Sometime ago I came up with Iosif Ionescu, who’s the Romanian counterpart to Joseph Joestar. His wife is a veterinarian named Irina, his son is a paralegic archer named Ioan and and his daughter is an ecologist named Ionela, all referencing the likes of Erina Pendleton, Johnny Joestar and Jolene Joestar. Iosif Ionesco is a Romanian biologist who encountered stray dogs resembling Danny and Iggy respectively, except that Danny is the father of Iggy and both of them are stray dogs hanging out in the Romanian wilds eating wisent together with some provisions from people. Ilmar Tuglas, who is based on Kakyoin Noriaki, is a good friend of his who met each other online talking about what life was like under communism. Joseph Joestar was first seen in the Battle Tendency storyline, before resurfacing as an old man in the subsequent ones (Stardust Crusaders and Diamond is Unbreakable). Kakyoin mostly shows up in Stardust Crusaders.
Ilmar comes from a family of fur farmers and socialists alike, even when he and his father (a Lutheran priest in the Ahja parish) sometimes work in animal care themselves despite Ilmar being a financial adviser for most of the part. If Iosif Ionescu is Joseph Joestar who works as a biologist studying Danny and Iggy in the wild hunting wisent and wild rodents in the Romanian steppes and forests, then Ilmar Tuglas is Kakyoin Noriaki who’s shown to look after the cats Tama and Dolce somewhere in Estonia where he owns an animal shelter (a former fur farm itself) with his father, even though he usually works as a financial adviser to Kira Yoshikage (Graham Knightley). Both Romania and Estonia used to be communist countries and moreso when Araki Hirohiko was a young, budding cartoonist, so there was a Cold War between the Soviet Union (which Romania was affiliated with and Estonia was a part of) and America.
America’s allies include South Korea (which was created to contain the spread of socialism to the rest of the Korean peninsula), Japan (where Araki comes from), United Kingdom (the namesakes of characters like Wham and Pet Shop Boy come from this country alone), West Germany (where Kraftwerk’s from), France (where Jean-Pierre Polnareff’s namesake, Michel Polnareff, comes from) and Italy (most of the Golden Wind characters reside there). There is a new Cold War but between China and America this time, also this is a cold war where America’s clearly in decline. So it would be befitting to aim a game like this with the accompanying characters (including the afformented Jojo analogues Ilmar Tuglas and Iosif Ionescu) at a more global (read non-American) audience, with America becoming increasingly irrelevant to the wider world. Maybe not necessarily entirely irrelevant, but nowhere as powerful as it was before.
There are prophecies of not only China getting more powerful, but also Russia resuming its superpower status that if these two were to defeat the United States together (which some say is Mystery Babylon, the end times country said to corrupt the entire planet), then this would further hasten America’s decline. It may not happen yet at this point, but it’s clear that America really is in decline and may not recover from a forthcoming economic crash at all this time. So it becomes even more crucial for this potential franchise to actually pander to more powerful markets in the future, with America declining at present, that America will no longer be a benchmark for how successful a media franchise would be overseas. Although there are ACG franchises that perform better in other, non-American markets before like Saint Seiya in Latin America for instance, with America in decline that it’ll no longer be the gold standard for international success these days.
It’s even telling that American studios aim their films at Chinese audiences, which goes to show you how powerful China has become. If this trend continues for other countries to begrudgingly follow, then it makes more sense to aim such a potential franchise like this at Chinese and generally nonwestern audiences more. Even if it comes at the expense of things like LGBT couples and the like, considering that China, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya are rather censorious of what they allow. Which means the countries that are okay with LGBT matters and the like are increasingly in the minority and are much likelier to be allied with the US, complete with both declining birth rates and mature gaming markets as well. So this gaming franchise will not have LGBT characters because these do not appeal to more conservative markets like Nigeria and Ghana.
Additionally it seems stray dogs and the ecological problems they pose appear to show up less often in ACG media than they would in both journalism and academia, even if this is something of terra incognita for both gaming and comics in a way. With gaming, you can find a way to not just observe stray dogs attack wildlife but also find ways to not only stop them from doing this, but also prevent this from happening in the first place. With comics you can depict how and why dog predation occurs and what problems they pose to both people and the environment, considering that Iosif Ionescu is a scientist who studies stray dogs attacking wildlife a lot. Even Japanese journalism takes time to dwell on such a subject matter that’s mostly untouched in animation, cartooning and games, despite the latter three’s potential to take advantage of this to educate the public in a different way.
Ilmar Tuglas has observed similar things back in Estonia as well, having to rehome dogs attacking deer because he doesn’t want them to get killed. You might say it’s ironic because his own family are no strangers to farming foxes for their fur, even though they don’t do this anymore because of how unpopular fur farming’s gotten over there too. Ilmar and his family end up giving the food meant for foxes to cats and dogs instead, which is far from ideal in their case, but a matter of having to go with the changing times from then on. Fur farming was a thing in both Europe and North America, especially en masse, that it was as normal as pig farming is today. But it’s also kind of speciesist in this regard that the ire’s aimed at people using cute doglike animals for fur, though there’s still not much sympathy given to pigs, even when they’re useful for sniffing out certain fungi.
To further complicate matters, animals like pigs have a longer and more consistent domestication history than foxes do, so turning pigs into pets wouldn’t be that drastic because they’re more heavily tied to humans than foxes were and still are. And they’re still more widely domesticated anywhere else in the world, whereas foxes are largely restricted to paleoarctic regions with the exception of Australia. But it’s easier to throw fits over people skinning animals resembling Rover and Fido, than they would with animals like Babe just the same (since the Chinese word for fox fur clothing is really fox leather clothing). Which is still speciesist in a darkly ironic way, since pigs are far likelier to be domesticated in nearly all corners of the globe, but foxes largely reside in the paleoarctic like I said before. It wouldn’t be drastic making pigs find mushrooms anywhere else.
You might as well consider how this person feels about chickens as opposed to parrots, where since their point’s that chickens have been domesticated by people longer and earlier, so treating them like one would with cats and dogs shouldn’t be this drastic compared to say parrots. Considering that foxes don’t just have different care requirements, but have a more inconsistent domestication history compared to say cats and dogs, that Ilmar’s own relatives and possibly Ilmar himself at some point would’ve known that they are rather tricky to deal with. So transitioning to cats and dogs doesn’t seem drastic but these two are so familiar to humanity that it would be this easy to take them for granted at times, so even if it depends on the individual animal, Ilmar and his family would’ve found them much easier to raise than they would with foxes even for years.
And they’ve been breeding foxes for fur until recently, so they’d have experience in knowing a thing or two about fox behaviour. So both Ilmar Tuglas and Iosif Ionescu represent rather underrepresented character types and topics, in the sense that they don’t show up this often in ACG media for some reason. Ilmar Tuglas’s own family (if not Ilmar Tuglas himself) house pastors, socialists and fur farmers alike under one roof, I’m pretty much certain this isn’t even unique to them as similar arrangements might also be found anywhere else in the world to varying degrees. But most especially post-Communist Europe once they went from socialism to capitalism and when freedom of religion has resumed in these places, coupled with the decline of fur farming, that such characters can also be found in places like Poland and Slovakia, like one would with Estonia in his case.
Given how demonised Protestantism is in X-Men (which for some reason never gets remarked upon much by Evangelicals), it would be nice to turn such a portrayal on its head by having a lot more sympathetic Protestants in the forms of Ilmar Tuglas, his mother Margit, his late cousin Priit Mihkelson and his father Tanel, who’s even a local pastor in Ahja. Gail Simone actually had a good point about the way Christians are portrayed in both the DC and Marvel canons, but most especially X-Men where they’re often kind of demeaned if they’re Protestants in question. It’s really strange to think that an atheist like her took offence to such a depiction but most Evangelicals are ironically indifferent to this, even though ideally it should have been the other way around. But a Redditor said that a lot of Christians are worldly, so it didn’t turn out the way it should’ve.
Ilmar’s Christianity represents a different sort of Christianity from the one North Americans are used to, which involves awareness of global warming and sympathy to immigrants, the latter’s also there in the Bible. He’s also somewhat sympathetic to socialism, which would surely surprise North Americans. But his family has socialists in them, so this would’ve rubbed off on him, however inappropriate it maybe either for his religion or his occupation as a financial adviser. Estonians are weirdly underrepresented in American ACG media, despite Estonia being a capitalist country as of late. They continue to be underrepresented, because there are no Estonian superheroes, supporting characters and villains to this day, even when both DC and Marvel writers could have at this point.
Ilmar and his family might not be the only Estonians in American and American ally ACG media, but when Estonians are generally so underrepresented in those media that it’s going to be hard naming a prominent Estonian character from either DC or Marvel, if because there’s really none at all and still none to this day. Or in Iosif Ionescu’s case, Romanians who aren’t vampires. It does bring up a certain possibility that many in America and American-allied media aren’t that exposed to both Estonian and Romanian cultures (media included), even when both Estonia and Romania are just as interesting as South Korea and Japan are. The one thing more underrepresented than a mere Romanian is a Romanian scientist, one who specifically studies stray dogs to boot. Which dovetails with the lack of ACG media that’s about dog predation in any way.
It’s not necessarily entirely unheard of in the media but usually canine predation is mentioned in either journalism or academia, not so much more escapist fare like video games even when video games provide an opportunity to not only stop dogs from killing wildlife, but also preventing them from doing this altogether even when it’s done virtually. Video games have been used to educate people about things like wild animals and ecosystems, that it shouldn’t be a stretch to make and use a video game to educate people about the perils of dog predation really. If you could make a video game that’s about caring for dogs, you could also make a video game about stopping dogs from killing wild animals just the same.
Not to mention there are people who make a living from studying dog predation and stray dogs in general such as Andrey Poyarkov, who originally set out to study wolves but ended up studying feral dogs instead. Iosif Ionescu’s no different because he also set out to study wolves but when stray dogs are far more abundant, that he ended up studying and even adopting some of the latter instead. The two dogs he studied and then adopted are Danny and Iggy cast in the roles of father and son respectively, which was something Ilmar suggested to him since he doesn’t want them to get killed. Well they’re part of a pack of stray dogs so he could’ve adopted more of them with his other relatives and also Irina too, Ionela is the one who owns a dog looking like the one killed by Tonio.
Ioan owns dogs that look like the ones killed by an arrow or something, a kind of inversion of what goes on in Jojo where the characters actually keep dogs from getting killed themselves. I kind of speculated before that Araki Hirohiko does or did this because he wasn’t in a good mood, but this involves realising he did this unconsciously, especially whenever he didn’t feel right himself. He admitted that he didn’t let Pannacotta Fugo betray the team because he wasn’t feeling right at the time, so it’s plausible Araki did this to dogs in a way because admittedly I used to obsess over dead dogs whenever I wasn’t feeling right before. But this kind of humanises Araki in the sense he does things whenever he wasn’t feeling right at any point in time, which might explain why some characters like Johnny Joestar and even Ghiaccio appear to have symptoms of depression.
Or why some characters have stands or powers relating to guilt in some way, as guilt’s also a component of depression. Which means Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure might also be more cathartic than one realises, along with a profound air of foreboding regarding what will happen next, that it does differ from something like most superhero comics in this regard. Like I feel a lot of superhero comics from both DC and Marvel have a rollicking air where the hero’s expected to save the day largely mentally unscathed, not to mention these two have a rotating rooster of differing writers with equally clashing views and approaches to familiar characters and storylines. JJBA for most of the part can easily be traced back to one author, albeit with some helpers to the side, so what goes on in JJBA is clearly from one mind.
If this includes characters who appear to be depressed in many ways more than one and the like, then it does point out to a cathartic mindset at any point. But I’m getting off-topic here and even then it’s kind of telling that there’s really not a lot of characters of any ethnicity and nationality who bother studying stray dogs in any capacity in most ACG media, even when these could’ve picqued one’s interest in such a subject matter. I remember the essay ‘Education Of A Cartoonist’ pointing out why comics stories are repetitive is because their own authors don’t read or learn much, don’t bother doing anything else that would lead to less repetitive characters and storylines. This also involves doing a different take on something familiar, like what if both Danny and Iggy aren’t just stray dogs but also related to one another and have the fortune of being cared for and adopted by Joseph Joestar.
What if Kakyoin Noriaki lived long enough to become a financial adviser who also cares for stray animals to the side, well in the form of their analogues Iosif Ionescu and Ilmar Tuglas that does speak volumes about certain directions not taken or done often. Even less commonly done is using such abilities for quotidian and forensic means, like imagine if Trish Una grew up to be a forensic scientist herself who softens things to make it easier to solve cases this way. Imagine if Kakyoin Noriaki used his ability to not only pick up items, close doors and the like (though he could’ve done that before in canon), but also help out detectives when it comes to solving criminal cases. It seems more common to find characters using preternatural skills in combat, but not so often when it comes to more practical situations that demand you to not only save lives, but also do things like preparing food and solving criminal cases.
This goes back to the point posed in Education Of A Cartoonist where it seems it’s easier to write glorified fistfights because such writers don’t really bother doing anything else, learning anything else and knowing somebody/anybody else who does this to write something else altogether. Whether if this even includes the vexing subject of fur farming is up to anybody’s guess, but it does beg the question over which character with such an ability would gravitate to this controversial practise. Ilmar Tuglas comes from a family of fur farmers who were in the habit of raising foxes, mink and the like for fur clothing, they don’t do this anymore due to animal rights activists getting in the way. Instead they make a living from veterinary pet care instead, as his own father and mother are veterinarians (even if one of them’s a parish pastor in Ahja), though it could be argued that what they do is speciesist since they care for cats and dogs a lot.
It would be particularly controversial to even humanise fur farmers this way, given how politically correct both the United States and its allies tend to be and are. From both the Russian and Chinese perspectives, these countries tend to be very politically correct. These countries are more in-tune with things like anti-racism, intersectionality, feminism, LGBT rights and animal rights a lot more than these two are, not that China’s particularly inclined towards animal cruelty. Mind you even in China there are people who make their dogs hunt rodents, guard premises and hunt boar, a lot like what their western counterparts do or for another matter, their Vietnamee and Indonesian counterparts just the same. But I feel it’s more like America and its allies tend to be really self-righteous from being very politically correct on many matters, that anybody else who aren’t in their orbit seem much worse by comparison.
Even when it’s not always exactly nor precisely the case, but it does feel this way at times due to political correctness being more normalised in the west. This might also include animal rights activism in a way, given the antipathy towards fur farming in Russia isn’t as pronounced as it would be in Canada, despite sharing similar ranges of climates, latitudes and biomes together. Unless if Russia succeeds in conquering Canada and then incorporating it into one of its many territories which would be the one situation where such practises would even be mainstreamed. And even then it would still take time for it to become socially acceptable again, with indigenous North Americans being far likelier to take up this cause. Even if not all Native North Americans do this, they’re still likelier to do this than their white counterparts would. And fur farming would be pretty niche in the interval at the very least.
But it does make one wonder if it were possible to portray fur farmers and even ex-fur farmers in a more sympathetic light, especially when it comes to how politically correct the west is relative to both Russia and China. In the sense that some people turn to fur farming as a way to earn money this way, even actually caring for the animals they’ll farm for their fur. It’s even telling that both Russia and Canada were on equal terms when it comes to fur farming, or for another matter former Soviet republic Estonia in this regard. Estonia banned fur farming sometime around four years ago, so it would’ve been fairly recent that Ilmar’s family stopped fur farming due to such presssures. The Tuglas fur farms have been converted into shelters for stray cats and dogs, given they’re not only more abundant but also easier to manage due to their longer histories of being domesticated, relative to foxes.
As for the farm foxes, well although the activists succeeded in freeing them, there was the issue of rehoming them. Foxes aren’t particularly popular as pets, not that they’re entirely useless, but they’re not the animals one would often use for things like pest control the way one would with cats and dogs (even in China, this is also the case there too). They could’ve gone stray, plausibly interbreeding with wild foxes. But this also left some Tuglas relatives in a financial quagmire, especially if others continued fur farming (especially with Priit’s side of the family), that they ended up farming vegetable and fruit crops instead. With Priit’s passing (at the explosive hands of Graham Knightley, one of Ilmar’s clients), Ilmar now amasses a large collection of fur coats. They can’t be sold to people anymore, lest Ilmar be pelted with stones when he comes close to doing it.
And even then he gets questioned why would he continue hoarding fox coats when he cares for dogs, who are their relatives and doppelgangers. I feel this is a depiction of fur farming that goes unheard of and unseen in such media, wherein the fur farmers in question are really ordinary people like me and you. It’s like in an effort to humanise foxes, fur farmers get seriously dehumanised and demonised. If fur farming were to have a human face in video games and the like, it would go to Ilmar Tuglas and his family instead. But it would say a lot about the sort of environment westerners are raised in, where furbearers are humanised but fur farmers aren’t. And why a counter-narrative would be interesting to explore really.
fynm 