JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 8: Why JoJolion Never Caught On, According to Japan

A YouTube video simply titled "why is JoJolion unpopular" turned into a long-running debate among Japanese JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fans about what actually went wrong with Part 8. The comment section drew 332 replies, and the top comment -- with 525 likes -- points to something as simple as the story's sheer length.

From there, commenters build out a longer list: the switch to monthly serialization that slowed the pacing, mysteries (a staircase symbol, a mysterious man, a baby made of gems) that commenters say were never resolved, and villains that, unlike earlier parts, don't clash with the hero over a competing philosophy. Several blame a thinner supporting cast -- no equivalent to fan favorites like Okuyasu, Koichi, or Rohan. Not everyone piles on, though: other commenters jump in to say they love the part anyway, including one who got hooked after only two volumes.

The thread ends about where you'd expect for a part about an unsolved curse -- not with a resolution, but with fans still arguing it out in the very last comment.

A Japanese YouTube channel that explains JoJo's Bizarre Adventure posted a video with a blunt title: "Why is JoJolion unpopular?" The question clearly struck a nerve -- the comment section pulled in 332 replies, most of them Japanese fans working through their own theories about what went wrong with Part 8, the long-running manga that follows Josuke Higashikata's amnesiac arrival in the earthquake-shaken town of Morioh. It's a part that's never short of readers willing to argue about it, and this video turned into exactly that kind of argument, one theory stacking on top of the next.

That top comment, with 525 likes, keeps it simple: JoJolion just runs too long. It's one of the longer-running parts in the franchise, and several replies pile on with a specific cause for why it feels that way rather than just long in the abstract.

Length and pacing lead straight into the second big complaint: mysteries that keep piling up without getting answered. This is a frequent gripe about JoJolion specifically, since the part is built around Josuke trying to figure out who he even is, and readers expect that kind of amnesia-driven mystery to pay off eventually.

Unsolved mysteries lead into the most-liked theory in the whole thread: that the villains themselves are the real problem. It's a sharper version of the same complaint -- not just that answers are missing, but that the people standing in the hero's way haven't given readers much of a reason to care about the fight in the first place.

The weak-villain complaint spreads to the supporting cast as a whole -- another recurring line in the thread is that Part 8 doesn't have characters as memorable as earlier parts did, and several commenters name the exact side characters they think JoJolion was missing.

Not everyone's verdict is negative straight through, though. A few commenters push back against the idea that the whole part drags, pointing to a specific turning point partway through where they say the story actually picks up and starts delivering on its setup.

And a handful of fans push back on the premise of the video entirely, saying they like JoJolion just fine regardless of how far along they are in it.

No one in the thread actually resolves the argument -- fitting, maybe, for a part that commenters keep describing as full of mysteries that never get resolved -- but the very last reply sums up the split about as well as anything else in the 332 comments.

That's the shape the whole debate ends up taking: a long list of specific, concrete complaints -- the length, the slower monthly pace, the mysteries left hanging, the thin villains, the missing breakout side character -- stacked right up against commenters who read the exact same part and came away loving it anyway. Nobody in the comments actually changes anyone else's mind, and 332 replies in, nobody seems to expect that they will. It just keeps being the part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure that Japanese fans can't stop arguing about.