Logical Weakness / JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

Tropes for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Tropes A to B (Adaptation Dye-Job) | Tropes C to D (Dub Name Change) | Tropes E to F (Evolving Credits | Famous Last Words) | Tropes G to K (Hate Sink | Heart Is An Awesome Power | Hoist By His Own Petard | Jerkass) | Tropes L to O (Logical Weakness | Nice Guy) | Tropes P to T (Shout-Out | Story-Breaker Power) | Tropes U to Z

Being a series where the heroes rely on both their strength and their wits, it is no surprise that they and their enemies have to deal with the inherent Logical Weaknesses of their abilities

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In General

• Hamon energy is a special wavelength generated in the human body via strict breath control and blood flow. Disrupting either of these disrupts the generation of Hamon; the methods of doing so have ranged from the mundane (choking, drowning, respiratory trauma) to the insane (freezing or even removing the opponent's blood). Exploited for all its worth when a Not Quite Dead Dio sneak-attacks Jonathan and shoots him through the neck with his Eye Beams, not only fatally wounding Jonathan but disrupting his breathing to the point he can barely unleash a Hamon blast strong enough to kill a single zombie when by this point he was the strongest Hamon user in the canon able to end much stronger vampires with the ease of killing an insect, forcing him to resort to a Heroic Sacrifice to stop Dio's plans temporarily.
  • Hamon behaves somewhat like electricity: it cannot be projected from its source without either direct contact or a medium to conduct itself and different materials conduct Hamon with varying levels of efficiency. So not only are Hamon users incapable of fighting at long range, but as shown when Joseph Joestar fought the newly vampiric Straizo, a prepared opponent can redirect or completely nullify a Hamon attack if they have the right materials on hand. Most materials can be overcome with a sufficiently powerful or concentrated attack, but the strength and skill needed to do so is something only the rarest talents in the art can reliably pull off.
• As a whole, Stands have one major weakness dependent on the user; they're your fighting instincts/passion personified. If a character has no ability to stand up for themselves or what they believe in, then they'll end up with Stands with low stats to match, and occasionally Stands that harm or even kill the user. A standout example is Masazo Kinoto of Part 4: he was shot by a Stand Arrow and was just determined enough to not die from it, but literally only just. He was too passive to actually control his power and ended up with Cheap Trick, a Stand that will kill him if anyone looks at his back (and then jump to the person who looked to repeat the cycle). To make matters worse, it's sentient, malicious, and capable of speech that normal people can hear... so it actively calls out to people so they can look at its current host so it can continue its killing spree.
• The Synchronization effect between Stand and user goes both ways: if a user's human body is badly damaged or in poor health, the potency of their Stand suffers as well. Jotaro Kujo displayed this in Stone Ocean: thanks to age catching up with him and not using his time-stopping powers for an entire decade, he's far less effective than he was in Stardust Crusaders, as Star Platinum went from the highest durability rank of A to the lowest rank of E because of Jotaro's body starting to fail him.
• "Automatic" Stands which follow pre-set directions instead of being controlled by their user are quite unwieldy and have openings that are easily exploited, like Melone's Babyface needing tons of prep time, and Kira's Sheer Heart Attack & Carne's Notorious B.I.G. being easily distracted by lures that have more of whatever quality they're seeking (heat for Sheer Heart Attack and speed for Notorious B.I.G. respectively). This independence also means they are unaffected by the usual 'the stronger the Stand, the shorter the range' rule and lack the Synchronization that normal Stands have with their wielders, so the user is completely unaffected by any damage the Stand suffers. But that also means that the user can't tell if their Stand has been triggered, destroyed, or misdirected. Users of these Stands tend to be extremely vulnerable to direct attacks, as they cannot command their Stands to defend them, outside of some very niche situations. For obvious reasons, most who employ these Stands go out of their way to avoid confronting enemies whenever possible. Worse, most users of automatic Stands are not exempt from their Stand's effects. If they aren't careful, they can fall victim to their own Stand's ability should they be careless or unfortunate enough to meet its targeting requirements.

Stardust Crusaders

• While Rubber Soul's Yellow Temperance makes him invincible as long as it wraps him, he has to occasionally unwrap it so he can take a breath, leaving him vulnerable to physical harm.
• Once it's discovered that the power of J. Geil's Hanged Man is to jump from one reflective surface to another as light, Polnareff and Kakyoin are able to exploit its weakness. Since Hanged Man moves at the speed of light in a straight line, all Polnareff has to do is know which reflective surface it will jump to next, then have Silver Chariot attack in that path to inflict damage. They ultimately defeat it by throwing a coin in the air - in front of a crowd of beggars, one of whom has Hanged Man in their eyes. Since all of them are following the coin, Hanged Man has no choice but to jump to it, regardless of whose cornea it's in.
• Death Thirteen's powers are as follows: 1: anyone who falls asleep near it is taken to a nightmare world. 2: anyone within that nightmare is unable to use their Stand, unless they summoned it before falling asleep. However, 3: anyone who wakes up from this nightmare before dying forgets about the Stand's existence, preventing them from preparing. And finally, 4: any injury sustained in the nightmare is also inflicted on the victim's real body. The fourth point turns out the be the Stand's weakness, since any injury, not just those inflicted by Death Thirteen itself, are transferred to the real world, so Kakyoin is able to send himself a warning by carving words into his arm with a knife. The Joestar group only manages to defeat it by Kakyoin being accidentally knocked unconscious with his Stand out.
• Telence T. D'Arby has a Stand named Atum that can steal souls to place in dolls if they lose a game to him, and can read an opponent's soul to truthfully get the answer to any yes-or-no question. However, this does have a few weaknesses. Firstly, D'Arby has to play whatever game he chooses according to the game's rules or else Atum's powers won't activate, so he can't cheat to win. Also, while the ability to always get a correct answer is perfect when D'Arby only has a few options to choose from, lateral thinking trips him up. Jotaro and Joseph use Loophole Abuse by having Joseph use his Stand to alter what pitch Jotaro is throwing in a baseball video game after it's thrown. When D'Arby uses Atum to see if Jotaro is keeping the same pitch after throwing it, Jotaro's soul keeps answering "yes" because he's not changing the pitch; Joseph is. While D'Arby can tell that Jotaro's outcomes are being changed, D'Arby can't figure out how they're being changed because he can't phrase the correct yes-or-no question to figure out what's going on. After Jotaro gets a two-run lead in the game, D'Arby becomes so despondent over not being able to figure out what Jotaro's up to that D'arby essentially gives up and resorts to begging for mercy.
• Vanilla Ice has a brutally powerful Stand, Cream, whose power is to disintegrate anything it touches. He climbs inside of it when it's used. Polnareff, however, realizes that when Ice is inside Cream, he can't see — to protect himself from Cream's power, he has to close its mouth, leaving him literally attacking blind. Polnareff has also worked out that Vanilla Ice is a vampire, something Ice himself hasn't realized, and so Polnareff tricks Ice into blowing several holes in the wall. That done, all it takes is Polnareff just pushing Vanilla Ice outside through these holes. The sun's still up during this fight, which means once he's outside, Vanilla Ice goes up in smoke.

Diamond is Unbreakable

• Antonio Trussardi's Pearl Jam can make food that cures any illness or injury, but Healing Magic Is the Hardest, and his Stand comes with a lot of caveats. First, basic rules of cooking still apply, so a messed-up dish simply won't work (although given that he is a professional chef, this is not too big of a weakness). Also, each dish only cures one ailment at a time, with rarer and more difficult-to-treat diseases requiring proportionately rare ingredients, so Tonio's Stand requires a lot of knowledge and preparation to work correctly. As shown when attempted on Okuyasu's father, conditions induced by Stand powers or other supernatural effects cannot be reversed by Pearl Jam as they do not technically qualify as physical ailments.
• Kishibe Rohan's Heaven's Door can turn parts of people's skin into books that contain details of their entire life up to that point, and anything written on those books will become truth. But there's one catch: the ability only activates when someone focuses on Rohan's latest drawing (though Rohan later figures out the definition of "drawing" is fairly flexible - scrawling a figure in the air with his finger while someone watches him is enough). Josuke saves Koichi and Okuyasu from him by just rushing in with his eyes closed, preventing Josuke from seeing a drawing. When Rohan insults Josuke's hair, Josuke opens his eyes, but he's Blinded by Rage to the point that even though Josuke technically sees Rohan's drawing, it didn't matter — Josuke is so intent on punching the crap out of Rohan for the hair insults that he isn't focused on the drawing.
• Akira's Red Hot Chili Pepper zigzags this trope, as it is made of electricity. At first, it seems that his weakness is insulating materials like rubber, but once it's revealed that Chilli Pepper can accumulate so much electricity in his body that no practical amount of rubber can stop him (enough current will just burn through rubber), that idea goes right out the window. It turns out, though, that large amounts of electrically conductive materials (like seawater) can leech away at the electricity in his body, causing him to dissolve.
• Yoshikage Kira's Killer Queen is an extremely deadly and versatile Stand that ends up with three separate techniques to make targets explode. Luckily for our heroes, said powers all have clearly defined parameters and vulnerabilities.
  • All of his bombs require a detonator, which is either the victim touching an object made into a bomb by Killer Queen or Kira miming pressing a detonator switch with his hand. If he is unable to make that motion or cause his victim to touch these affected objects, he cannot activate his bombs. The heroes barely manage to prevent Kira from using Bites the Dust on a random paramedic by having Koichi and Jotaro crush his hand, rendering him unable to hit the switch.
  • In turn, those bombs are fire-based and thus need oxygen to activate. Killer Queen can also only make one object into a bomb at a time. Stray Cat, a literal stray cat, renders Killer Queen powerless without even realizing it by using its air manipulation Stand to remove all of the oxygen from around a rock Kira made into a bomb... then gently kicking it back, causing it to explode far enough away that Stray Cat is unharmed by it. That it is such a hard counter to Killer Queen is why Kira decides he'll keep Stray Cat around, knowing that he'll have no chance of winning if his enemies find out about it and manage to sway the animal to their side.
  • His second bomb, Sheer Heart Attack, is a 'fire and forget' automatic power meant to kill any potential pursuers while Kira himself escapes. It works by having Killer Queen detach its left hand, which turns into an indestructible heat-seeking tank bomb. Its weak connection to Kira makes it Nigh-Invulnerable, but Kira can't control it other than activating and deactivating the power — and to do this, he has to retrieve the tank manually. So if you manage to figure out a way around the bomb (like setting a fire as a decoy), Kira won't know until he steps back into the situation. It also remains connected to Kira's left hand; when Koichi uses his Stand to make Sheer Heart Attack weigh fifty kilograms, not only can it not move, but Kira's hand also becomes that weight, yanking him to the floor and forcing him to struggle his way to the bomb's location.
  • His third bomb, "Bites the Dust", is an autonomous Stand power that traps its victim in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, and if anyone finds out about Kira's identity through the victim, they explode. The victim then restarts the day, though any victims will continue to explode in every iteration at the same time they first died. It's incredibly powerful, but it has three big weaknesses:
    • First, Bites the Dust requires that Kira attach Killer Queen to someone else to use it. This locks him out of his other powers for as long as Bites the Dust is active, so if he ever needs to use Killer Queen for himself (like in self-defense), he must end the loop immediately. This also cancels all effects of the loop that haven't occurred yet, so anyone who was set to explode after Bites the Dust was recalled would be completely safe. As a side-effect of this, Kira also cannot attach Bites the Dust to himself.
    • Second, it's also completely autonomous and Kira's only control over it is 'off' and 'on'. Because the loop revolves around the victim, Kira cannot gain any direct protection from it and could wind up exploding himself if he fell afoul of its rules. The victim is also the only person who retains memories of the previous iterations, so although Kira is aware of when Bites the Dust is active, he has to guess if it actually did anything every single loop.
    • Thirdly, the loop will work only if Hayato tells others about Kira's identity, or someone infers Kira's identity via him. Due to being its original owner, Bites The Dust won't activate (thus his anonymity will be in danger) if Kira is the one who divulges his own identity.
    • Hayato is able to exploit these three conditions to rid himself of the loop, firstly, by letting Kira gloat about his successful disguise when Josuke is in the area (called by Hayato to exploit this weakness) as he gets Josuke to attack Kira while it's active. Josuke would have shortly thereafter been killed by Bites the Dust, but since Kira didn't know that and thought he needed his Stand to protect himself, he cancels the power so he could use Killer Queen.
    • Another perk of Bites the Dust is that, once it's attached to a host, it will defend it against any threat. On one hand, it prevents the host from committing suicide; on the other hand, if Kira tries to harm the host without deactivating Bites the Dust, he risks being attacked and possibly killed by his own Stand.
• While not a Stand ability, Ghost Girl Alley has a special trap for anyone attempting to leave back to the land of the living: you'll feel the a threatening presence directly behind you, and if you turn around and look at it, hundreds of ghostly hands will drag you into the afterlife. This nearly happens to Koichi until Rohan discovers the trap's flaw: turning around only matters if you can see the spirits attacking you, otherwise they do nothing. Rohan saves Koichi by using Heaven's Door to temporarily make him blind.
• Josuke's Crazy Diamond seems to be a healing Stand, but its true ability is to revert objects to an earlier state. The distinction gives him several advantages, but also means that he cannot create new matter, just reassemble and restore a target's existing pieces. So while he could reattach someone's severed limb, if the limb is completely destroyed or otherwise prevented from reattaching to the main body, there's nothing he could do for them. It also means when Okuyasu's Stand The Hand destroys something with his right hand (which sends it to another dimension), Josuke can't repair it. Anything Killer Queen turns into a bomb is usually vaporized, destroying it thoroughly enough that it's beyond Crazy Diamond's powers.
  • On a more personal level, Crazy Diamond's power is a physical representation of Josuke's compassion and selflessness. While it says something about Josuke's noble nature, it unfortunately means that he can't use Crazy Diamond's power to restore his own wounds. He has to deal with injuries that he suffers the old fashioned way. His grandfather's fate shows Josuke that not even his powers can restore someone after death, which is a consistent rule in the JoJo universe — once someone dies, there's no Stand ability anywhere that can bring them back, no matter how powerful it is.

Golden Wind

• Giorno's Gold Experience can imbue inanimate objects with life energy, transforming them into living beings. While this does have a variety of uses, it also puts him at a disadvantage against opponents who can create an environment no living thing can survive in, like Ghiaccio with his Stand White Album (which leaves him only able to create short tundra grass), or opponents whose abilities specifically target organic matter, like Cioccolata's Green Day.
  • Giorno eventually learns to transform materials into replacement body parts to recover from nearly any injury. Unfortunately, this ability isn't technically a healing power, but an advanced application of his Biomanipulation power. Anyone Giorno "heals" has to endure the pain of him inserting the new parts and wait for them to finish integrating into their body over time.
• Mista's gunplay is brutally effective on paper, and the Sex Pistols make his shots even more accurate and lethal. The main catch is that he needs his revolver to pull any of his Stand abilities off, and he obviously needs bullets to fire. If he runs into a Stand that can ignore or negate his shots, he swiftly becomes outmatched. Since his powers are most effective with a revolver, losing his preferred gun makes his combat effectiveness suddenly tank.
  • Sex Pistols can redirect Mista's gunshots in unpredictable ways, but Mista's bullets aren't part of his Stand. While they're lethal to humans, they're still mundane objects incapable of damaging other Stands. The six Sex Pistols are far too small and weak to either fight themselves or defend Mista from other Stands. Mista's only strategy in battle is to target his opponent's human body directly as he has no method of contesting an enemy Stand itself. As Mista's gun of choice is a short-range revolver, other long-range Stand user's are his greatest weakness.
• Narancia's Aerosmith has a carbon dioxide radar that can track enemies through their breathing. However, there's two issues that it falls victim to. First, if the enemy is holding their breath, then the radar can't find them. Second, it makes no distinction between sources of CO2 beyond the amount each is producing. During his first battle in the series, Narancia accidentally started a fire the spread across the area. Surrounded by numerous flames, Naracia's radar is rendered all but useless: the flames around him all releasing different amounts of CO2 filled his screen with so many differently sized dots that it is impossible to determine which belongs to his human target.
• Sale's Kraft Work can remove the kinetic energy from objects to lock them in place and then have them build up kinetic energy until they shoot out with even more force than before. However, he has to touch the object and consciously use his power when he does so, meaning he's limited by the speed an object approaches him and his reaction time. Sale first uses the his power to survive getting shot in the head by locking the bullet in place when it made contact. Unfortunately for him, his reflexes aren't fast enough to prevent it from partially penetrating his skull in the meantime. As Mista points out, a sufficient amount of force would push the bullet in far enough to finish the job. Mista then proceeds to do just that.
• Double subverted in the fight with Ghiaccio. His Stand, White Album, encases him in a suit made of ice. Mista figures out that he needs to be able to breathe, and locates a hole on the back of Ghiaccio's neck... only for Ghiaccio to activate a secondary ability, White Album Gently Weeps, that lets him throw back any projectile. But Mista also realizes that Inertia Is a Harsh Mistress, lines Ghiaccio up with a broken lamp post, and empties his pistol at him. Ghiaccio throws the bullets back, but each throw propels him backwards due to Newton's Third Law, and ends up impaling his neck on the post.
• Secco's Oasis can give rock and soil the properties of liquid, allowing Secco to tunnel through the ground easily and trap people inside of it. However, it gives rock and soil all the properties of liquid, including the way sound moves through it faster than through the air. Bucciarati turns this to his advantage by tricking Secco into dragging down a car and causing the tires to burst, the sound of which blows out Secco's eardrums and renders him completely deaf.
• Diavolo's King Crimson and its partner stand, Epitaph is one of the strongest Stands out there, but they also come with some gaping weaknesses:
  • King Crimson's ability essentially removes Diavolo from causality for eleven seconds, rendering him invincible. But because he's as incapable of affecting the world as the world is as affecting him, he has to turn it off to actually attack; so if an enemy has fast enough reflexes, they can counter whatever Diavolo plans to do.
  • Additionally, time skipping still causes anything to happen that would have, meaning it's possible to use a recurring visual element to learn when time skipped by proxy. Polnareff uses drops of blood against his leg to prepare for this, managing to land a blow against Diavolo, while Giorno uses the same idea by cutting his finger open and letting the blood fall on his other hand.

Stone Ocean

• Pucci's White Snake can steal Stands as discs to give to others. However, as Stands are created to suit their original users, trying to insert them into someone else to use leads to several problems. First of all, some Stands are simply not compatible with other users and will immediately reject implantation. Second, there's no guarantee that any user of these Stand discs will be able to understand or control their powers even if they aren't immediately rejected. Third, some Stand abilities are so specific that they really only benefit their original holder. Fourth, Stands tend to be loyal to their users which does not transfer to anyone else. This can be as minor as a Stand known for protecting the user not bothering to defend the new one or as severe as violently rebelling if the match is particularly bad.
• Ungalo's Stand, Bohemian Rhapsody, forces its victims to live out the experiences of their favorite fictional characters as if they were that character, and if said character dies in the story, the victim will die too. Nothing, not even Stand powers, can avert the events of these stories. Ungalo can expand the range of victims to the entire world population besides himself, meaning if left unchecked, Ungalo would eventually kill all other humans in the world. He even isolates himself to an international flight to ensure his enemies have no chance of attacking or killing him to stop his Stand. However, he has no control over which stories his Stand manifests or what any of the characters brought to life do. More importantly, overlapping with Loophole Abuse, Bohemian Rhapsody isn't restricted to stories created before the Stand manifests. This allows Ungalo's enemies to come up with a perfect counter with enough time and a little ingenuity. If someone creates a story about a superhero who instantaneously rescues people trapped in other realities against their will, and returns them and whatever characters were brought to life to their home realities. Someone then says this superhero is their favorite character. This means that, sooner or later, Bohemian Rhapsody will generate this story, causing the Stand and everything it's done to instantly undo itself. Due to how effortless and powerful this is as a countermove, Ungalo surrenders out of despair. He never attempts use his Stand again, knowing that anything he tries with Bohemian Rhapsody will be undone with no way for him to stop it.
• Weather Report's sub-ability, Heavy Weather, creates rainbows that project subliminal messages, causing anyone who looks at them to perceive themselves as a snail and - eventually - actually turn into a snail. Naturally, the subliminal messages don't work if you can't actually see the rainbows, so you can bypass the ability's effects by being blind or avoiding looking at them for as long as possible. Pucci goes with the former option and uses Whitesnake to temporarily extract his own vision.
• Pucci's Made in Heaven in Part 6 is insanely overpowered since it can speed up time to the point where no one can keep up with it. However, any attacks that induce damage over time, such as poisoning, will have their effects sped up as well. This is how Emporio kills Pucci — he traps him in a small room and then uses Weather Report (obtained via a Stand Disc) to increase the amount of oxygen in the air. Both are affected by oxygen toxicity, but Pucci, being sped up, succumbs almost immediately while Emporio lives long enough to win the fight.
  • This doesn't apply to bleeding, due to a loophole. Anyone affected by Made in Heaven bleeds faster than normal, but their blood also clots faster than normal, so it's a moot point.
  • The anime showcases another weakness: Made in Heaven accelerates both Pucci and non-living objects equally. This also applies to projectiles like bullets or knives. Pucci's super-speed allows him to easily dodge your projectile if he sees that you're about to throw it; but once it's already flying, it will be accelerated, negating Pucci's speed advantage.

Steel Ball Run

• The Boom-Boom family's magnetic abilities are quite powerful, but they can be countered simply by attacking them with a non-ferromagnetic projectile such as a thrown rock or lead bullet, which will be unaffected by their magnetism. However, simply shooting a bullet at them won't work on its own since they can just destroy the gun before it's fired.

JoJolion

• Satoru Akefu, or rather, Toru-as-Satoru Akefu, has the Stand Wonder of U, which triggers whenever someone intends to pursue him and causes some improbable misfortune to hit them (i.e. a falling object aims itself at the victim and hits at over its terminal velocity). Though incredibly overpowered, it does have a few weaknesses.
  • Since it acts automatically on others' intent, it won't trigger if the target doesn't have the intent to pursue him, no matter where their location is relative to him. For example, it won't attack someone who is being taken to him by outside parties. And since Akefu works in a hospital, it's relatively easy to get into his vicinity by being injured and having paramedics take you to the hospital building. The paramedics aren't taking you to Akefu, they're taking you to get treatment for your injuries, and Akefu being in the area would be a coincidence to them. It also won't affect someone who is just crossing his path — when both Akefu and Rai are going to Josuke's location, Rai is entirely unaffected despite being right next to Akefu because he was pursuing Josuke, not Akefu. Finally, it can't affect someone who's standing still, since someone who isn't moving logically can't be "pursuing" anything.
  • His Stand's passive nature means that he has to invert Villains Act, Heroes React to get the most out of his Stand's power. If he ever goes out of his way to attack someone, he's depriving himself of its protection because acting in self-defense against his direct attacks doesn't count as pursuit.
  • There's nothing saying that anything displaced by Wonder of U can't be countered by an opposing force, like Mitsuba using her Stand to redirect things thrown at her.
  • It also has the rather annoying limitation that it doesn't prevent anyone from doing things he doesn't want them to unless he's directly involved, so it's entirely possible to put a serious spanner in his works just by ignoring him and attacking something he wants protected, so he'll have to come to you to stop you.
  • Wonder of U's ability has been explicitly described as the ability to manipulate the "flow" of things interacting with each other until a "Calamity" is produced. Therefore, something that "doesn't exist" (such as Josuke's "Go Beyond" bubbles) cannot be manipulated by the Stand and doesn't trigger its ability.
  • If someone does manage to get close enough, and the "Calamity" doesn't kill them instantly, there's nothing Akefu can do to prevent their next action. Kaato is hit by a "Calamity", but lives long enough to kill Tooru before dying herself.

The JOJOLands

• Jodio's November Rain can generate heavy droplets of water, but they're still water. If they hit a body of normal water, the droplets will mix with it and lose their supernatural properties. This means that Jodio cannot hit an underwater target.
• Usagi's Stand, the Matte Kudasai, can transform into anything someone else wants, which can include very complex objects like a working security camera that can play slightly-changed live footage. The problem is that Usagi's powers are very strictly limited by these Exact Words; it's something that someone else wants, which means Usagi can't get the Matte Kudasai to transform into anything he himself wants. To get his Stand's ability to work, Usagi has to rely on someone else by asking them what they want, or by telling them to ask for something specific, and only then will his Stand change into whatever they asked for.