Straizo Quotes

Straizo gets the thinnest villain psychology in the part, and it arrives with no scene to earn it. Straizo had a real story available. Fifty years earlier he was one of Tonpetty's students, a Hamon user who arrived with Dire just after Zeppeli died, and Zeppeli had gone to a death his teacher foretold without flinching. Straizo is the same school's opposite answer to the same fear, and the show tells us so only in this speech. Everything else between the two eras (the aging, the decision, the murder of Speedwagon's team in Mexico) is compressed into a few scenes of the previous episode. So "nothing I regret" lands as a stock line, the defiant death every second villain gets, rather than the endpoint of a fall. The one detail with teeth is the manner of his death: he kills himself with the Hamon he still carried, the discipline he betrayed. That image is better than the sentence spoken over it.

All episode, Joseph's weapon against Straizo is prediction. He finished Straizo's sentences before Straizo could, told him what he would say next, and was right every time. The last prediction belongs to Straizo, and it is the one Joseph cannot answer. Structurally the line is a hand-off. Straizo's usefulness as a villain ends here, but the story still needs Joseph to know that the Pillar Man in Mexico has been feeding on the blood Straizo spilled and is about to wake. So the dying man turns into a prophet, and the prophecy is rationed. "Him" gets quotation marks and no name, "evolution" is left for later episodes to explain, and Joseph's own reply is a plea for more that he does not get. It is a cheap device, and it works because it reverses the episode's joke. The boy who always knows the next line is finally told one he did not see coming, and it is about him.