The Delicate Matter of Pucci's Skin

every once in a while a series causes a discussion that goes beyond the realm of punchy japanese saturday morning cartoons and enters into the web of implications regarding very serious social and cultural matters this is perfectly normal and natural all fiction is the result of society and culture so it's reasonable that aspects of them would reflect and discuss back at their origins jojo's bizarre adventure is no exception to this having one specific character routinely cause such discourse that character is part six's main villain enrico pucci and that discourse is the one relating to his skin color and by extension his race since jojo has no canon colors as by araki's own statement colors are rarely much of a discussion but because pucci has been consistently drawn to have dark skin by both the colored manga and many additional works related to the series while also having in features in more light-skinned designs in various other occasions his situation has sparked a passionate and often toxic debate regarding author intention representation and in regards to the eventual anime adaptation the dangers of whitewashing so i thought as a very jojo centric channel i should maybe talk about it for 10 or so minutes now this discourse might seem somewhat specific in scope but it is founded on very real very serious matters regarding social justice media representation and racial empowerment so i will be treating this with the respect and professionality i feel it deserves i would please ask all of you down in the comments to do the same before we get started however you might be wondering what the big deal is why do people care if he's black or not what's the point of media representation for minority groups if you are like me a light-skinned man you need to understand we are surrounded by society whose media is almost entirely reflective of us a vast vast majority of movies series games and general pop culture are filled with people that look talk and feel like us to us the idea of representation might seem initially weird precisely because we are so over represented in media to a point where we take it for granted but for example when i play a video game with a female lead character i often find myself having a harder time to truly connect to the character not because i dislike women in media or something but simply because the very apparent physical and contextual differences create an additional barrier this lady has lived a very different life from mine in a very different body and social situation than mine and while basic empathy will still allow me to feel and cheer for this character the gap created by the inherent differences between us prevents me from getting as much out of this character than maybe my sister or my girlfriend could it's the foundational principle of relatability and i'm sure you can think of a few times where you felt something similar now imagine that feeling being pretty much to default when experiencing any form of media imagine that wherever you look you see characters and faces whose differences make them and their specific journeys somewhat distant to you with almost no alternatives that really get you most cases where you would find yourself in a fictional characters are sideline caricatures with little substance beyond stereotypes and generalizations you would find that the default situation of fiction for you would be that most of it doesn't really understand or cater to you which would suck would you not then be incredibly happy to find rare examples of characters that align more closely to you and that you could truly connect with this is the reality many people of color and other marginalized groups like for example the lgbtq community find themselves in as white straight maleness is overly abundant in pop culture those who don't belong to this group are inevitably neglected fiction is or should be fundamentally for everyone but by having people be underrepresented we create an inherent barrier of enjoyment and inspiration leaving people of color and other marginalized groups with only few works that truly include understand and inspire them it's also important to understand that representation and pop culture presence can be empowering again to us it might seem odd but you need to remember that due to our over representation we tendentially don't need empowerment and don't look for it but to those that have historically been oppressed marginalized pushed out of sight and had their struggles identities and very existences erased and devalued to them seeing themselves be represented on screen in game or on the page is a sign of progress affirmation and empowerment pop culture is always a reflection and a result of the social sphere it exists in and as we strive to become a more global inclusive society our movies and stories should ideally reflect that additionally it is not just about these groups finding themselves in fictional characters but also having the representation of these groups be seen by others inclusion allows previously marginalized groups to be seen to become visible and concrete parts of this culture which solidifies their place as equals and communicates to everyone that they are welcome and accepted whether or not a portrayal depicts a specific struggles and situation that group experiences or if it's just a cool compelling and interesting character that happens to be black gay or so on these instances are important and valuable it brings in perspective it brings in color and it makes it just a more complete picture of who we are now by including black gay asian lesbian hispanic trans and all other sorts of people in our fiction we continue to state and reiterate that these are parts of our society we protect support and value as the equal human beings they are conversely if we insist on all white all-male castes we perhaps inadvertently at times perpetuate the idea that the more marginalized groups i mentioned earlier are only marginal and secondary an idea we must at all costs move away from so under this lens media representation matters because it is the very vehicle through which we solidify and reiterate the social equality we aspire towards it is not about giving these groups preferential treatment but about giving them equal treatment that presents and empowers them as consistent parts of our lives societies and fictions social rights movements protests reforms and legal acts were the ways by which these groups bravely fought and pushed to initially get the rights they deserve cultural representation inclusivity and diversity in fiction are the ways by which we now solidify these rights and ideals and communicate unmistakably that they are here to stay with that out of the way and with all of us on the same page as to why this matters let's discuss poochie as stated earlier pucci has had his skin color depicted in many different ways throughout his existence from white to tan to black with the latter being his most famous and popular appearance jojo infamously has no canon color scheme so all of these should be equally valid as potential looks for poochie it's important to remember that the colored manga is not made by araki but by shueisha and has in the past made its own decisions on color so it can't be considered the most canon we can't even really give colorings by iraqi himself the priority because if we do that kira is a redhead and bruno wears lime green colorings that i think you'll agree aren't really congrats with those characters wildly accepted appearances anymore so can we just end the video right there pucci is whatever race you want him to be i mean we could that's a valid takeaway but that would mean not considering the biggest point of this discussion namely the hints within the story of stone ocean that regard his race and heritage we are told poochie's family is descendant from italy with parents that seem visibly more light-skinned than their son even in the colorless originally published manga additionally pucci was born as one half of a pair of twins with his fraternal twin brother domenico being separated from it at birth we later meet dominico under the name weather who also boasts the same difference in skin tone from a supposed twin brother these circumstances have led people to speculate that pucci's race resembles more closely the darker skinned olive tones of southern italy rather than of an african black skin tone however it is important to note that african black skin has been part of the italian gene pool for quite some time due to of course the age of colonialism and italy having had offshore empires in eritrea ethiopia and somalia the genes that govern human skin color are complex and not even properly understood yet but suffice to say that dark-skinned individuals being naturally born into light-skinned families even as part of twins is a known occurrence so it is still possible for pucci's heritage to be of black race with him simply being the only visibly black member however there is of course one more instance within the story that addresses this situation and frankly just complicates it quite a bit when his sister perla who is also light-skinned starts stating whether poochie decides he must make them break up as he realizes the identity of his brother in order to do that he personally hires a private investigator to make them break up in a manner that will cause parallel the least amount of pain however as it turns out the private investigator is the leader of the local kkk group since they don't know that weather is adopted they look into his foster family as if it were his real one and upon learning at whether supposed father is black come together to lynch and kill weather for being an interracial impurity according to them so to summarize a kkk member accepts a job by a visibly dark-skinned man with no issues not even a verbal bit of aggression but then ignores his job in a fit of rage to violently kill a light-skinned man because his father was black do you see the issue here i for one have a hard time believing that the kkk a disgusting volatile hate group would willingly cooperate with a black man but then lose their in a violent pogrom when a white man has a blank relative it just seems weird and is probably the biggest potential hint that poochie might not be black however he is still visibly much darker than the investigator and everyone around him even in the colorless manga the closest we have to araki's unfiltered original vision again i have a hard time believing that an aggressive kkk member would just not care at all about taking a job from someone who is clearly not white so him being as calm and cooperative as he is leads me to believe that there might have been some other circumstance influencing his behavior which would make him cooperate regardless of poochy's skin color perhaps he is rendered more cooperative by the fact that pucci is a priest a man of god and a pertaining to the church the kkk originally opposed the idea of catholicism heavily but have since become quite tied to religious fundamentalism so this investigator choosing to cooperate because he speaks to a man of god might be a valid explanation or if you want to leave the diagesis or the fictional in universe and instead investigate on an authorial level it is also possible that araki wasn't completely aware of what the kkk exactly is if you misunderstand their ideology as just being against interracial mixing and not you know minority killing psychopathy then the behavior of that investigator makes more sense as he isn't against the existence of non-whites per se but about those that mix the races again this is not what the kkk is about they are dangerous and disgusting and i'm not a fan of attributing misunderstandings upon an author but the fact remains that if you do misunderstand this organization in this specific way the scene does end up making more sense than it did before but again if we can only make sense of the scene by assuming the author did an oopsy it's just cements that this scene is confusing and odd and most of what we can extract here just ends up complicating it further without much of a verdict in the end speaking of verdict what's this video's verdict what is pucci's race i i don't know but i think it would be cool if he was black the story and context of him only give incredibly vague and non-distinct hints to this many of which seem to clash with the undeniable fact that he is depicted as visibly darker than all the other characters the most telling scene for this is also the most confusing scene so it just ends up being left mostly to interpretation personally i think that what is gained by pucci being black is more valuable than what would be lost the story remains unaffected and the only scene that slightly changes is so small and so weird regardless that i think it's not a big deal meanwhile him being black colors up the cast of an already very diverse part and cements poochie as one of the earlier and more prominent black characters in shonen which i think is super cool obviously i still believe it is ultimately up to interpretation but i don't think anyone who sees him as black is misunderstanding the series same as i don't believe that anyone who just sees him as tan olive or even hispanic is being anti-black or racist as long as we can understand that his race is ambiguous and that that allows for multiple equally valid visions of the character we can respectfully observe i think we're good araki didn't make his skin color a big deal so i don't think that by imparting our own interpretations on pucci's skin color we are distorting his artistic intent or whatever and if people can find empowerment and inspiration representation and a feeling of inclusivity through this character and his position then that is an unambiguously good thing there is no harm done in believing he's black and it doesn't make anyone a lesser fan just because small details in the story complicate the situation believe what you want and be respectful and aware of why this might be important to people of color now we should also of course address the original question that started this whole discourse if davidpro the anime studio adapts stone ocean and chooses to have poochie be white or light skinned would that be a case of whitewashing i am not sure but i wouldn't say so like for something to be a problematic case of white washing there would have to be a canonically confirmed non-white character gets turned white but because pucci's race is completely ambiguous with our aki to this day coloring him differently it's just not a very clear case considering that araki has recently depicted pucci as more tan than straight up black if the anime follows that example can we really talk about whitewashing on the other hand i definitely think that if poochie were made white or just tanned it would be a huge shame and a missed opportunity regardless of color canonicity thanks to the colored manga pucci has become synonymous with the gay black priest and has become an icon of representation within shonen and he will remain such for as long as the colored scans exist however whether we like it or not it is undeniable that the anime's color palette often ends up becoming the de facto look many of these characters become known by in the larger fandom so david pro erasing pucci's iconic black look in the anime would maybe not necessarily be problematic on a technical sense but it would definitely be a huge shame and leave a really bitter taste in my mouth however the chances of that happening are actually pretty slim in my opinion as a similarly dark-skinned tiziano had his skin color represented very nicely so i am expecting anime poochie to be around that ballpark thank you so much for watching i hope you can walk away from this video informed and maybe even entertained huge shout out to my friends help me write the script and broadland their perspectives ninja caleb sanyatara kami their info is in the description highly recommend checking them out and of course if you want to support me you can do so by subscribing ring the bell or even becoming a patron which puts your name at the end of my videos and gives you access to our special discord server black lives matter trans rights are human rights take care be safe bye bye you

Channel: Oceaniz

Views: 47,503

Rating: 4.6064277 out of 5

Keywords: Pucci, Jojo, Stone Ocean, Skin, Race, Black, Priest, Dio, Jolyne, Oceaniz

Id: KnFEHcr5ffw

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020