I think people put a bit too much stock in Jamato's reliability when it comes to his opinion of Spoke.
Like, to be clear, Spoke has done some shit. He killed some innocent people, he lied to his best friend, and he lost control very quickly of the little kingdom he'd assembled for himself. He also chunk-banned Wifies for no reason. And was generally a menace in the early days.
He is not, however, worse than Ash, or even comparable to him. Hell, he's not worse than Wemmbu or Flame either. He has done less damage overall. And he's just objectively less selfish (dude keeps giving up anything and everything he has without any prompting whatsoever just because there are people who look like they need it more, come on).
But Jamato obviously doesn't see it like that, and he never has. He always attributed more importance to Spoke than he should have. Example of what I mean, here's an extract from his journal from back in season 1 (Screenshots kindly provided by @arsonistfriday):
To be clear, this is after Jamato abandoned Spoke for "the sake of the server". The two of them were hardly friends by this point. Jamato already considered Spoke dangerous. But he also decided to choose him over the safety of the entire server, and the only reason why that decision didn't doom everyone is that the exploits he showed off were patched up.
In one way or another, he always puts Spoke on a pedestal. He's stuck in the past even more than Spoke himself, which is a feat. And a lot of the things he says about Spoke more aptly apply to him.
It's not a coincidence that Jamato, not Spoke, is the one who, in the end, re-made the Invisible Mafia. That is what NULL is. An army of nameless and faceless soldiers that follow his every command while he sits back, all cushy and worries only about giving speeches. Jamato's hands are clean because, like Ash, he uses those under him to kidnap and kill thousands.
He is what everyone seems to think that Spoke is. He is what he thinks that Spoke is.
And he refuses to consider that there could be people more impactful than Spoke (Ash, Lettuce, Arachnid, Cindercrest, even Flame and Wemmbu, honestly), because what would it mean then that he was so willing to give up the entire world for Spoke? And what would it mean for his role of "protector" that he never did a single thing about any of those other threats? That he still isn't doing a single thing about them, instead of wasting his time going after people like Planet?
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