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[starmark]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Alex
Contact: AIM: GloriousRikkaidai
Other Characters: None!

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Jotaro Kujo
Age: 17
Canon: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders
Canon Point: Episode 48: "Long Travels, Goodbye My Friend"
Character Information:
▶ Jotaro on the JJBA Wiki
▶ Episode Summaries for Stardust Crusaders

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 repeatedly demonstrates his tenacity: he 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 clever and innovative ways 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 crafty and versatile when it comes to achieving that goal.

Where Jotaro's honor and tenacity overlap, there lies his profound loyalty to the people he's chosen to care about. For a kid who starts out as an abrasive punk who is stubbornly committed to doing what he wants, when he wants, because he thinks it's best and damn anyone who might say otherwise, he grows and changes a great deal over the course of canon, forming bonds of trust with his fellow Crusaders that ultimately make them a found family in their own right. As noted above, one of the easiest ways to get him to take immediate action is by threatening one of his friends: when the D'arby brothers threaten the other Crusaders, he leaps in to risk himself even when he has virtually no plan for defeating them other than "he'll figure something out as he goes"; when Steely Dan, upon being defeated, makes a last-ditch effort at coercing Jotaro back into compliance by threatening to take hostage a random little girl, Jotaro is able to calmly ignore the threat because he knows that Kakyoin already has the problem under control. But perhaps the most telling evidence of all is the fact that during his fight with Dio, Jotaro demonstrates firsthand how injuring one of the other Crusaders can be a berserk button of his. Dio successfully gets under his skin by taunting him about Kakyoin's death, which occurred when Jotaro and Kakyoin were separated and thus when Jotaro was powerless to intervene; furthermore, he sends Jotaro into a reckless rage by draining Joseph's blood right in front of him as a means of replenishing his own power. Though Joseph's ghost explicitly tells Jotaro not to lose his cool or let Dio provoke him into charging in and getting himself killed, Jotaro ignores it because, as he says himself, "No one could stay calm after seeing that." At that point, avenging his friends is the only thing that matters, and so he disregards his grandfather's advice in favor of throwing himself full strength at Dio to defeat him once and for all.

However, 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 he's also a gigantic nerd. 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 200,000 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 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 socially awkward 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).

Additionally, further installments of canon reinforce the idea that Jotaro can be incredibly emotionally stupid when it comes to 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, and have assuredly left him battle-scarred in the aftermath. 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 recklessly 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.

5-10 Key Character Traits:
Honorable, Tenacious, Clever, Loyal, Nerdlord, Battle-Scarred, Socially Awkward, Reckless, Stubborn, Emotionally Constipated

Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? FITS, please!

Opt-Outs:
Werebear, Naga, Minotaur, Troll, Arachne

Roleplay Sample:
▶ ONE
▶ TWO
▶ THREE
▶ FOUR (this is a multi-person group thread, but Jotaro does feature in it and demonstrate certain significant traits in a few distinct places, despite not always being the center of attention in the thread)