Warning! Spoilers for Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Chapter 106 ahead!
As what may be the final chapter of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga steams towards its conclusion, Josuke‘s powers are refined to an even more ridiculous standard than before. The battle for the Locacaca fruit has reached a fever pitch, and the fate of the Higashikata clan is on the line—for some more so than others.
The currently running eighth part in the series, JoJolion has followed a man given the name Josuke Higashikata (although not THAT Josuke) as he struggles to uncover his past, the origins of the curse on the Higashikata family, and the secret behind the mysterious Rock Humans that threaten the world. With the villain Tooru’s stand ability “Wonder of U” finally revealed, it seemed that, in classic Jojo fashion, he might very well be impossible to stop. His ability works passively, causing any attempt to interfere with its users plans to fail in wildly unlikely ways. While even an ability like this has a limit on its range, most stands have a range of less than ten meters, making it very difficult for almost anyone to defeat.
Jojo protagonists often learn new ways of using their powers in the heat of battle, however, and it turns out that Josuke is no exception in that regard. Josuke’s stand, the awkwardly named “Soft & Wet,” has turned out to be surprisingly versatile, able to send bubbles out that can absorb both things (like scraps of paper) as well as properties of those things (the sound a shoe makes with each footstep, for example). The bubbles can also be used offensively, launched at enemies to explode on contact. While the stand’s limits are vaguely defined, the idea is that it’s temporarily stealing some aspect of an object’s essence, even down to physical attributes like friction.
![Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Josuke’s Power Up Is The Craziest Stand Yet](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Jojo-Bizarre-Adventure-Part-8-Josuke-Yasuho-Bubbles.jpg)
In Chapter 106, however, Josuke discovers that this ability works differently than he previously thought. As he unleashes his new power, called “Soft & Wet: Go Beyond,” it’s explained that what Josuke’s bubbles are actually utilizing is a property known as “Spin,” which played a large role in JoJo part 7, Steel Ball Run. Spin arises from perfectly spherical objects rotating rapidly, until they create more energy than it took to initiate the Spin, enabling them to perform incredible acts like breaking dimension barriers and subverting the time freeze abilities of stands like Dio’s The World. Josuke’s bubbles are then described as impossibly thin strings, rotating so fast as to appear to be a sphere, while simultaneously being so thin as to essentially be absent, leading to bubbles of “nothing” that don’t properly “exist.” The explanation is admittedly pretty confusing, and is no doubt difficult to translate with any accuracy, but it’s possible that a better explanation may be offered later on. The end result is that these nonexistent bubbles of nothing are shockingly dangerous, erasing things that they come into contact with.
Soft & Wet: Go Beyond pushes JoJolion to peak absurdity when Josuke has the brilliant idea to combine it with Yasuho’s Paisley Park stand ability, which connects to her phone offering GPS-like tracking and guidance of anyone and anything. Through this combination, Josuke is able to transmit the bubbles over the phone network and attack the villain from miles away, and as his bubbles “don’t exist,” Wonder of U can’t stop them. Since this combination gives Josuke essentially unlimited attack range and the ability to destroy or steal almost anything, Soft & Wet may just have become the new king of overpowered stands in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which is really saying something. Despite Tooru’s seemingly imminent defeat, there are still a few more enemies out there that will need to be dealt with, and Kaato Higashikata seems to be one of them.