@nebulasreblogs said: Perhaps that 10% Just Some Guy came from that elixir that Jack's father used in an attempt to destroy the Evil, which instead gave it sapience and spawned Aku
I'm forever thinking about the fact that Aku's first ever words were "You! Thank you!" If nothing else, the potion gave him manners.
But nah—jokes aside, if we're looking at Aku as "90% evil, 10% just some guy," I don't think it was the potion that gave him that 10%. I think that, at the moment he gained life, he was still 100% pure evil. (Pure evil with good manners, but I guess manners must be morally neutral.)
I think it was time and experience. He started out as pure evil—but 17 years later, after fighting Jack, now he's pure evil... plus fear of death via magic sword—which i'm pretty sure is the first trait we see him possess that isn't "evil," "enjoying being evil," or "unexpectedly polite."
A few thousand years later, he's pure evil... plus guy who acts in fast food commercials, plus guy who has learned European fairy tales and wants to tell stories to children, plus guy who hates getting mud on the rug after it's been vacuumed, plus guy who's miserable and whiny and lethargic when he gets a cold, plus guy who does stupid victory dances when his enemy loses his sword, plus guy who knows how to use the phrase "this is a safe space," plus guy who thinks he has an account in the computer but honestly sounds pretty dubious about it and would have no idea how to locate it if presented with the computer, plus guy who hides in bed when he's depressed, plus guy who's unexpectedly stoked to find out he's a girl dad, plus guy who's polite to employees on the phone.
He violates as many promises as he can, and that's evil; but when an injured minion gives him good news, he rewards the minion by repairing his body, and that's not evil. Scaramouche insists Aku will pay off his bills like he's sure it's true, and if he's Aku's #1 assassin, he must have been working for him for long enough to see whether or not Aku actually pays off his debts and rewards his underlings—and so, he must be paying debts and rewarding underlings.
When he takes hostages, people do what he says for the hostages' safety, which means he must not have a reputation for killing all hostages so don't even bother giving him what he wants—which means, sometimes, he must let the hostages go.
He makes choices to be less evil out of self-interest, and I think he probably learned to do that with time. Because if he killed every hostage and never rewarded his assassins, eventually nobody would work for him.
Just within the fifty year span of the show, we see him go from guy who doesn't understand the purpose of stretching and how it works to guy who starts his mornings by stretching. We see him change over time.
The potion gave him life and personhood, and with personhood he gained the potential to be Just Some Guy. But the potion didn't give him guy-ness. He gained guy-ness with experience. He does Evil but now, after several thousand years of interacting with the world, he also just does Stuff. The purity of his evil has been diluted by the mundanity of existing in the world.
(You could also make the argument—as I've seen some people do—that Aku was never inherently evil; rather, he was just an unthinking thing that devoured with no moral alignment—is quicksand "evil"? is a tar pit "evil"?—and thus when he gained thought he could have been anything he wanted. But because he was told from birth that he's evil, that's what he became. The emperor told the poison-tree-monster that he meant to destroy him before the poison-tree-monster announced his name is "Evil."
Personally, I think there's room to textually support the argument, but "normal person comes to believe they're evil because they're told they were" doesn't compel me narratively the way "no this person actually was legitimately born evil" does. The first one is too realistic, it happens, there are people like that walking around right now. There's nobody who's born literally evil, and that fantastical element is what intrigues me. He's literally pure evil... and therefore, what are the limitations on his actions that humans don't have? He's literally pure evil... and therefore, how does he live a full successful life when he has to deal with the consequences of his own actions? How can he be pure evil and not destroy the things he wants to keep? How does he strike that balance, if, unlike humans, he doesn't have the free will to do good? He's literally pure evil... and therefore, is it possible for him to be anything else? How? Would he ever want to be? Why?)
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