Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
Of course, this answer is offered as a way of thinking about DIO, not a claim that he isn’t evil.
Junko Kaneda’s take on DIO blew me away. An analysis of DIO through class and feminism—and a pretty convincing one, at that. Her reading offers us a new way of understanding both DIO and his evil.
Let’s start with class. DIO’s background is fascinating: he comes from the bottom of society; his father was an evil man, but only a small-time thug, while his mother died prematurely from overwork. Jonathan Joestar also lost his mother early, but his father brought him up well. We could say he was free to grow up in a healthy environment.
For Jonathan, moving up in class simply isn’t an issue; for DIO, it is a very real one. What fundamentally helps DIO rise in class is not his decision—“I’m giving up being human”—but the deeper causes that lead him to it. Strictly speaking, “I’m giving up being human!” is not courage (in the JoJo sense), but calculation. DIO’s intelligence is not wholly innate: he develops it through continual learning. Don’t forget that he is reading when he first appears, and depictions of him reading are everywhere after that. Joseph Joestar reads manga for fun; for DIO, reading is a means of upward class mobility, a form of steady, practical effort. It is also his rejection and repudiation of his ignorant, incompetent father. As he says: “Just thinking that this man’s blood still runs in my veins drives me to the brink of madness.”
DIO says he hates the rich. There’s no particular grievance—he just hates them. We could say this hatred is colored by class. If the Joestars’ class privilege needs no reason, neither does DIO’s resentment. This need not be explained simply by his being “evil,” since at first he clearly treats poor people better than rich people.
The inscription on his father’s gravestone gives the year as 1880, so we can infer that the story takes place in the Victorian era. The Victorian era was also when the concept of “adolescence” was born. It was during this period that education received greater attention, giving young people more opportunities to rise in class through diligent study.
If I may take this a little further myself, I would like to quote Balibar’s critique of the concept of the “human”: “The human being derives from the citizen, not the citizen from the human being.”1 This is not, of course, an insult accusing everyone of being inhuman. Rather, under capitalism, the concept of the “human” is highly suspect: some “humans” are always excluded from it, becoming what Agamben calls “bare life.” And the proletariat, as a “subject without substance,” is precisely nonhuman. Isn’t there also helplessness in DIO’s wild laughter when he declares, “I’m giving up being human!”? As Johnny Joestar says in Part 7: “DIO is someone who had even his destiny taken from him from the moment he was born.”2
By contrast, inheritance runs through every generation of the Joestar family. Even Jotaro Kujo’s name contains the character 承, meaning to receive or carry on—a key word for the Joestars. JoJo is an heir; DIO is someone who is exploited. In a sense, DIO starts out already exploited (by society) to the point of having nothing left, so he can only exploit others. JoJo, meanwhile, enjoys enormous class advantages from the outset and need only inherit them.
Here we can turn from class analysis to gender analysis. DIO hates his father but sympathizes with his mother, whom his father exploits. If JoJo identifies with fathers, mentors, or companions, then DIO can be said to identify in the opposite direction: with his mother, who is exploited just as he is. The tarot card associated with DIO’s Stand, Za Warudo (The World), carries the meanings of “woman” and “androgyne.”3 DIO represents society’s other: the proletariat, women.
DIO describes his Za Warudo (The World) like this: “The only person in stopped time … is me, DIO.” Viewed as a refusal of others’ intrusion, this power is a solitude of tragic grandeur. Don’t forget that when DIO first meets Jonathan, even having his bag touched fills him with intense disgust, never mind direct physical contact. DIO rejects the other absolutely because he is already the absolute other.
Of course, let’s be honest: DIO treats people—especially ordinary people at the bottom of society—as tools. There’s no defending that.