"You don't even know what the Philosopher's legacy is, do you?"
Of the very few fleeting reasons there are left to endure reality, one of the most enduring is the love I have for Metal Gear Solid. I've not been subtle about that, pretty much every other week I'm sneaking in an reference or unwittingly letting slip some sort of idiom or speech pattern I've developed from that series. I'm an AI sponge, soaking up all the media around me and splattering it all over this blog without a care in the world. But, no matter how important MGS is to me, no matter how formative that series has been to my current place in life (which is significant, by the way. I got into writing because of Snake Eater) there has recently been another franchise I can't stop going on about. One that stretches even further back than MGS and is arguably more influential. And with the amount of times I've mentioned JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, I don't think there's much point being coy about that either. But what if there was more in common with this series than sharing fans? What if they also shared a main villain, between core Jojo (as-in, before 'Steel Ball Run') and my favourite MGS entry (III: Snake Eater)? Well that could either be one of the most hairbrained things my psychosis has ever imagined or... well, okay it's definitely that either way, but it could be true as well! (Oh, and Spoiler warning for Metal Gear 1-5 as well as Jojo Parts 1-5.)
Let me start with the Russian man first, we have Colonel Volgin: the Thunderbolt. This KGB career man started off his career as a humble war criminal from World War 2, brutalising and murdering captured soldiers in a manner that earned him the fear of his compatriots. (They grow up so fast!) After the war, Volgin learned about his father's part in an organisation known as The Philosophers, a group of wealthy and powerful war-time individuals who conspired to pool their resources in order to help end the war, (and maybe control parts of the world to ensure that another world war would never happen again, but that would be scribbled into their constitution much later.) Being obviously inspired by such a noble and altruistic philosophy, Volgin immediately stole all the legacy funds from this super group and used it to try and plan a coup against Khrushchev in a grand plan to ultimately escalate the cold war into a thermonuclear holocaust. (Like father like son?)
Now we shift gears to Dio Brando (prime), a poor British child born under the thumb of a drunk father in the slums of London, Dio learned quickly how to survive on the harsh streets and bide his time. The greatest power he ever earned was patience, and everything that would go wrong in his life from then on would mostly come in the times when he would lose it. Through the winding line of fate, Dio Brando's father would pass away when he was just a teenager and pull the last of his strings to get his son adopted by the wealthy Joestar family. Dio was disgusted by his disgrace of a father, but still seized the opportunity to become close to the Joestars so that he could overthrow the rightful heir of the Jostar line, Johnathon, and ultimately steal the fortune that he felt life deserved to give him in recompense for the hardships of his childhood. So not quite as bad as Volgin- oh, but then he rejected his humanity, became a vampire and slowly escalated his plans to turning all of England into his undead slaves. Only to
then develop the power to control time in limited degrees and deciding that entitled him to become ruler over all of the weaklings in humanity. (Ahh... and they say Dio was an ambitious man.)
So now we start to draw the similarities, if there are indeed any to draw. First, both characters are blonde, which might not seem like much but considering that both these characters come from Japanese creators, a place where there is little natural blonde hair in the gene pool, it's a point that sticks out. Second, we have the ruler complex that is indicative of both these characters. Neither of them are portrayed to have redeeming characteristics about them but are instead varying degrees of avaricious, or tyrannical. Volgin wants world war, Dio wants money, then power, then total global domination. And both of them find ways to turn those grand ambitions into personal vendettas against the protagonist. Volgin finds out that Snake has infiltrated his base by incapacitating his lover, and from there on becomes increasingly obsessed with killing Snake and causing him as much pain as possible. "You'll pay for hurting Ivan!" Dio, on the otherhand, takes an instant and almost intrinsic disliking to Johnathon Joestar, not just as his rival to the fortune but because he represents someone born into all of opportunity and privilege that Dio seeks without having to endure an ounce of the hardship that he had to- marking the start of a rivalry.
And then there are the extremes that both go to in order to fuel their revenge. Volgin famously shouts "This isn't over yet" and lives up to that promise when he returns ten years later as a walking corpse of fire fuelled by nothing more than anger against Snake and maybe a tiny bit of Psychic energy. (Metal Gear is weird with its magic) Dio, on the otherhand, is driven by a literal curse of immortality (vampirism) that he harnesses specifically to drive at the punishing of the decedents of Johnathan as much as humanly (or inhumanly) possible. But there's also the aggressive sexuality of Dio, which doesn't seem as prominent in Volgin. Dio is ever the cult of personality leader, and many of the scenes of him luring followers under his sphere of influence containing symbolism of sexual attraction and the consummation of innocence, such as with the flashback with Kakyoin. What's more, we see several scenes of him with lounging with women draped at his feet and the many who's blood he seems to dine on. There's a scene of him trying to seduce a worryingly young girl in the later half of Phantom Blood and in Golden Wind we're told how rare it is for any woman to make it out of his harem alive. Volgin on the otherhand is proven to be bisexual, like Dio, but apart from a scene of being sexual inappropriate towards Eva one time, sexuality isn't really a big part of his character.
In fact, the many similarities are circumstantial at best with Volgin only faintly resembling Dio if you squint and try to make the pieces fit in the holes. But do you know what character they fit with much more naturally? That's right, the big bad of the whole MGS franchise; Liquid Snake. Liquid is a blonde, English clone created alongside Solid Snake using the DNA of the legendary soldier Naked Snake. (These seem like porn names, but I swear they're the originals.) Much like Dio, Liquid's journey starts with an adopted childhood insecurity which taints his lifelong obsessions, namely he believes that he was a clone made from Naked Snake's recessive genes whilst Solid was cloned from the dominant genes, making him the genetically inferior clone. (Which turns out to be the exact wrong way around) This feeds into a persecution complex where he believes he is geared to be the loser, just as Dio does thanks to the circumstance of being born to a poor abusive father, thus both characters are driven to overcompensate in their desire to reclaim their 'respect' and 'birthrights', leading them to a collision course with the protagonist.
When I started this blog I did so as a joke, seeing the stupidly vague connections between Volgin and Dio, but when I bought Liquid into the equation the similarities built and built to the point where now I'm not so sure. ("And besides: these aren't- my- characters!") The brother-like relationship between the hero and villain of these stories seems almost intentionally referential, although Snake doesn't seem as heartbroken about their inability to bond as siblings as Johnathon does. (But that's more down to who the respective heroes are as characters, Dio and Liquid are still shockingly similar) And then we get to how both of the characters have managed to persist in their journeys of vengeance. Dio defies all laws of physics and steals Johnathon Joestar's dead body by replacing Johnathon's head with his own, which then persists in a coffin for a hundred years thanks to his vampiric status. Liquid, on the otherhand, after being killed, literally possesses the body of Revolver Ocelot after Ocelot uses Liquid's arm to replace the one he had cut off by the Cyborg Ninja, Gray Fox. (I feel like I'm spouting out word salad, but I swear this is all part of the MGS plot!) That's a frighteningly similar means of revival, taking the body of another character in order to come back later into the plot, wouldn't you say?
The only spot of difference is, again, Dio's outstanding sexuality, although given that Hirohiko Araki seems more intune with sexuality in general, that might just be a writing preference. You've seen how open Liquid dresses, haven't you? I bet if Kojima were more open to that sort of story, we'd have seen Liquid seducing the Genome army just like Dio did. Right now I'm actually about 60% on the theory that Kojima at least took Dio Brando into account when designing Liquid Snake, and maybe even dived back into the influential insanity that is JoJo when further developing the character. And there's no shame in that; Metal Gear has an incredibly memorable main villain because of that. So there's my moronic joke blog turned into a genuine theory by the end, but what do you think? Am I onto something or am I just blowing smoke up my own end? Let me know-
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