sakura_no_miko | Fic rec

Fandom: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (parts 1-6)

Rating: PG

Pairing: gen, background canon pairings

Warnings: angst, self-loathing issues

Other notes: au, everyone lives, family, ensemble, alternating PoV

Length: 17k + sequels

Summary: Post-Stone Ocean, everyone lives fic: two months after leaving prison, Jolyne, Emporio, and Jotaro make their way to the Adirondacks to a family reunion. This time, everyone is invited.

Aw, man, it was hard to pick if I wanted to rec Fluency or its sequel, Get Back. Both of them are just lovely. Get Back is longer, of course, more meaty and full of character development, but Fluency has more of the ensemble thing going on.

This fic just feels so homey for me. I’m mixed race, but for the most part I’m closer to my mother’s family, and most of my older relatives speak Cantonese, with English as their second language. I’ve got one — cousin of some sort? — who’s got a pair of toddlers who speak English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. It is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. But me, ah, I only speak English. My mom says that as soon as she went to school, she just started speaking English. Have you seen in some modern video games, especially fighting games like Tekken, they started having all the international characters speak their native language, but to each other? So the Korean guy is chatting on in Korean, and his Japanese opponent responds in Japanese. It looks weird, but most of the conversations in my family go exactly like that. My grandmother speaks in Cantonese and my mom responds in English. All the time.

Though… Well, being a kid, it mostly felt uncomfortable. Couldn’t follow most of the conversations. I’ve got all this jumbled half-knowledge. Old habits and superstitions that I never actually learned the explanations for. You just did it.

So, yeah, this fic, man. Like every awkward Christmas in my life. Aside from the magic shenanigans.

The very first scene already has two great pieces:

“No, I mean...um, are you nervous?”
She glances at her father, who looks ahead as if he’s not paying attention to what is beside him. His pretend indifference is as bad as Emporio’s worry; the child she loves shouldn’t have to take care of her, and her father doesn’t know how to be concerned.

Holy heck, just four lines, and you get Jolyne’s character so well. Jolyne is, like, early 20s, I think? And she gets the full brunt of that “young person saving the world” characterization. The older I get, the most shounen anime and YA novels make me think, these children are way too young to be doing this shit. For Jolyne, taking in a young boy as her son puts her in an interesting position. Her own parents divorced, and her father is physically and emotionally distant. And her kid, like her, went through this end-of-the-world craziness, so he’s got this awkward maturity for his age. Jolyne is stuck in the middle — the person she might want and accept comfort from is awkwardly hands-off, and the person she wants to be strong for immediately notices her weak point.

(Also, god, it sets up her and Jotaro’s development in the sequel so well.)

So, unsurprisingly, she lashes out:

“Nonna Suzie doesn’t know anything about what you did. Baba does, though.”
She erupts.
“God, that is so like you , Dad, just dropping a fucking bomb right before we get inside - !”
“- Jolyne?” Emporio says, quiet but unafraid of her outburst. He grips her sweaty hand and she swallows her voice, squeezing back.
“So, what, is Nonna gonna ask me about jail? Or did you lie and say I’ve been in college? And like, is anybody gonna ask about all the freaky shit in Florida and if we saw any of it? What the fuck’re we supposed to say!” Jolyne says.
“Everybody knows what happened except for Nonna Suzie,” Dad explains.
They’re at the stairs of the house now. Emporio hesitates at the thick shelf of snow on them, and Dad lifts his arm, helping him up onto the step.
“Everybody here except for Nonna has a stand.”
“Who is everybody?”
He looks at her and frowns. “The family.”
“ Dad - Dad, I don’t - I don’t know who that is.”

Which, again — awkward Christmas meetings with relatives I see once a year. Trying to explain a year’s worth of my life in mild platitudes. Yeah, work is fine. No, not seeing anyone. Totally not suffering from massive anxiety and depression, nope, nosiree. Totally not making a hobby out of writing sexually explicit stories for free and posting them online.

And — ah, maybe this is just me, but there are so few moments when I really talk to anyone about my life. Not at work, certainly; not with family; on rare occasion with my close friends, we just start quietly, honestly bitching about the things that are seriously bothering us.

And then, that line: I don’t know who my family is.

See, there’s a reason I had to do this fic alongside Eight Day Week (Jojo-Spotting). It’s another fic where theres a big family reunion, and it’s causally mentioned that all of the Jojos have gone through some nasty events, but none of them are openly talking about them. For Jolyne, this is compounded by the fact that she’s a child of divorced parents, and her family is scattered around the globe, so she doesn’t really know them, or know how any of them could remotely understand what she’s gone through. Jotaro tried to keep her out of the family business, for better or worse.

Ugh. You know you hit that moment where you’re finally considered grown up enough to actually hear all the dirty laundry about your family? I’m still sifting through bits and pieces. Probably a bunch of things I’ll never get the answers to. And definitely a few things I could have gone without knowing. But, such is life.

It’s what Jolyne needs to grow, as we see done so well in the sequel, where she visits various members of her family in turn to learn more about herself and them. I don’t know who my family is, she says — I feel disconnected and alone and frightened, and the thought of opening up to all these people is terrifying. But once she’s able to open up, to see that other people have been through the same thing, that everyone around her is struggling in their own way, she’s able to find herself, make herself better.

Which, again, back to Eight Day Week — this idea of depression and isolation going hand-in-hand with each other. Feeling like you’re alone. Like you’re a burden to other people. Like no one else understands your pain, and you can’t understand your own pain, and there’s no way to stop it.

Ah, you know, there as a line in another Jojo’s fic I rec’c’ed earlier, Teach Your Children, where Jonathan thinks about how archeology is comforting to him, to see that human customs have endured, to see that the people in the past weren’t really different from himself. There is an essential humanity, a human condition, that we can all share. That’s kind of what this fic is about. Finding that connection to other people. Sifting through all the things that seem foreign, and strange, and unwelcoming. Getting past that anxiety that says, I can’t understand, and I cannot be understood, to realize that, yes, you can. It’s quite uplifting.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this fic.

Um, I've rec’ced a lot of Jojo’s recently, so…hmm, character building, building a family and community… I did recently enjoy Blood Oath, where Giorno meets his family after coming down with a case of sudden, erm, vampirism.

(Looking for more fic recs?)
Crossposted to pillowfort

Fic rec - Fluency