An Aloof Intel Officer's Dossier

Explanation and ramblings about Jo'on's dialogue in my mod YORIGAMI SYNDICATE

Link to the mod's repository

Note that I am not a Yorigami Jo'on expert. I only recently fell into this rabbit hole 60 days before the publish date. What I have is a mix of concentrated research and years of passive observation. Lots of autistic ramblings ahead.

In doujin culture, there are certain artists who draw a character in a way that clearly diverges from the mainstream fandom consensus.

Take, for example, a specific artist who draws DoreSagu (Doremy x Sagume). In mainstream fanart, Doremy is usually depicted as a smug dream gremlin who has it all under control, while Sagume is the stoic, serious, or easily flustered Lunarian she lovingly trolls. But this one artist insists on drawing them differently: Sagume is portrayed as an emotionally constipated, domineering mob kingpin keeping Doremy like a traumatized, shaking, tearful pet housewife. The artist openly admits in their tags that it's complete キャラ崩壊 (kyara-hōkai : character collapse / OOC).

And yet, their version of that dynamic is iconic, hilarious, and has a hidden layer of bittersweet longing. The chasm of understanding between them is so vast that no matter how much Sagume tries to convey her feelings without words, Doremy simply cannot understand their depth. Somehow, Doremy who diagnoses people by their dreams, is the most dense, oblivious baku in the universe when it comes to Sagume's attempts at courtship. So Sagume resorts to utter physical dominance. The artist has drawn tons of comics that often end with Doremy shaking and crying in bed as the punchline while Sagume keeps her there in a headlock.

For me, leaning into an unusual, offbeat interpretation is just fun. It lets you explore a rougher, messier dynamic that gives the characters a completely different flavor.

That brings me to Jo'on Yorigami, and my choice to localize her dialogue with rough, G-dropping street slang in my GTA San Andreas mod, YORIGAMI SYNDICATE.

The "Fake-Rich" Mask

If you look at Jo'on's raw Japanese text in Antinomy of Common Flowers (AoCF) and Sunken Fossil World (SFW), it is actually relatively mild. Linguistically, her official dialogue features frequent feminine particles (〜わよ, 〜わね) and elongated, petulant vowels.

To be completely fair to the community translators, they aren't censoring her. They are accurately translating the text they were given. In English, that comes across as a theatrical, bratty mean-girl villainess: the classic arrogant diva looking down on peasants, delivering melodramatic lines like a Saturday-morning cartoon villain.

And for a long time, that's how I assumed she had to be written. But when I actually sat down to script her in GTA San Andreas, something felt fundamentally hollow. I revised her lines again and again, and it just didn't feel right.

Writing Jo'on purely as a theatrical mean-girl diva captures her public, onstage performance well. But inside a gritty game like San Andreas, taking her flashy persona at face value felt like it was missing the secondary layer of the joke: Jo'on is an overcompensating fraud.

She's good at getting cash, but she just blows it all on expensive trash to look important. She dresses in flashy luxury to act like a big-shot, but she can't hold onto a single dime, and her unrefined street roots are always showing. And as Reisen bluntly calls out in AoCF, no matter how extravagantly she dresses up, her lowly origins always leak through. Even in canon, her high-society mask constantly slips. You just have to look at her actions instead of her words.

Look at how Twilight Frontier animated her in combat:

Canon gave us an aggressive street brawler wrapped in expensive accessories, but paired her with the dialogue of a theatrical, cartoonish anime villainess. That contrast in itself has its own charm.

However, the artist re_ghotion drew and wrote a version of Jo'on whose voice actually matches her fists, and that portrayal left a mark in my brain for years. Even though she wasn't my top favorite at the time, just a passing interest while scrolling through an album of amazing art, that bias had already quietly latched into my subconscious.

So, when I finally sat down to read her canon dialogue so I had a basis for her lines in the mod, I thought... Huh? That's it?

The Influence of Re_ghotion: The Shitamachi Delinquent

During the 60 days I spent scripting YORIGAMI SYNDICATE, my primary inspiration was re_ghotion's art.

Re_ghotion draws Jo'on as a chain-smoking delinquent who brawls with a grin and a bloody nose, and speaks with a distinctly coarse, abrasive tongue. It's the reason I coded an idle smoking mechanic (joonsmoke) into the mod, and the reason I went out of my way to replace the standard homie cigar with a slim white cigarette to match the visuals later in development.

Re_ghotion's Jo'on doesn't say janai; she says じゃねえ (janē). She drops polite grammar entirely in favor of blunt, working-class street imperatives:

「テメェ今 私のツレに何つった」
(The fuck did you just say to my partner?)

Look at the vocabulary: テメェ (temee) is an overtly hostile, delinquent pronoun used when you are about to beat someone into the pavement. But the main word here is ツレ (tsure).

Tsure is working-class and delinquent slang for an accomplice, a homie, or a partner-in-crime. She doesn't call Shion her "sister" or use proper family titles. She frames their partnership like two mobsters running an extortion crew against the world.

「はあ⁉ 教育って何よ!?! 私ゃ関係ねーだろ!! 天人に言えよ!!!」
(Hah?! What do you mean upbringing?! That ain't got shit to do with me!! Go tell the Celestial!!!)
「ママじゃねーし!! バカ姉の妹だし!!」
(I ain't her mom!! I'm the idiot sister's little sister!!)

Notice the contraction: 「私ゃ」 (Watashya) and the slurring 「関係ねー」 (kankei nē).

This isn't generic rudeness; this is 下町言葉 (Shitamachi-kotoba), the historical working-class dialect of downtown Edo and Tokyo.

Japanese media historically has a double standard when it comes to female working-class speech. In an essay by Japanese editor Yasuzumi Fukaya regarding Tokyo downtown dialects, he points out an example from the classic film series Otoko wa Tsurai yo (男はつらいよ). While the male lead Tora-san speaks in rough downtown slang, his younger sister Sakura's dialogue was written in clean Standard Japanese. The filmmakers avoided giving her downtown speech because they worried a woman speaking with rough contractions would sound "vulgar and crass" (下品).

This is why re_ghotion's take on Jo'on feels so distinct to me. In canon, her dialogue is that of an over-the-top anime villainess. Re_ghotion swaps that theatrical persona for the raw, everyday slang of the downtown streets.

Fukaya also noted that authentic Shitamachi speech was delivered at terrifying speeds, contracting syllables "as if enunciating every single sound was too frustrating and slow." That fits Jo'on so well. Her official profile literally describes her as a fast-talker (言葉巧み), and while that usually means a slick con artist, here it works on both levels: she talks fast, drops syllables, and cuts straight to the point because she's got schemes to run and marks to fleece.

「ぶっちゃけ全っ然気持ち良くねぇわ」
(To be completely blunt, that didn't feel good at all.)

If you look into the etymology of ぶっちゃけ (bucchake), it goes way deeper than just standard 90s youth slang.

The slang comes directly from the older verb 打ち明ける (buchi-akeru: to confide or speak frankly). The prefix ぶち (buchi-) has historical working-class roots in Tokyo, carrying an inherently aggressive, violent force: it is the same prefix found in ぶち壊す (buchi-kowasu: to smash to pieces) and ぶちのめす (buchi-nomesusu: to beat someone into the ground). When 90s Tokyo youth and gyaru subcultures contracted that verb into bucchake, it retained that same concussive energy: a conversational wrecking ball used to drop all polite social pretense.

The word carries the aggressive punch of old street slang, evolved into the soundtrack of 90s Tokyo consumerism.

In a way, that mirrors Jo'on's evolution as a Pestilence God.

In classical folklore, a pestilence god (疫病神, Yakubyougami) brought literal, biological contagion: cholera, smallpox, and physical fevers. Mamizou Futatsuiwa mentions in Lotus Eaters Chapter 62 that Jo'on used to spread infectious diseases in the past. But as society modernized, public sanitation improved and the ancient plagues faded. So her contagion adapted. In a capitalist world, the most devastating fever isn't physical sickness; it is the fever of runaway spending which leads to rapid financial ruin.

I find a fascinating parallel here with her evolution as a deity: her divinity and her vocabulary seem to mirror the exact same historical leap. Her godhood adapted from biological plagues to modern economic ruin, just as her speech carries roots of raw Edo physical violence adapted into the flashy, cynical slang of 90s street youth. In my eyes, she didn't become softer or refined; she just updated her delivery method for the concrete jungle.

...Ah, there goes my autism over analyzing a single word choice again. Damn it.

「やんねーよするわけないでしょ」
(I ain't doin' it, there's no way I'd do that, obviously!)

This one is beautiful. Raw instinct and defensive pride in a single sentence.

The first half is her raw gutter reflex: やんねーよ (Yannē yo).
The casual verb yaru (to do) becomes yaranai, slurs into yaranē, and drops the consonant into yannē. It is an immediate, unvarnished street bark: "I ain't doin' that!"

The second half is her immediate damage control: するわけないでしょ (Suru wake nai desho).
The instant that rough bark leaves her mouth, her brain panics at how unrefined and defensive she sounds. So mid-breath, she scrambles for composure and pivots into standard, dismissive valley-girl Japanese to save face: "There's no way I would do that, obviously!"

It's like slipping on your ass and immediately trying to make it look cool and intentional by doing impromptu breakdancing.

Localizing Shitamachi to San Andreas

Fukaya made another sharp observation in his essay: Standard Japanese (Hyōjungo) is an emotionless, inorganic language, noting that if the Meiji-era reformers who developed it intended for it to be used as modern synthetic computer voices, they had incredible foresight.

That is why my first draft felt off. I initially tried writing her with that standard, theatrical mean-girl voice: proper grammar, no dropped G's, and zero street slang. But inside a gritty game like San Andreas, it felt completely flat. Jo'on isn't a proper, scripted cartoon villainess; she's impulsive, unhinged, and loud.

When bringing Jo'on into GTA San Andreas, 95% of the dialogue I wrote is Jo'on talking directly to Shion. Nobody talks to their family in their public, customer-service voice. When she speaks to Shion in private, the fake-rich mask comes off.

In English, we don't have the exact particle system of Japanese, but we have a similar cultural divide:

Dropping G's ("runnin'," "fleecin'," "burnin'"), using street slang ("chump," "scrub," "peon"), and barking commands in that loud, bratty, high-pitched voice felt like the truest English equivalent to her raw Shitamachi grammar.

It preserves the gap moe:

If I just stuck to writing her as an over-the-top anime diva, it would have glossed over how rough and unrefined she actually is underneath.

She is an 80s extortionist who stole enough cash to dress like royalty, but can't stop talking like the gutter kid she's always been. And that's why, to me, she's unforgettable. I will one day delve deeper into the gap moe of the rest of her design.

For now, this explains my thought process in drafting and revising her dialogue three times over.