How to Find Lava Rocks [Analysis]

[0:00]Step by step, can we follow Latrato's diary to recreate the lava rocks and figure out what they are? What I mean is, if we look at the themes of the story and guess what mechanics might exist that explain the new supernatural stuff that happens in part nine, will Latrato's instructions change from seeming cryptic to making intuitive sense? I think it's possible we can already get a loose idea of what they mean, why they work, and what forces are behind them. To add to Jojo's list of bizarre worldbuilding. This is a pretty open ended subject for an analysis video, and the answers will be vague at best. So what I'll do is walk you through my process, and based on what I found seems to be the answer, we might also end up being able to explain why JoJolion's rock humans exist in the first place. BLADE OF THE GRASS JOJO ANALYSIS "HOW TO FIND LAVA ROCKS" Line one of Latrato's diary instructions, according to the fan translation at least, is God expresses all of this world with numbers. There's not a lot to go off of, so at first I thought this could mean one of three things. Latrato could be talking generally about a mechanic of the universe, he could be describing a specific phenomenon that's tied to the lava of Hualalai, given what he says in a later line, or what he could have meant by this phrase was that he attributes a specific phenomenon to a specific entity that he identifies as God. Fortunately, it does seem like this is clarified in lines two and three with numbers control the flow of this world and God is the lava of Hualalai. But personally, I would hold off on assuming that these two lines only exist to add context to line one for certain. Instead, I'll look to see if there's a theme that could be represented by a mechanic that might subtly be referenced by the story so far, and also explain all of these three lines, whether or not two and three build on line one, because they could also only exist to define it. So thematically, there's a bit of an emphasis on middlemen. Jodio feels powerless because he's at the mercy of being a cog in a wider machine, and Howler draws strength from wedging himself in between a resource and the people that depend on it, who it's normally supposed to go to, through his stand based on the idea of the eclipse. Eclipse 8 seems to be based on the solar eclipse and the song by Pink Floyd, which would mean it's tied to the dark side of the moon and manipulating light by dividing it through a triangle and isolating what's divided. This would also be why it's based on superpositions. In the song, the idea is that even though everything's in order, like it's held together by a pressure from the sunlight, once the moon blocks out the sun, everything has more freedom to loosen up and fall out of order. When you legally have more money, it lets you cast a larger shadow to obscure things and illegally make additional money more easily. The Pink Floyd song is based on the solar eclipse, and that's where the moon gets between the sun and the Earth. Because the moon is normally a middleman that reflects light from the sun onto the Earth. When it's generally in between them, you have the new moon, where the light bounces off the side that's dark to us, and we only see the side that's not getting any. But when the moon is directly between the Earth and the sun, it can go out of its way to block the light it normally reflects, darkening the sky even in the middle of the day. Middlemen are important because society is held together by the economy. Different people's wants and needs are regulated by different amounts they'd need to possess, and things they owe each other, and economies themselves are held together by middlemen. Money is an in-between to better break down the value of one resource so it can smoothly be exchanged for another. But this also opens up room for inconsistencies in prices. Exchange rates between currencies completely removed from the values of the services they provide change every day, and by having the ordering of services go through intermediaries, they can end up losing some value by the time they're completed, or one could end up worth more than what they're being provided in return. Entire industries and fortunes are built on the lag times and intermediaries between trades of resources and services. People can make money just off the fact that there can be delays and mishaps in the carrying out and payment of a trade. There's a little bit of inefficiency, some value escapes in any exchange. So if the economy is a closed system where there's more of a focus on exchanging and exploiting the delays between payments of a pre-existing resource rather than creating new things or directly applying that resource, and that resource is a currency, a middleman for actual things of value, then it shows a bit of a shift in priorities toward the imagined concepts like debt and ownership instead of the natural resources their initial value came from. So the trend is over time, the more and more things of genuine value there are that escape, and everyone equally enters a sort of debt. Currencies and commodities do help organize and smoothen exchanges. So there is a healthy middle ground, a balance between having intermediaries that exchanges revolve around and not. But no system is 100% efficient. So the more middlemen and layers of invented systems there are maintained by people over the passage of time in order for an exchange to take place between two individuals, the more the values of those pieces of the exchange are unfortunately going to be lost in transit and through mishaps, through a sort of entropy. It's easier for mass production and automation, and for quantifying things as numbers to break things of value down into equal sized bricks. But you lose some efficiency from the original one-to-one nature of direct trades and services between people. But because people nowadays are already born in a terrible economy with debts and low chances to earn their own personal fortunes, they're incentivized to make more middlemen and layers of systems whenever they can. Because you can earn so much more by being in control of the flow of resources between people. As you're a foundation of a new level of service they rely on, and it gives you ease of access to double dip and skim some extra money from all sorts of exchanges taking place through your service. The more layers there are, the more cracks for money to slip through. And so the overall trend is that the world gets worse and worse off for 99% of people. When the system is already inefficient, individual people become desperate and make it even worse by creating their own opportunities to siphon money through the needless shuffling required to make genuine exchanges. Stuff like tips and subscription services and automated online vendors. Because people jump at short-term conveniences, loans with interest, and gold rushes that are basically lotteries where one person gets out really big by providing an opportunity for a bunch of people to compete with each other, contributing to the cycle. This is the kind of thing the rock humans prayed on in JoJolion, exchanging one health issue for another to keep people giving them their life savings. So while human society is overall worse off, the rock humans living within it can relatively gain more power over them. And the humans spend all their time fighting each other in the rat race. Since there are layers of interactions creating more separation between people, that anonymity creates a lack of trust. So people offer services through a mindset of it being a transaction, and each time there's a rigid boundary like that, some efficiency is lost. The one sided incentive to double dip given to the people who become foundations the economy relies on, means they're going to encourage a one directional shift to needlessly create more unnecessary layers of systems, and use each opportunity to steal from even more of each trade. And because that makes everybody else more desperate, they can pressure people into a pyramid that supports this cycle they're trying to create. It's a net negative on the values and resources being circulated around the world, because specific people who are already on top and who make things revolve around them want to siphon wealth from others further, draining each individual of even more of the resources and fortune they'd make from their careers and possessions. It's a classic form of equivalent exchange, a net negative that benefits the user over others that main villains use in the Steel Ball Run continuity. and this is also the ability of Eclipse Eight. The Howlers have never created water. Like the moon, they're a middleman that directs the flow of water through the land. By using how we depend and fall back on essential systems owned and monopolized by the Howlers, they have the freedom to keep us in the dark, to further seize the flows of different resources and commodities in order to claim ownership of them, too, and to get away with taking more power from everyone else. And to do that, they've taken sole ownership of precious land. You could also see this idea in how the story has gone so far. People in a battle royale where they turn on each other for the chance to make extra money. They use magic rocks, objects of direct value that control invented quantified systems like money that are maintained through values of ownership and debt, and agendas between people to siphon stuff of value back to them through the mishaps of intermediaries, and they can objectively reduce the value of the things they quantify in order to get those things to return to them. But in the process, the desire to double dip and pull the stuff they control the flows of back toward them after exchanging them out into the world, causes them to destroy their own balance and destroy themselves if they double dip enough. Jojo's wouldn't be saying that all ownership and luxuries are bad, but that the concept of negative one apples or debt, of ownership and owing somebody something else, is what industries are based on. But they don't exist physically, they're only held together through people's thoughts and commitments to each other. Sole ownership of a fundamental service everyone relies on is the problem. Because these kinds of relationships are the types that separate people vertically across hierarchies, and horizontally through inner circles and transactions. And because of those gaps, direct value can escape. And so the circulation of the services and resources is less efficient than it could be, and everyone is collectively worse off, as some value drains off through the gaps between people into nothingness. That goes to no one. So the long-term trajectory of society is that it will slowly get worse, as everything of value is slowly absorbed by specific entities. So there's no more circulation and no more activity. There is no long-term sustainability for society because there is no wider balance. But would things have started this way, or would they have turned this way one or two hundred years ago? A basic rule for Jojo mechanics is that if something has a distinct level of influence, it creates an observable supernatural phenomenon that overrides the physical environment to allow some kind of action to take place. And because of this, if there needs to be a contrived reason world history would still develop to resemble ours, some contrived phenomenon is added to the planet made out of rock. The pillarmen existed, so humanity would not have been mutated to have supernatural properties as the creatures agriculturally on top of the world. The energy given to us from the sun that's passed down the food chain and allows life to exist, can be optimized with the right breathing and mindfulness. So at the center of the earth, there seems to be really hot crystal that constantly melts metal around it. And because of this, the spin of the earth spirals that melting metal around the core to create a magnetic field that's sort of loosely dragged along the axis of the planet's rotation. And this magnetic field shields the planet from harmful stuff from the sun and the rest of space. It creates a balance preventing the atmosphere from deteriorating over time and preventing life forms from being exposed to radiation, so life can exist on the planet. So some kind of crystal that's able to hold its shape at the center of the Earth, despite metal melting around it, combined with the planet's spin, can create a balance that allows the life fueled by the sun to sustainably continue existing as time passes. So, let's say that this crystal at the core of the Earth is supernaturally empowered by Jojo's core mechanics. Just like the sun does for carbon life forms on the surface of the Earth, this crystal spawns silicon lifeforms underground. And just like the magnetic field, the activity of life on Earth is kept sustainable by a balance made from the two types of life forms that act as positives and negatives. The silicon creatures are like a nucleus of protons, so they're the positives that are naturally able to be blessed and fortunate by the environment surrounding them. And the carbon life forms on the surface are the negatives. They need to expand to directly acquire resources, but their activities are designed to revolve around and be caught within the pull of the positives at the Earth's core. If the JoJolands is about sustainability and balances created by the relationships of positive and negative pieces, it fits with this Steel Ball Run continuity's types of messages and moral advice. Jojo's has always been a story with a moral that's made amendments every single part. Appreciate what you have, but sometimes etiquette can hold you back, so make doing the right thing such a natural part of you, you can do it organically and in unorthodox ways, but don't just rely on instinct. Still deliberately make an effort to be as efficient as possible and do what you can before it's too late. But even if you don't have the power to achieve what you want on your own, you can be a supporting role and draw strength from a larger system like society. But when society fails you and your situation seems predetermined and hopeless, for all you know, you can be on a predetermined path that seems impossible, but then at the last minute has everything open up to achieve the goal you want. But don't let that advice enable manipulative tendencies by exploiting forms of fate. If the situation really does seem hopeless, pass the torch to somebody else who can squeeze through a blind spot you can't fit through. Everyone should be in this together. The only thing missing from the original continuity of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is that because these messages all feature role models who are unrealistically noble, it gives the impression that if you've had flaws, or if you don't have distinct individual influence, because influence is relative and there are several billion of us, you don't have to do your part. So you can leave things to the people who do have that chance. In the Steel Ball Run continuity, the stories are about how to optimize the limited autonomy you do have by seeing the world you're part of as an interconnected whole, where everyone has flaws and their perspectives are divided, so people can contribute to a balance and do good acting from a place of self-interest as long as they're mindful and regulate it. So carbon based negatives who explore and conquer the world to satisfy their own agendas can be good if they're doing so as part of an ecosystem that's balanced. And a problem to contrast that is because everyone is born limited to their own perspective, so from their point of view they start at zero, a positive who already benefits from being something that things revolve around and rely on, will have the greed to climb higher. This would give us an explanation for where the rock humans came from. One trait of the rock humans is that they're allergic to mangos, and that they love honey. But with this model, these dietary traits make perfect sense. A mango is a stone fruit. The seed inside of it is walled off within the core and vulnerable to the elements without that wall, and mangoes specifically symbolize prosperity, divine origin, and positive energy. Meanwhile, honey is made from the labor of others. Creatures who sacrifice autonomy to work as a tight unit. So if this is taken advantage of by a third party that just siphons off some of the stuff they produce for their own sustenance, then it's just like what the rock humans do. Rock humans like honey because opposites attract, and rock humans are allergic to mangoes because same charges repel. Now, because same charges repel, all the silicon creatures crammed in the Earth's core would repel each other, so the ones at the very center would repel the others to the surface through various vents at the bottom of the ocean floor, creating a hierarchy of the positives. Rock organisms were then able to develop alongside carbon ones on the Earth's surface, to specifically have the trait of always winning games of musical chairs, because the positives are blessed by the land to be rich and fulfilled where they are, where it's the negatives surrounding them like carbon life and humanity that need to spread across the surface because they revolve around the positives. A positive gets to be a nucleus. It bends things around it, but the negatives are dispersed and move around because of the influence and anchoring of the positive. So humanity, the negative counterpart to the stone creature at the core of the Earth, expand and directly cover more parts of the surface of the Earth, and this has driven hierarchically weaker positives out of their homes. Because silicon creatures were forced out onto the surface because of the exclusivity of that positive hierarchy, they, as positives, still got the benefits from the land and nature to be content in one place, and they had the talent to manipulate and bury themselves within the behaviors and social structures of carbon creatures. So when the negatives, the carbon expanded and took over their homes, this convinced some rock humans to switch over and infiltrate them to prey on them instead. Positives are born at zero, so they can be greedy and want to double dip. They're attracted to the negatives, even though the wider system only works if they're far removed between and underneath the negatives as a nucleus. So if a nucleus wants to physically climb higher or grow larger, so it can physically reach and make contact with the negatives that revolve around it, this would both explain everything about the rock humans and also what would be going on in Hawaii. Because a big idea in the Steel Ball Run continuity is that negatives, like humans, interact with the world and take a posture based on what they prioritize or choose to learn about from a place of self-interest, and the protagonists find a balance where they can do that but to contribute to a wider, helpful goal and right wrongs. Every main Jojo has an ability that's a small scale form of the type of equivalent exchange and bad mechanism imposed by the main villain of their part, but it's used in a way that counteracts and frees people from that system. Johnny takes on risk by sacrificing his nails. He dips into the red so he can hit someone from farther away and regrow them back. So it's not to the degree of Valentine's needless sacrifice, and Josuke traps and redirects things, but only temporarily to untangle larger chains. Because Jodio's ability would work by temporarily separating bonds and splitting positives and negatives to cross a boundary and form even larger bonds on the other side, I'm willing to bet the main villain does something like create faulty bonds to siphon things through a boundary, hoarding positives for itself like a nucleus, while everything else is kept negative on the outside, but recruited into a system to a membrane that helps funnel more positives and negatives into it. If every one is a combination of positive and negative pieces, they just have an overall charge of either being a plus or a minus, the main villain would do something like completely steal the plusses away from them, turning them into a negative that fits a little hierarchy of theirs. So the message would be something like genuine bonds and relationships leave you vulnerable. You can be exploited, or you can mutually drag down the other people you care about, because you're driven more by your feelings than practical action. But if you're not born with the ability to naturally emotionally connect with others, that doesn't inherently make you a bad person. The rock humans didn't naturally have empathy, but what made them bad was that they took advantage of that to form a circle amongst themselves and prey on other people. If you don't naturally emotionally connect with others, you can still consciously value them, but it means it's easier to separate from them when times are tough and go in your own direction so that the two of you can cover more ground and meet back up at a later point. There's freedom in temporarily being able to break bonds. So the thing not to do that the main villain would do is the inversion of this. Create all sorts of attachments to other people you won't let go, that instead of being genuine, mutual relationships, are things you see as mechanisms and to try to take advantage of. People can connect to natural positives, values and resources, through their desires. Imagined negatives. Gaps that direct their behavior toward positives like agendas and debts. Society is made of bonds and tethers, like these negative concepts, where one person owes another person something. Because people's agendas and actions revolve around absences they need to fill, like needs they have to meet. But seeing each other through relationships that you see as mechanisms like these, only drive people further apart. When people's relationships are distanced by agendas, when they're separated horizontally by different needs and pack mentalities, and separated vertically by hierarchies, heat can escape and the world can get worse. So the bad thing to do is make a web of distanced relationships with horizontal and vertical separations. And when you have a hierarchy, it takes the shape of a pyramid, because there can be less people, the more powerful the rank. People will fight each other and weaken each other just to climb the ladder, hoping they do better than everybody else. Kind of like a lottery where they hope they'll get the jackpot. The real winner of a pyramid scheme is someone who isn't even playing the game, but they made the whole thing as a way to get powerful through the struggles of other people. They're a foundation, which means they're simultaneously position-wise underneath and mentally floating, untouchably above the labyrinth of that pyramid. And the whole thing exists to construct a passageway they can climb up through. So in reality, if there's some supernatural phenomenon that creates a pyramid scheme and recruits people into it, if you're the sole person that reaches the very top of the pyramid and you think you've won, it just means you'll be split apart for the foundation of the game to reach the world through. A pyramid scheme really takes the shape of a triangle with a split in the middle, so something at the bottom can rise to the top when it's ready. In other words, it's the shape of a volcano. The message that the main villain would be a cautionary tale for, like in parts seven and eight, seems to be that humans should not form webs and pyramids for their relationships. The world is made from combinations and layers of mechanisms. You should not see your relationships as mechanisms and refuse to give people their autonomy. If you think you can recruit and take advantage of people forever, you're really a sucker for something larger, that's maybe mentally above you, invisibly watching what you're doing, but physically underneath. If humans form relationships like pyramids, they're ultimately going to be exploited by something that's not even human. Let's say by a family of silicon deities that do have a hierarchy between each other. Because since they're a counterpart to humanity, they can naturally have vertical and horizontal separation between them, but that might make an outcast at the bottom of the hierarchy. If we say that there's a family of silicon creatures at the very core of the Earth, matching how silicon is directly underneath carbon in the periodic table, because it's not about scientific accuracy. Jojo's collages together a bunch of symbolism and concepts, so they create a wacky idea together. But if we say this, that a family of silicon creatures are who the main villain draws power from and is at the mercy of, then it would also explain why the lava rocks are being made. The abilities of silicon creatures underground would be that they revolve human activity around them. So if each deity has a volcano on the island of Hawaii, then two of them, the deity for the desire of connection, and the deity for the desire for resources, could have formed a symbolic magnetic field between them and something like a water cycle. Back in the day, if the deity for connection had been the negative, then they could build up a concentrated charge of people's spare feelings and empathy for each other, and then regularly rain that down across the island to connect those negatives to positive sources of life emitted through the lava of the volcano of survival resources that, for being the same charge, would have been repelled up toward the Earth's surface through the lava, and would have had temperature resistance through a thick, outside skin that doesn't let things pass through it. So people's appreciation would be given to the land, helping the land flourish and refill itself with resources those people could use to thrive. People's spare feelings would be redirected back toward the land to help replenish it, in a wider system that would have shielded the world from long term sustainability issues, by keeping the circulation of resources balanced through how people prioritize and treat them. But let's say some of these silicon deities are not happy with this situation. They want to be up on the surface with everybody else, and all they can do is connect to people telepathically through their desires and ambitions. One of them, maybe the deity of self-actualization or something, reaches out to somebody's greed and presents them with an offer. Hey, you do some human thing, flip the poles around, be my vessel, and you could be the one in contact with and technically in possession of all the physical resources that I'm going to be stacking up together to increase my power and build a tunnel to reach the surface. So now with the poles flipped, what we get is the deity of resources building up a negative charge of people's desires, and then collapsing them through lightning onto positives being radiated from the volcano of connection. So these positives then trap the web of people's desires to revolve around them. So nothing that's quantified to be valuable as a resource will ever be able to escape that volcano's pull, causing the overall circulation of the planet's resources to slowly funnel more and more things of value to whoever is on the land of that volcano, who would be the vessel for this deity and their cursed family line. So if that can explain lines one through three of Latrato's diary, line four brings up the next question. What would be the significance of lightning and the new moon? Well, the mechanism of lightning uses negative charge built up at the bottom of a cloud from rain scraping against ice and snow forming in the cloud, to aggressively and suddenly connect with something that has a positive charge on the ground. If there's something that's working like another eclipse, it needs a shadow to operate through, and what it does is bend and control light, then to set off that lightning, what it needs is the darkness of the new moon. If you're on the hunt for lava rocks, then during the new moon, you want to look for lightning. And so the rest of the line would probably just refer to gas and debris coming out of the ground from the spot where the lightning connected to something positive underneath it, where some colony of some kind of tardigrade-like rock microbes would be trapping the value of the lightning in their pull and shaping themselves into a pyramid. So the last line would just be clarifying that what you're looking for is something that has captured the lightning. It's whatever the lightning struck and impacted on the ground. At least that's my best guess. Maybe the lightning is something else. Maybe all of this is something else. Uh, only time will tell.