“I will tell you what courage is, JoJo! Courage is to look your fear in the eye and know that it has no dominion over you!”
Will A. Zeppeli Quotes
2 quotes from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“It seems to me that in you, I have found both a best friend and a new family. JoJo... through you... I will live on forever... My son... JoJo...”
Zeppeli walked into this fight knowing how it ended. His own teacher, Tonpetty, had foretold that he would die in this place, and he went anyway, with a plan to free Jonathan rather than to survive. That changes what the last words are. A man ambushed by death reaches for comfort. A man who walked into a foretold death has had time to choose his words, and Zeppeli chooses to adopt someone. The claim is large for a friendship measured in days. Dire arrives later that night saying Zeppeli was his dear friend for over two decades, and the old friend does not get the deathbed. The stranger does. Zeppeli's reason is the Hamon itself, poured into Jonathan in the same scene, so that living on is not a metaphor but a transfer he can feel happening. The irony the series builds on it is that the line comes true twice over. Jonathan carries the technique to Dio, and fifty years later a Zeppeli grandson and a Joestar grandson are training in Hamon side by side.
About Will A. Zeppeli
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Lifted out of the tunnel, this reads as a philosophy of courage. In context it is a breathing instruction, and the rest of the speech says so: fear scatters the breath, breath is the sword at the hip, breathe with courage and the Hamon follows. That ought to make it smaller, a pep talk in the service of a technique. But the episode runs the dependency both ways. Within minutes of meeting Jonathan, Zeppeli told him that courage alone will not defeat the stone mask; here he tells him the breathing will not come without it. The technique needs something the technique cannot supply. The setup is the flea. Zeppeli asks whether a flea biting a giant is brave and answers no, it is hungry. That quietly corrects the series' first definition. In episode 1 Jonathan decided a gentleman joins a fight he has no chance of winning. By Zeppeli's test, charging in proves nothing; plenty of things charge. Jonathan's boyhood creed was about entering the fight. His teacher's is about staying functional inside it, and the second is the harder standard.