Johnny Joestar

Slight of frame and shorter than average, Johnny has pale eyes and light hair that falls to his shoulders and curls up at the tips. His signature is a star-speckled knit cap, its top pierced so that two tufts of hair poke out like small horns and a horseshoe framing a rearing horse's silhouette hangs at the front. He wears equally star-patterned trousers fitted with spurs and a pale hooded short-sleeved top marked with harness-like lines, later gaining heart-shaped patches at the shoulders, while a long feather trails out from behind his collar, and star-and-stripe cuffs ring his wrists.

As the story advances his look softens toward realism, his hair wavier and his build a little fuller. Paralyzed from the waist down, he relies on a wheelchair before the race and rides his horse Slow Dancer throughout it.

Johnny begins Steel Ball Run as a bitter, depressive former jockey, a young man whose brilliant career ended when a stranger, provoked by Johnny's own arrogance, shot him in the spine. What he lacks in hope he makes up for in an almost frightening resolve his allies call dark determination, a single-minded fixation on regaining his legs, first through the Spin and then through the Saint's Corpse. He shrugs off horrific wounds to chase that goal and shows no hesitation about maiming or killing rivals for Corpse Parts, yet he is not wholly heartless, refusing to drag the defenseless Lucy Steel into the fight and, years later, taking the Rock Disease onto himself to spare his son.

His bleakness has deep roots. As a timid but gentle boy he adopted a wild mouse he named Danny and idolized his older brother Nicholas, and when Nicholas died in a riding accident blamed on a white mouse, Johnny came to believe he should have died instead and that fate was forever punishing him. That is why he fixates on the Corpse's blessing, which he imagines can reset his cursed negative existence back to zero. His outlook only brightens after he meets Gyro Zeppeli, whose kindness and steady encouragement pull him out of his despair step by step, a recovery mirrored in the successive ACTs of his Stand Tusk. Though Gyro dies, Johnny carries that hard-won hope into a later life married to Rina.

Born in 1872 to a fallen aristocratic family in Danville, Kentucky, Johnny is the second son of George Joestar, a celebrated horse trainer with seven Triple Crown titles. He climbs into a saddle at five and is hailed a natural, though his stern father plainly favors his elder brother Nicholas. A defining wound comes early. Ordered to drown his pet mouse Danny as punishment, Johnny cannot do it and frees the animal on Nicholas's advice, and when Nicholas is later killed by a fall blamed on a white mouse, Johnny convinces himself the tragedy is his own fault.

He nonetheless rises into fame as a gifted young racer, taking the Kentucky Derby at sixteen, but never earns his father's respect, and a bitter quarrel ends with George declaring that God took the wrong son and casting him out. Not long after, Johnny bribes his way to the front of a theater line, and the youth he displaces shoots him through the spine, leaving him paralyzed and abandoned in a hospital where he is mistreated and forgotten.

His path turns when he sees Gyro Zeppeli's spinning Steel Ball briefly stir his dead legs. He chases Gyro into the Steel Ball Run race, breaks and bonds with the horse Slow Dancer, and over the long course becomes both a Spin user and the Stand user of Tusk. The journey remakes him, and he ultimately reclaims the use of his legs, though his story closes years later in Japan, where he dies in 1901 after his head is crushed by a boulder.