"I do not care about what happens to these characters" those are the worst words you can give to a work of fiction. If I don't care about what the characters or their motivations, then you'll have a hard time getting me to like the work at all.

I reread Jojolion this year after giving it an F when I read it in 2022. I really didn't like the second half at all. I felt it had a lot of buildup to little payoff and didn't feel the main villain felt menacing enough.

I reread all of Jojo this year from Part 1 to Part 7 and felt like all of the arcs were S tier to A tier in terms of Shonen manga. So it made me want to revisit Part 8. And my opinion hasn't changed at all.

The first thing we see in this arc is Jobin and his wife actively try to kill Yasuho to save their son. So I'm already not on their side as I've felt they've crossed into bad territory, even if they have their reasons.

So the main part of the arc is Josuke and Rai trying to get the Rokaka fruit from Toru. A character who came out of nowhere and was not hinted at beforehand. If they don't stop him he'll!!!...mass produce the Rokaka fruit and sell it to consenting adults who want to use it to heal an aspect of their body. Oh no. Why should I be rooting for them again?

There's nothing major at stake. If Dio won, he will take over the world. If Kira won, people will continue to be murdered for funsies. If Diavolo won he continues to run the mafia that pushes drugs to children. If Pucci won the universe gets reset (whoops). If Funny Valentine wins, he uses the corpse to make himself invincible and makes the rest of the world America's submissive. If Toru wins...he keeps selling the fruit for money and leaves the Jojo cast alone as he has realized it's not worth it to continue to pursue them.

I don't care about what's going on. I barely like the Higashikata family. They're all creeps to a degree especially Joshuu who was a complete jerk who never really got any comeuppance. I can't be bothered to cheer for them trying to kill someone, when they have shown willingness to kill innocent people before, who was even going to walk away with just one fruit after they ate the other.

It doesn't help that Wonder of U is an amazing ability that isn't very fun to watch for as long as it went on. Especially when the way they beat it was nowhere as satisfying as I felt it could have been (oh he just has invisible bombs now that somehow don't exist in reality...alright) and I wouldn't even complain about that if the rest of the fight had been fantastic in my eyes.

Overall I just didn't feel any stakes to this arc. I couldn't be bothered to root for the heroes when there was no one in enough danger to go around killing people over it. I couldn't be bothered to want the villain defeated because if he got what he wanted he'd have just left them alone and gone back to living his own life. And on top of it the arc just goes on and on when I feel it could have easily been 10 chapters shorter.

There already a way to fix the child from turning into a rock, so I don't care about that because it's a solvable issue and I don't like Jobin or his wife to root for their solution. They don't give closure to Kira's mom or Josuke's mother either. We see no resolution to either arc. So after all of this I don't even get a satisfying conclusion or feel the one character I did like got anything out of it.

Overall I was very disappointed with the second half of Jojolion. I think everything up to the Killer Queen arc was incredible but it doesn't change how I feel about what happened after. I have bumped the series to a C though.