▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Alex
CONTACT: PM this journal
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Reimi Sugimoto (doreimi)

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Jotaro Kujo
CANON: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders
CANON POINT: Episode 48: "Long Travels, Goodbye My Friend"
AGE: 17 (and 11 months, he turns 18 one month after his canonpoint)
BACKGROUND:
▶ Jotaro on the JJBA Wiki
▶ Stands and how they work
▶ Star Platinum, Jotaro's personal Stand
▶ Episode Summaries for Stardust Crusaders


PERSONALITY:
When we're first introduced to Jotaro Kujo, he's depicted as the very model of generosity and charm; the sort of individual who always has a friendly, open expression on his face and a warmth toward everyone around him.

...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. 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 character development kicked in, 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 jail cell, isolating himself to ensure that the so-called "evil spirit" would be unable to hurt anyone while he attempted to figure out what it was and why it was haunting him. Later, Jotaro snaps that while he's absolutely no poster child for goodness and morality, even he draws the line at people who tread on innocents for their own gain. And in fact, when he ultimately discovers that a former enemy of his is being mind-controlled to do the Big Bad's bidding, Jotaro ignores all warnings to the contrary and uses Star Platinum to perform impromptu brain surgery to free him, despite being told repeatedly that the process is dangerous, reckless, and quite possibly futile.

That willingness to do the impossible despite all odds is a trait that Jotaro carries with him throughout the entire series. Like the rest of the Stardust Crusaders, he departs for Cairo on a moment's notice after his mother falls ill from the effects of her own rapidly appearing Stand, which can only be halted by the death of Dio, the series's Big Bad. Though Dio is an effectively immortal vampire with a massive power base and scores of devoted Stand user followers, Jotaro never hesitates nor falters in his determination to find and defeat Dio in the fifty days his mother has left to live before her own Stand kills her. And in the course of that adventure, his capacity for problem-solving extends well beyond use of physical force; quite frequently, he defeats enemy Stand users through creative use of his environment and capabilities, and not just Star Platinum's fists.

Understandably, Jotaro isn't without his faults. For example, 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. He's not particularly sociable and doesn't have the easiest time connecting with people at first; one of the reasons he doesn't emote a lot is because he thinks people should already be able to tell what he's feeling just by looking at his face, so 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. Also, 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 in later installments of canon he thinks he's doing the right thing for his daughter by effectively abandoning her so that he can protect her from afar. By Jotaro's flawed logic, it's better to keep his distance because then any potential threats that find him won't also find his loved ones.

However, lest anyone take away the impression that Jotaro is actually some kind of ultra badass coolguy determinator protagonist, it's equally important to point out 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 perform a trick in which he flips five lit cigarettes inward into his mouth, to the delight of his friends. 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!" 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.

So who is Jotaro Kujo? 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 bad with people but he loves the ocean. And he's someone who never asked for the responsibility that his family legacy has placed on him, but who stepped up and saw it through to the end anyway.


POWERS/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.

✔ 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.

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.


INVENTORY:
▶ A cigarette lighter
▶ Dio's diary
▶ Kakyoin's earrings
▶ A thick manga volume with a knife gouge through it
▶ A magnet
▶ A knife

MOONBLESSING: Sanguis! He'll be a wolf at first and a dragon someday

▶ SAMPLES

His top-level on the TDM, which has 2+ subthreads beneath it — though I can partition them out into multiple links if you'd prefer!