phasing itself and its limbs inside of people to affect aspects of them — most notably, the two times Star Platinum is used to start and stop a character's heart. This is depicted as Star Platinum essentially reaching into a person's chest cavity, grasping their heart, and manually pumping it; how this actually works in terms of physics is anyone's guess, but between that and a level of precision that makes him capable of performing unassisted brain surgery early on in canon, Star Platinum makes for a pretty good emergency medical technician in a fair number of ways.

Finally, while Star Platinum is not sentient and not an individual in his own right, he does display certain characteristics that suggest a slight level of autonomy — including but not limited to his ability to protect his user even when that user is incapable of giving orders to do so (and by extension, demonstrating an interest in user- and self-preservation even before Jotaro was fully aware he could command his "evil spirit" in the first place), a passing mention by Jotaro that his Stand seems even more violent than he is himself, and the fact that Star Platinum is shown to emote on occasion independently of Jotaro, though most likely still as a result of his reactions and feelings. It cannot, however, talk in any form other than its Stand cry, and communicating with it is probably more akin to a pet owner idly talking to their dog than any sort of meaningful interpersonal interaction in that respect.


Network/Actionspam Sample:
Jotaro on the Ruby City August Test Drive!
Jotaro on the Bakerstreet Train to the Afterlife Meme, included additionally because it's a situation where circumstances are more conducive to him emoting, and more introspection is available.


Prose Log Sample:


The truth of the matter was, now that he actually had the opportunity to stop and think about it outside of the battle situation and all of its reckless adrenaline, Star Platinum's Stand ability sort of unnerved him a little.

It wasn't just the ability to stop time, in and of itself. Objectively speaking, that was...equal parts cool and unnerving. Cool, because there was so much good he could do with it if he put it toward that end, using those precious few extra seconds where he could move and no one else could to correct mistakes, prevent accidents, maybe even make the difference between life and death. Unnerving, because not only had he seen how easily that same power could be used for unfathomable evil, but because that empty world that existed between moments in time had belonged to Dio alone for a long time, and Jotaro wasn't precisely sure it was an inheritance he wanted. But whether he liked it or not, it was his. His to do with as he pleased, whatever that might be.

And sometimes it was isolating, and stifling, and he hated it. It was the power that had given him the ability to defeat his family's oldest enemy, once and for all. It was also the power that had murdered his best friend, and through some kind of great cosmic irony, he was the one who'd been left as the sole custodian of it.

What was he supposed to do? Acting like he didn't want it, pretending like it didn't exist — that wasn't going to make it go away. The potential would always be there, like an ugly secret just waiting for the most inopportune time to be unearthed. What if it started happening by mistake? What if someday Star Platinum sensed a threat and froze the world on his own, imposing that sort of will over everyone else in the vicinity as he prioritized his user's continued survival over their freedom to act? Even now, the thought turned Jotaro's stomach in a way he couldn't quite explain, calling up visions of passerby with cigarette lighters knocked unknowingly against their skin and an old man on his knees with a knife point hovering an inch away from his exposed throat. Why was this something he'd been given responsibility for?

But on the other hand, what if he embraced it? Suppose he learned to use it, began to wield it, took the power of stopping time firmly in his own hands. Would it ever truly be his own, or would he only end up spending the rest of his life with the specter of Dio hanging over his head even more than it was already?

The last thing he wanted, he thought vehemently, was to be anything like Dio. But apparently some force of fate or cosmic destiny had decided that, in at least this respect, he wasn't going to have a say in the matter.

Jotaro sighed, pulling down the brim of his cap as he called Star Platinum forward. As always, his Stand's response time was instantaneous; he had only to will it, and in the blink of an eye Star Platinum was there, towering and silent as the river flowing steadily along under the bridge beneath their feet. It wasn't any great mystery why he always seemed to find himself drawn here, he knew, even though no one else living possibly could've. No one else living had been present for the moment Dio died, after all.

Even now, he couldn't help but glance up every so often, unconsciously checking to make sure that the second hand on the world's clock was still ticking away, half-expecting to spot a road roller coming crashing down at him from overhead.

But tonight the sky was empty and stained red-gold with sunset, and the surroundings were silent from purely natural causes, and there was something weirdly calming about sending Star Platinum to collect leaves and drop them over the side of the bridge, just to watch the slow current carry them away toward the horizon and drink in the visual proof that time was still moving after all.

And when the precise moment hit at sunset, when the river seemed to turn to blood and the debris beneath went the hue of bone, he watched it come and go like a silent guardian, and thought to himself how easy it would've been to freeze the world in place, and make that strange sight last a few seconds longer than the universe had ever intended it to, just because he wanted to. If ever he wanted to.

But he hadn't. And more likely than not, he won't.

What he really wanted, he decided, was to leave decisions like that for another day.