Term · JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Stand
Your soul, standing beside you, with a name borrowed from a rock band and one very specific rule.
In Otakana the clue reads: A fighting spirit made visible
- Type
- Term
- Series
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
A Stand is a fighting spirit that only other Stand users can see. It usually appears as a humanoid figure at the user's shoulder, it takes damage the user feels, and it obeys exactly one power, defined narrowly. Star Platinum punches fast. Crazy Diamond repairs. Gold Experience makes things alive. The narrowness is the point, because every fight in JoJo becomes a puzzle about what the rules do and do not cover.
Araki introduced them in 1989 for Part 3 and never went back. Before that, heroes beat vampires by breathing correctly, which limited the enemies he could invent. Stands removed the limit. Later parts produced Stands that erase time, control gravity, print bombs from photographs and force everyone in a town to obey a written note, and each one arrives with a rulebook the reader has to work out mid-battle.
Most are named after music. Killer Queen, Highway Star, Echoes, Sticky Fingers, Purple Haze and Moody Blues are all records, and the tarot names of Part 3 gave way to that habit quickly. Being a Stand user tends to attract other Stand users, which is the closest the series comes to explaining why a small Japanese town has dozens.
Spelling STAND
STAND is an ordinary English word and there is no romanisation trap in it, so the difficulty is the shape rather than the sound. Five letters, a single vowel in the middle, and two consonant clusters bracketing it, ST at the front and ND at the back. Guesses that lead with common vowels waste turns here. The Japanese is simply スタンド, sutando, borrowed straight from English.