So as part of a much longer ask about why humans in Aku's future are at different technological/cultural stages that should be centuries apart, I got asked,
Maybe its a reflection of when he got to each part of the world…? But why wait so long in going from feudal east asia to north america? Don't tell me the ocean was a barrier? 😭
And guess what! I have an answer!
To start with (and you, Person Who Asked This, haven't reached this episode yet, so i'm just gonna give you a minor spoiler): yes, actually, it DID take Aku a long time to conquer the world. There's an episode where we learn that he got a robot army because taking over the world was going too slowly for his tastes. Meaning:
by Aku's own measure, taking over the world took forever. He wasn't "waiting," he was SLOW.
Aku didn't finish conquering the world until sometime AFTER he had a killer robot army. So depending on what era you think Jack was born and how long you think it'll be before we have fully autonomous killer androids, Aku's global conquest took anywhere from 500-1500 years.
The evidence suggests that, until Aku got his robots, he was trying to conquer the world without an army. as in ALONE. as in ONE GUY. is it any wonder he took so long?
if an invader conquers a city, sets up an oppressive government and establishes a military force to enforce its new laws, and then the government+military moves 100 miles away because the government+military is just one single person with laser eyes, do you know what that means? that city is now un-conquered, my friend.
true, along with himself Aku also had a smattering of dubiously solid shadow demon things he can summon up—but they're provably easy to destroy, it would not be hard to mount a revolt against them if the civilians knew that Aku himself wasn't around to back them up.
plus a few bounty hunters and eventually scientists he could bribe into working for him, but like?? unlike every other human population, Aku has no "home nation"—or city, or tribe, or even so much as a goddamn polycule—on whose loyalty he can unquestionably depend. literally no one, anywhere, wants him in charge! every human who works for him does so either out of greed, or fear.
and the fearful ones will be looking for an opportunity to escape or undermine him; and the greedy ones will only stick around until the incalculable atrocities aku's committing finally get to their consciences, or else they catch wind of Aku's tendency to backstab his hired labor rather than pay them.
Without a loyal army, he's fighting an uphill battle. and he didn't have that army for centuries. not only is everyone in front of him trying to stop his advance any way possible, but also everyone behind him is trying to escape his grasp. he probably had to keep backtracking to re-conquer places.
the ocean wasn't the barrier; the process of trying to conquer a WHOLE FUCKING PLANET, and ALONE, was the barrier.
So: that's all stuff that can be plausibly extrapolated from canon.
Now we're moving into headcanon territory, which is only tangentially related to your questions but I've wanted to share this for a while: My Big Fancy Map Of How I Think Aku Conquered The World!!
0 - START HERE. Japan. I don't think Aku cared very much for Japan, he didn't have a good time there.
1, 2 - from a global conquest starting point in Japan there's really only three options: invade Korea, invade China, or invade the Philippines. China is scary as hell; Japan's experiences with war with Korea were, let's leave it at "bad"; so: the Philippines, and then on to Indonesia.
3 - Australia's the biggest chunk of land Aku's faced up to this point and he's still a newb at conquest, he glances off the north coast and moves on to some more islands.
4 - loops back to finish off Australia.
5 - you'd think that if Japan is Aku's base of operations, he'd then go back to home base and from there head west into Korea & China. But I don't think Japan was Aku's base of operations. I'll have more on that in a sequel post. because this post is long.
The great advantage of starting off by conquering islands is that it makes it much easier to control how much information leaks out of your new little empire, because no one's escaping your empire without boats. Which is even harder for them to do if you can control the weather. At this point in canon we know that Aku's been making periodic trips to mainland, and that at least as far as east Africa people have heard about—and done business with—a "great evil spirit"; never mind how many people the little prince told about Aku during his travels. It's probably safe to say that, at minimum, China & Korea are VERY, VERY aware that the island empire worryingly close to their coasts has been conquered by some kind of gigantic malevolent shadow. But they probably know very little more than that, because not many people are escaping Japan and anybody who sails over for recon ain't returning.
So everybody's nervously watching toward the east for Aku to invade.
They don't expect him from the southwest.
6 - canon fact: Aku does not seem to enjoy the cold! I think he made the classic "invade Russia in the winter" blunder. Conquered central Russia, un-conquered central Russia, angrily retreated to China. It doesn't help that, depending on what century you think this is, most of the turf north of the Silk Road is still dominated by nomadic peoples, and—listen, Aku's basically a kaiju with a more refined vocabulary. It's a lot easier for Godzilla to knock down Tokyo than it is for him to step on 500 individual galloping horses. Aku has a much easier time conquering settled cities than nomadic tribes. So he goes "fuck the Turks and the horses they rode in on" and moves south.
7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 - this is where i think Aku starts buckling under the strain of trying to conquer the entire planet as one guy, a handful of shadows, and a revolving door of mercenaries who hate him. even the fucking turks have an empire now?? He's grumpy, this is too hard, invading & pillaging a new place is fun but buckling down and establishing rule over a region isn't. It's a lot easier to smash a kingdom than it is to grip a kingdom & keep that grip. He's always been pretty liberal with the eye lasers but increasingly he finds himself going "fuck it, this city can't rebel against my rule after i move on if none of them are left alive."
it's just a miserable, centuries-long, never-ending slog across india, the middle east, east europe, east africa, central africa... the only thing keeping him going is his inborn conviction that he's to be the master of this world. that, and the fact that he's the biggest asshole that's ever existed.
14 - hits the westernmost point of Africa. he now "rules" an empire stretching from japan to senegal.
please picture aku standing at the very tip of point almadies staring out at the atlantic ocean with a sense of weary triumph—tired, yet determined, and wiser and stronger from his many long years of unending battle.
now imagine somebody reminding him there's another couple untouched continents and making him cry.
15, 16 - finishes up the southern half of Africa before tackling the rest of Europe.
Intermission (6 part TWO) - he finally takes the northern half of eurasia, as well as russia. probably in like, june. he's learned his lesson.
he's now conquered all of afro-eurasia and australia—but we're using "conquered" very loosely here. at this point in history he doesn't really have a government or a country of any kind. what "conquered" really means right now is that he's ensured no one else has a government or country. he's crushed all major kingdoms, broken up all major empires, killed every dynasty of note, slaughtered every army of any size...
and a single really determined kaiju might not be able to maintain rule over four continents, but a single really determined kaiju CAN maintain chaos. any time a population center starts trying to mount a revolt or reestablish local rule, he just, swings by and smashes them again!
but that's A LOT of territory with A LOT of population centers that are all constantly trying to get their feet back under themselves. it's next to impossible for aku to make any forward progress while aku's trapped in a neverending cycle of suppressing everyone else's forward progress.
but eventually he makes the jump across the atlantic.
17, 18, 19, 20, 21 - hit the east coast of brazil, swooped south around the andes, headed up the west coast and into central america. depending on when aku reaches the americas (as well as how much he disrupted europe's colonization plans), he may or may not still have to contend with the inca & aztec empires. if he does, that's what he uses as his justification for going from the south up rather than from the north down: take out the big empires first, and then all he'll have to worry about is some nomadic tribes and then some people who live up in the tundras, no big deal.
(translation: he does NOT want to deal with more nomads and tundras, he is SICK AND FUCKING TIRED of nomads and tundras, it's russia ALL OVER AGAIN he can't do it he just can't do it he's gonna crawl back in the pit of hate for a thousand years don't touch him don't talk to him don't even LOOK at him.)
22 - if hitting the bermuda triangle will let him put off heading north then by god bring on the triangle
23, 24 - now, we don't know how much colonization happened in this setting, but we do know colonization happened, because there's a bunch of white people in the american southwest and one character references the US civil war. apparently while aku was chewing his way through the ottoman empire they were still busy shipping pilgrims to new england. sure. whatever.
but i have to imagine plunging the entire eastern hemisphere into interminable crisis held back the european colonization of the americas to some degree; meaning the industrialization of the US is even more concentrated on the east coast than it otherwise would've been. so while they're building in the east and moving west, aku slides up california to conquer the west and move east.
THE CONCLUSION - and eventually he gets around to the FUCKING tundras. and now he's conquered the world yahoo yippee.
but a caveat: he's conquered the world... once. at one point or another he has held every major population center on the planet, but he hasn't yet held them at the same time. taking over the americas means he's utterly lost his grip on east asia by now—if he even held it at all by the time he reached brazil. how much of europe and africa is still under his sway? how many of the people he bribed/bullied into maintaining his rule are still ruling—how many have been overthrown or killed or just decided to declare themselves the rulers in his absence? when's the last time he visited australia??
somewhere in the americas he realized that if something didn't change he'd end up spending all eternity circling the globe like a dog chasing its tail trying to re-conquer his lost lands while the lands he just left behind slipped out of his grip again. and humans are getting more dangerous. their gunpowder weapons are shooting bigger bullets and/or a whole bunch of bullets simultaneously. they're making bombs and trains and steel ships. possibly nukes?? and listen—aside from the sword, nothing of this world can harm Aku, but the show establishes multiple times over that there's plenty in this world that can hurt Aku, and the humans are getting pretty good at hurting.
this is the point at which we're told in canon that aku grew impatient with the pace of his conquest—and got himself a fucking robot army.
after that, he could finally switch from playing whack-a-mole with human resistance groups to consolidating global rule under his name.
idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????
Gardening nerd take: Fruit trees are constantly being pollinated by whatever random cultivar is in the next orchard over or whatever wild version of the tree they were domesticated from just happens to be growing in the woods nearby. The hard part isn't getting a variety of different kinds of apples, it's getting the same kind of apple consistently. What growers really want is an apple that's tasty, has a nice texture, keeps for a long time in storage, and isn't too fragile to transport to stores far away from the orchard.
This is why most fruit trees, along with loads of other kinds of ornamental and edible plants, aren't grown from seed. The rootstock (a hardy variety of your tree that may have some bonus qualities like disease resistance) is grafted onto the scion (a cutting of a tree that produces a known cultivar of the fruit you're after). So the apples you buy at the store come from clones of a really good, or at least really reliable and profitable, apple tree.
You can actually get funky fresh with it if you want and graft different trees in the same family together, so you can have an apple where every branch bears a different variety or a fruit salad tree where every branch is a different kind of stone fruit. You can also crossbreed certain fruits to create hybrids!
Americans happen to be able to see more variety with our apples because we produce them on such a massive scale that we've performed feats of engineering like building huge oxygen-controlled warehouses to store them for longer. Europeans actually breed a lot of super cool fruit varieties too, but like us, most of your available fruit in the big grocery chains is probably whatever grows biggest and keeps longest.
Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in
TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.
"'I don't know' isn't an answer" alright man then I'll just. Fuckin. Enter my philosophical mind-palace and check the fuckin akashic records. Real quick lemme just catch and cook and eat the Salmon of All Knowledge. Tell me ur question again so I can real quick climb to the highest branches of the Yggdrasil and lay it at the feet of Freda the all-wise Queen of Heaven. Dickhead.
Grace making huge advencements in the Eridian medical field.
Turns out there's a childhood disease to the tune of measles that erodes the carapace, and the first symptom shows up about a week before any actual damage is caused.
Grace comments to Rocky that one of his students seems to be turning oxidisation-green. About a week later that student has to be hospitalised for this illness.
Eridian scientists realise pretty quick that Grace can detect the illness long before any of their equipment can, and when caught that early it is much, much easier and safer to treat.
Not only is Grace celebrated in the scientific field for his knowledge and for his part in saving the world, he becomes a beacon of hope for doctors and parents and children on Erid.
I asked for a pastry at the coffee shop. When I raised my card up to pay, he simply said "you're good." and waved it away. I wondered why. I wondered what made him think I deserved to have my order be free. Sparing me those two dollars.
Sitting down at the table, I remembered the scars on my arm. The universal signifier of "This Kid Needs Help." Maybe his kindness was only out of pity. He saw those and assumed there was some great misery and wanted to offer me some relief. It's generally good to be kind to people who are hurting. But I wasn't hurting that bad.
The thing is, there is some great misery. People generally aren't doing that great. There is a great misery within me and within him and within everyone, and some people notice the pain, some people express it, others don't. But we all suffer from something.
It doesn't matter if someone seems to deserve some relief. Everyone needs it. Everyone is suffering constantly. Some more than others, but still. This Kid Needs Help applies to everyone.
Thirty minutes later, I went to get a second pastry, intending to pay and leave a tip this time. It was the same cashier. As he reached to grab it for me, I saw scars on his arm.
But it doesn't really matter. He'd deserve a tip anyway. Because it's never just us hurting.
