“Hey, it’s ya boiiiiii. Thanks for the 200 bits, cancerfart420. Holy shit, these queue times are seriously pepega. I just wanna frag out, man. Okay, my team’s here. PogU. Ready to get carried, boys? Here we go.

“Oh my God. That guy was trash. Trash. Terrible. Complete dogshit. The only reason he killed me was because I missed my shots and he hit his shots. Literally, that’s the only reason he beat me. If I hit my shots and he missed his, he’d be dead. That’s how trash he is.

“Holy shit, that gun keeps melting me. Nerf that shit already. I asked a dev about adding some extra bloom to the recoil pattern, and he said they’d consider it. That’s right. I talk to game devs on Twitter. No kappa. You won’t hear me mention it, though, I keep that fact on the down-low.

“This kid’s aim is feelsweirdman. I don’t want to be that guy, but could he be…hacking? Okay. That does it. I’m spectating this little shit. Oh, look, he has “TTV” in his name. I’m not telling you to go to his Twitch stream and bully him. I’d get banned if I did that. All I’ll do is insinuate that he’s hacking and then loudly read his Twitch handle to my viewers.

“Goddamn, I’m actually whiffing everything. Okay, I’m changing my mouse sens again. Please watch me for 5 minutes while I do this. This is now a tech support stream. Wait, why does my mouse have “CPI”? Is that the same thing as “DPI”? Can someone tell me? Also, why aren’t my stream alerts working? I need my chat to diagnose and fix everything wrong in my entire life.

“This is gonna be a huge nade. Huge. Kobe. Do you know that ‘kobe’ means a grenade thrown with accuracy and precision while ‘yeet’ means a grenade thrown with raw power ? I’m sure this is the first streamer you’ve ever seen explain this. Glad to help educate y’all.

“Okay, I see some little kids causing trouble in chat. Where are my mods? For the last time, I’m not a racist. All I did was call a black teammate a monkey and tell him to get back to Africa. How’s that racist? Technically we’re ALL monkeys and we ALL come from Africa. Try reading a book sometime, 4head. Anyway, that incident happened fifteen whole days ago, and I apologised for it. Yes, you heard me. Even though I did nothing wrong and was 100% in the right, I still apologized. That’s the kind of guy I am.

“Just drop it. I’m not here for drama. I just come on here to chill with you guys and to spread positive vibes. Yo, thanks for the 500 bits. My boy cancerfart420 going crazy today.”

“Fan theories” have become increasingly popular in recent years (now you know what they are). Like the related phenomenon of “creepypastas”, they’re exciting at first but soon fall into repetitive cliches: bad guy is secretly good, good guy is secretly bad, dumb guy is secretly a genius, up is secretly down, main character is secretly dying of cancer and hallucinating. There’s 10-15 basic fan theories and soon you’ll have seen them all.

However, the best fan theories are compelling enough to make people forget that they’re theories, and start talking about them as if they’re accepted canon.

In Star Wars, the Imperial stormtroopers miss a lot. They do more missing than Graham Lineham addressing a transgender man. Their accuracy has become such a joke that it’s given rise to terminology such as the Stormtrooper effect.

In 2015, a theory was proposed that stormtroopers are being ordered to miss, in order to keep Luke alive and fulfill Vader’s plans. It was posted on the Fan Theories subreddit, and the author never pretends it’s anything more than fanciful speculation. The theory quickly spread across the internet, however, and soon nobody was treating it as a theory. Soon, it became a generic “checkmate, atheists” rebuttal to the most casual mention of Stormtrooper accuracy. For example, this meme on imgur (with no less than THREE lines of text explaining the joke, holy shit dude) has the top-voted comment :

haven’t we established that the stormtroopers miss on purpose?

…No. We have not. There is zero textual evidence that they miss on purpose. There’s a theory that they do, and in light of the facts, the theory’s probably wrong.

1) Why fire guns at all if they want the heroes to live?

As any marksman is taught, you never, ever point a gun at something you don’t want to kill. It doesn’t matter if you try to miss. What if a stormtrooper kills Luke with a stray shot? Blast rifle bolts have an area effect (as seen in the Docking Bay 94 scene, where blasts take out large sections of concrete), so even a “miss” might kill Luke with shrapnel.

2) They miss when there’s no reason to.

We see Stormtroopers miss R2D2 and C3PO on the Tantive IV, miss Han Solo when he’s leaving Mos Eisley, miss Ewoks, etc.

3) It’s not true that they want everyone on the Millenium Falcon to escape.

Luke Skywalker needs to live because he’s capital-I Important. Leia needs to live because she knows the location of the Rebel base. They could have plausibly wanted Han Solo alive, as he was the pilot of the ship.

…But why miss when shooting at Chewbacca, a wookie of no tactical value?

4) there aren’t many positive examples of Stormtroopers hitting shots.

Here we see Stormtroopers storm the Tantive IV, and accomplish the feat of killing several guys in a narrow hallway with no cover. It looks like hard work.

Here’s the scene of the execution of the Jedi. Stormtroopers shoot them at point blank range. Not an amazing feat of marksmanship.

4) “These blast points… too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.”

Ben Skywalker’s quote re: a wrecked sandcrawler doesn’t necessarily imply that stormtroopers are good shots. He could mean “they knew where to aim, as opposed to Sand People who just blast away indiscriminately”. This is the risk of using dialog as evidence.

When consuming art, it’s possible to see things that aren’t there. Sometimes these mirages persist, are spread across time and culture, and the imaginary thing becomes part of the “official” tale. Nowhere in the nursery tale of Humpty Dumpty does it say that he’s an egg.

“Stormtroopers miss on purpose” was created as an imaginative “what if” theory. However, it now seems to be accepted as the gospel truth of what’s happening in Star Wars. Much of history is probably composed in a similar way.

Some people become JoJo fans naturally; I was forcibly converted. I was part of a movie-watching group and whenever we ran out of material our host would inflict JoJo marathons on us. I still recall his mounting panic when we didn’t share his enthusiasm (“…this gets really good around Stardust Crusaders, I promise!”)

It took me a long time to like JoJo, and even now I’m not a superfan. But I “get” what it’s about. Not in the sense of plot (a cursed mask, sibling rivalry, an ancient blood debt), but what it’s really about: the glory of the West. Or, less politely, weebishness in reverse.

Traditionally, weebs are white kids who are fascinated by Japan (or the Japan they see in anime) and assign various romantic ideals upon it. The stereotypical weeb is overweight, undersocialized, a disappointment to his parents, and a failure with women – he holds no love for the place of his birth. Japan represents a kind of Avalon to him, an isle across the waters where nerds and misfits are accepted.

Hirohiko Araki is an anti-weeb: a Japanese person who’s in love with Western culture. I guess the bamboo is always greener on the other side. Japanese authors are often attracted to a certain element of Western culture (Edogawa Rampo loved the Gothic movement, Yukio Mishima loved fascism, Haruki Murakami loves bohemians) but Hirohiko Araki’s tastes are exceptionally omnivorous. He loves everything about us.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is about rockstars, pirates, highwaymen, knights, athletes, gangsters, gamblers, and rakes. Everyone’s an archetype of masculinity, cool beyond cool, a muscular, flamboyant ubermensch. JoJo takes Western machismo and exaggerates it to cartoonish, absurd levels.

It’s pretty gay at times. I don’t know whether JoJo’s homoeroticism was intended, but it’s striking that the manga has one female character, and she’s passive and pathetic, serving as a prize for the strutting male peacocks to fight over.

The love weebs have for Japan is often an intellectually shallow one, and they tend to get stuff wrong. Hirohiko Araki gets details about western culture wrong, too. For example, the villainous Dio resurrects a pair of medieval warriors, Brufold and Tarkus, to help kill Jonathan Joestar. We’re told that they’re knights who served Mary, Queen of Scots…but neither of them look like knights. Tarkus (left) is armored like a Roman Centurion. Brufold (wearing a horned helmet) is clearly modelled after a Viking warrior. These are not knights.

Or consider the family name, “Joestar”, which sounds jarringly wrong to the Western ear – people don’t have surnames like that. It reminds me of the infamous Fighting Baseball player roster, where a Japanese game programmer had to invent a bunch of American-sounding names and came up with “Sleve McDichael” and “Bobson Dugnutt”.

But realism isn’t important in JoJo. Perhaps hyperrealism is, though: everything given a little push over the cliff (in the words of Nigel Tufnel). JoJo is the world of could-have-been truths that are exaggerated to compensate for the fact that they never existed.

Obviously a name like Dio Brando gives the game away – a stilted amalgamation of a heavy metal rockstar and a Hollywood actor. As is the character of Zeppeli, who is visually modelled upon Salvadore Dali. JoJo often surprises the reader with its degree of literacy and wit.

I enjoyed the start of Phantom Blood more than the end. The way Dio Brando whiplashes from gentlemanliness to psychotic brutality is hilarious and shocking, and puts the reader squarely in Jonathan’s corner. And the “down-to-earth” nature of the tale was pleasant: something gets lost when the hero is battling a sentient hairstyle.

The final few volumes sort of blur together. Jonathan faces a threat, learns a new power or ability to overcome it, faces an even bigger threat, learns a new power or ability, and so on. It’s like a treadmill that speeds up all the time – soon you’re tired and want to get off. It was probably more enjoyable in its original run, where the repetition is less obvious. Probably better as an anime, too, where colours and music help establish JoJo’s mojo.  I’m curious to see where the Joestar family goes next: hopefully a Jonathan Joestar vs Sleve McDichael crossover.