Erina Joestar Quotes

An epitaph that is also a production note. Erina survived the ship in Dio's own coffin, with an orphaned baby, after Jonathan died holding Dio's head as the ship exploded; and the first thing she says about her husband is that nobody will know. That is the premise, not only a lament: the war against Dio was fought in tunnels, graveyards and a burning house, with no witnesses but the people fighting it. The consequence is the shape of everything that follows. Her next sentences say his descendants will know, and point to the child she is carrying as the first to hear. From that point the series commits to telling its history the only way this line allows, through a family and a few private institutions that keep the secret. Speedwagon's fortune will fund one of them. The phrase "undeserved oblivion" is the one piece of self-pity she allows, and the show spends the next hundred years answering it. The ordinary world never finds out. The bloodline always does.

On the page this is a worried grandmother talking, and the episode around it says otherwise. Earlier the same episode, a racist mobster insults Smokey in a restaurant and she does not tell Joseph to stop. She tells him to mind the other guests and teach the man a lesson. This is not a woman who wants her grandson kept out of fights. It is a woman who has already sorted fights into kinds. The half century is exact. She was on the ship when Jonathan died holding what was left of Dio, and she and Speedwagon are among the few people alive who saw what Joseph is being pulled toward. What she refuses is not violence but inheritance, the idea that Jonathan's enemy gets to claim a second Joestar. Joseph answers that if this is his fate he will accept it fully, which is exactly the idea she was trying to keep away from him.