Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“He is PURE EVIL, right down to his very bones! Is he a victim of circumstance, you're wondering? Not on your life! He's been evil since he drew his first breath!”
Robert E. O. Speedwagon Quotes
2 quotes from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
“She makes a better Florence Nightingale than I do, anyhow. You rest up, JoJo. Speedwagon withdraws coolly.”
Two episodes earlier this man kept blades in the brim of his bowler hat and told a subordinate to slice Jonathan open on Ogre Street. Now he has come to the hospital with a plan, announced in his own monologue, to give a man who has lost his father and his house a reason to live. He finds the job taken. A nurse has iced Jonathan's burns so many times that her hands are bruised, and she turns out to be Erina. The third-person exit is a joke about his vanity, and the vanity is the point: nobody else is going to narrate a cutthroat stepping aside gracefully, so he does it himself. What changed since episode 2 is not his manners, since he still talks like the docks. It is that Jonathan spared him, and Speedwagon has rebuilt his life around being useful to the man who did. Here useful means leaving. It is the first time in the series that loyalty takes the form of absence, and the self-narration sticks: by the first episode of Battle Tendency he is narrating outright, introducing Joseph as a young man with his grandfather's face who is far from a gentleman.
About Robert E. O. Speedwagon
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Speedwagon's case against Dio rests on two kinds of evidence, and the speech admits to only one. He claims he sorted Dio from a sniff, a skill learned in the gutter; what actually convicts Dio in this episode is the druggist Speedwagon brings along, the man who sold Dio the poison. The nose gets the rhetoric and the witness gets the verdict. The strongest objection to the line comes from inside the same episode. Minutes later George Joestar, dying from a knife meant for his son, blames himself: he went too easy on Dio, and Dio may have done it for want of a father's love. That is the victim-of-circumstance reading, voiced by the one man with the most right to reject it, and the show lets it stand unanswered. Speedwagon still has the better reading of this character. George's theory has to explain a boy who arrived in episode 1 already planning to take the Joestar fortune, and it cannot. But the structure concedes something the line will not: a father dying of his own generosity. Speedwagon can be certain because he never had to love Dio first.