Dio Brando

Dio is written as strikingly, almost unnaturally handsome, a golden-haired figure Araki modeled on foreign idols and on the beautiful-boy villains of classic shonen manga. His green eyes tilt slightly upward, and a smile brings out dimples alongside sharp fangs; characters across the series call him gorgeous and even bewitching to behold.

Once he seizes Jonathan Joestar's body he adopts a bolder look: a jacket over a tight dark tank top, chaps, a heart-shaped circlet that echoes his knee guards, and pointed shoes, the whole ensemble usually rendered in orange or gold tones. A necklace hides the scar where his head joins Jonathan's neck, and after he drinks Joseph's blood his hair spikes upward while his lips and nails darken to a deep green.

Dio is a textbook manipulator, cold and domineering, moving through life without conscience or empathy. His defining trait is limitless ambition. A childhood of poverty and abuse under his father hardened him into someone bent first on becoming the wealthiest man alive, then, when the Joestar fortune slipped away, on becoming the most powerful being on Earth. He treats everyone as a tool, discarding morality entirely and reaching for control through charm, seduction, or murder alike.

That charisma is genuine enough that people liken him to a cult leader, yet it cracks the instant anyone dares to match or defy him, at which point his psychotic streak comes roaring back. He shows real respect only for unbreakable wills, chiefly Jonathan's, and regards women as little more than meals or instruments, fathering several children he abandons to lives of hardship. A century sealed beneath the ocean tempers him somewhat: the revived DIO grows curious about art, literature, and music, dreams of a state he calls heaven, and pours these musings into his diary and into his young confidant Enrico Pucci.

Dio is born in Northeast London to Dario Brando, a drunken and abusive father he despises and eventually poisons. Learning of George Joestar's old debt, he installs himself in the Joestar household and plays the model gentleman while quietly tormenting his adoptive brother Jonathan. Years later his plan to inherit the family fortune by poisoning George unravels, and with nowhere left to run, Dio turns the ancient Stone Mask on himself, using George's blood to become a vampire. He and Jonathan clash as the mansion burns; impaled and seemingly destroyed, Dio instead recovers, drains Wang Chan, and raises an army of the undead at Windknight's Lot. There he slays Will Zeppeli and survives a wounded eye dealt by the Ripple warrior Dire, only for Jonathan to sever his head. Weeks afterward the surviving head slips aboard Jonathan and Erina's honeymoon liner, and in the ship's fiery destruction Dio claims Jonathan's body for his own and sinks into the Atlantic.

Fished from the sea in 1984, Dio spends the following years siring illegitimate children and amassing power, meeting Enya to gain a Stand, The World, through the Bow and Arrow, and befriending the priest Enrico Pucci. Now calling himself DIO, he lingers in his Cairo mansion seeking Joestar blood to fully merge with his stolen body while Joseph Joestar's group fights toward him. When they arrive he reveals The World's secret, the power to freeze time for up to nine seconds, and cuts down Kakyoin and Joseph, the latter later revived. His final duel with Jotaro Kujo turns on that same power: Jotaro learns to move within stopped time, wounds DIO's leg, and lets Star Platinum shatter his body, whose remains crumble under the rising desert sun.

DIO's death does not end his reach. The Stand Arrows tied to him seed new users across Morioh, his son Giorno Giovanna rises as the hero of Vento Aureo, and in Stone Ocean, Pucci carries out DIO's written plan for heaven, using a fragment of DIO's bone to ultimately unlock Made in Heaven while enlisting more of DIO's sons against Jotaro's daughter.