In the fourth story arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, a unique neutral party appears, one that can relate to the author on a personal level: Rohan Kishibe, the manga artist.
Morioh Town is home to many odd and rather gifted individuals in the late 1990s, and none of them can compare to this prominent and ambitious manga artist. Rohan is even a stand user, but he uses Heaven's Door for research, not combat. He has better things to do than get into brawls as Josuke and Okuyasu do.
Art, At Any Cost
For years now, Rohan has been a highly successful manga artist, and his work routinely gets high praise from the critics and his readers alike. This makes Rohan something of a prodigy, and he has centered his entire life around this endeavor. He is the model of an obsessive artist, and he's not even in it for the money or fame. Rohan's house is fairly modest, and everything in it is geared toward his work, from movie memorabilia to art books and, of course, a spacious and well-stocked workroom. Rohan is a wanderer in body and mind, spending his time exploring new places like Japan's forests or museums, and he will even disregard his own safety or the law to find new sources of inspiration. So far, it appears he has gotten away with it, and the results speak for themselves.
Rohan is a ruthless but good-hearted artist, ready and willing to draw on any rich source of inspiration he can find, up to and including strangers' lives. But he doesn't sit down and interview them over tea; he expedites the process with his Stand, Heaven's Door. This humanoid Stand isn't a fighter; instead, it will open the target like a book, allowing Rohan to view every detail of the person's life. He can even write in new lines to modify that person's behavior, often along the lines of "I won't attack Rohan Kishibe." He once did this to Koichi Hirose, adding him as a character to his newest manga chapter in intimate detail.
All this makes Rohan rather aloof and somewhat conceited, and he generally looks down on everyone around him since he is a successful artist who can pry into other people's lives with impunity. It's a sort of superiority complex, and fortunately, he channels it to a constructive end. Still, it's likely that many of his readers and critics would hotly object if they learned how he gets his material. Heaven's Door is an invasion of privacy like the world has never seen.
Rohan Does Battle
Rohan would rather avoid battle or conflict, but sometimes, such chaos brings itself to him. He went too far when he pried open Koichi's life, and Koichi, Josuke and Okuyasu cornered Rohan in his house to protect their privacy. At first, Rohan had the edge since he could modify his three opponents' minds, but after getting a little motivation (having his hair insulted), Josuke turned the tables and buried Rohan under his bookshelves, incapacitating him for a time. Not even that defeat dampened Rohan's ambitions or superiority complex, however.
Later, Rohan encountered a strange boy named Ken Oyanagi who had a hole in his left cheek, and was challenged to a game of Janken (rock-paper-scissors). Ken was a Stand user, and his Stand, Boy II Man, could steal a person's soul if they lost a best-of-five Janken game to him. Rohan, though annoyed at the kid, accepted the challenge after getting harassed about it, and found himself facing a serious challenge. He won the first two rounds, then lost the next two, and thus Heaven's Door was too weak to affect Ken. After winning a mental battle, Rohan managed to win the final game and with it, the match.
Rohan rather dislikes Josuke, and this antipathy was justified when Josuke challenged Rohan to a crooked game of dice. Josuke was using Mikitaka Hazekura the shapeshifter as dice, and Rohan very nearly caught on to Josuke's cheating during the game. That, and Mikitaka's cover was starting to come apart.
Rohan's most frustrating stand battle was against the parasitic Stand Cheap Trick, which could attach itself to a victim and turn them into its user. But it's all downside -- Cheap Trick will kill its user if anyone looks at their back, and Rohan "caught" Cheap Trick in his own home when a hapless guest visited. Rohan awkwardly made his way down the street, flattening his back to the wall and other surfaces to prevent certain death. He ends up in Reimi's haunted alley, and once Koichi sees Rohan's back, Cheap Trick tries to transfer to him, only for it to get disoriented, then get dragged off by the ghostly hands. At last, it's gone, and Rohan is free.
Finally, Rohan had to face Yoshikage Kira's final ability, Bites the Dust, during the climax of this story arc. He faced Hayato, a boy who was on to Kira's secret identity and powers, but Rohan set off Bites the Dust when certain conditions were met (such as Hayato telling him Kira's identity). It took several tries, but at last, Roha, Josuke and the others broke free of Kira's trap, and they took him on one last time.
