I don't send many Samurai Jack asks but do you think he gets cold? His outfit, especially with the geta kinda send me. His feet have to be killing him and just judging by the scenes where he's got his kimono off... I think its just the one layer? Worried for him. If you're cold he's cold, let the samurai into your house.
maybe you should send more
thrilled to inform you that he does, in fact, get cold.
more than once
and yeah he's just running around in the one layer. which, given how kimono are supposed to be worn, means he's basically running around in his underwear at all times. idiot tried to climb mount fucking everest in his undies.
ooh what I am getting out of that last update is that Ford didn't realize that Bill thinks he's a virgin- and now he is realizing that Bill thought he just lost his virginity kgjfdghf - what a wild ass turn of events. Local old man didn't think he'd be hooking up with his enemy (who is now a lonely, middle aged virgin)
Yup! Eve if Ford had really thought it through beforehand he might have assumed Bill had at least had partners throughout his life on Euclydia- he certainly never expected to be Bill's "first"!
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.
i keep sending you asks about it instead of watching the show but i generate a lotta thoughts as i go- anyways, do you think jack would be salty that the only other person who knows anything about Japanese culture is Aku? (I am also fresh from the "oh, sushi!! CHONCH" scene. Jack, thats just fish. Girl misses home so bad all he asks is for sea food and something vaguely soy sauce adjacent- granted I am giving this scene way too much leniency.) I think you've already addressed this but I also really see this getting to Jack on a deeper level. He can't reference anything really. His own culture is an inside reference he's sharing with AKU of all people. He's already feeling alone out here.
hmmm wait a few more episodes.
but yeah—you've probably already seen the posts where I mention it before, but there's so much potential in the fact that Jack and Aku are the only two people from their particular time & place left. They were born and grew up in a kingdom that not only no longer exists, but by the looks of it has been totally erased. (...again, wait a few episodes.)
But—just how much was Aku born already knowing, and/or how much did he pick up from the humans he was oppressing before he totally quashed any detectable signs of their original culture? We don't know a lot about the beliefs Jack was raised with, we don't know whether they're the same as real world historical Japanese beliefs, but we don't know they aren't, so,
Does Aku understand Shinto beliefs? Does he know Buddhist prayers?
I think that would probably fuck Jack up the most, if it turned out that somewhere under the surface Aku has roughly the same theological understanding of the world as Jack. That doesn't mean he practices these religions, that doesn't mean he worships kami or recites prayers or anything of the sort—
but like, for instance—if Aku were to decide to systematically destroy shrines because he's certain the spirits/gods they're dedicated to are opposed to his conquest and he'd rather declare war on them than beg their favor, that would mean that, first, he has to believe in those spirits/gods. If Aku were to trap somebody's soul in the Pit of Hate for all time because he doesn't want their death to mean they escape his eternal punishment by reincarnating into a new more pleasant life, that would mean that, first, he has to believe in reincarnation. Even if he doesn't worship, that doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't believe. He believes in Cronus. He believes in Set. Who's to say he doesn't believe in Benzaiten or Ebisu? (Hell, considering what the setting's like, who's to say he hasn't met them?)
How much do Aku and Jack's memories of their "childhood" culture have in common? (of course Aku was never a "child"—but he still has a place where he was born that shaped his understanding of the world.) An internal calendar of holidays and festivals no longer celebrated? fairy tales? Do they share superstitions about lucky and unlucky numbers, about sneezing and sun showers and whistling at night and the first dream of the year?
Some of these things might now be universal—if Aku has done things a certain way since before recorded history, now everybody does them that way. And some of these things might even be reversed from Jack's understanding—if the number 4 was considered unlucky because it sounded the same as the word for "death," maybe in the future it's considered a lucky number because mister Dark Lord Of All Darkness considers death omens lucky.
But how many things do only Jack and Aku remember?
something I'm kinda wondering is the opposite?? What are some mpreg tropes (or maybe just fandom tropes in general??) that you don't like?
I'm generally not interested in sitting around trying to think up a list of things I dislike and then spending my time writing about how much I dislike them when I could be spending that time writing about things I like.
In high school I wrote what's ended up a 500k word mpreg fic inspired by the fact that most of the other mpreg fics I'd encountered in that fandom were woefully OOC and that irritated me. So I'll give you that: I don't like things that are OOC.
I've been watching Samurai Jack, and something that's been bugging me for multiple episodes is the amount of time spent on setup, establishing surroundings, and plot? It took me a while to realize that it's less filler and more just a product of its time. Cuz nowadays, shows rush to get to the point as quickly as possible, often getting canceled after season 1. They'd never have time to get there if they'd spent 5 minutes on setup each episode. But samurai jack has 5 seasons and clearly had the time and attention needed to design all of these aliens and write all of this setup. It's interesting to watch in a post "seasonal drop, and yes the show is canceled" era of television 😅
It's not a "product of its time," either. It was a freak then, too.
Compare it to other kids' cartoons released around the same time, several of which had heavily overlapping creative teams with Samurai Jack: Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Dexter's Lab, Fairly Oddparents, Invader Zim, Kids Next Door...
THOSE are the shows that are NORMAL for their time period. All of them "rush to get to the point." Dialogue from the first 5 seconds to the last 5 seconds.
The slow pacing in Samurai Jack is EXTREMELY atypical for its time. I'd say it's extremely atypical for ANY time. If it wasn't backed by one of the biggest names in animation, it never could have been made. This isn't "normal early 2000s" animation, this is "avant garde art house shit" animation.
It was, essentially, an art piece by a director who was SO respected in the animation industry that Cartoon Network just went "as long as you don't spill any blood you can do whatever the hell you want, man." There's interviews floating around where artists who worked on the show talk about how Genndy Tartakovsky's explicitly stated goal was to produce movie-quality animation on a TV cartoon budget, and all the tricks they pulled out to achieve that quality level.
This is the guy who went on to create a cartoon about a caveman and a T-rex from 2019-2022, during the canceled-in-one-season streaming era—and it took until season 2 to have dialogue. This is just what he's like.
It's better to look at Samurai Jack not as "each episode takes five minutes of setup before the plot gets rolling," but rather as "each episode has at least five minutes of hardcore #aesthetic where you're intended to sit there and marinade in the vibes and admire the stunning background art and inventive character designs, and then unfortunately we've gotta get to the plot; but we'll get the plot out of the way and back to the art as fast as possible." The animation isn't a vehicle to deliver the plot; the plot is a tool to justify all the cool animation sequences the director wanted to do. I can GUARANTEE you that Aku wasn't designed as a shapeshifter because Genndy thought "that'd make him a good villain," but because he thought "that'd make him SO fun to animate."
Here's a fun game to play: with each episode, try to guess which animation sequence was the one around which the whole episode plot was written just so they'd get an excuse to draw it. There's always something. in some episodes it's really, really fucking obvious. (remember this comment when you reach the shinobi fight; you'll see what i mean.)
You're right that none of it is "filler," but I'm talking at an episode level rather than a scene level. Filler implies an ongoing plotline, with "unnecessary" episodes filling gaps between the plot episodes to deliberately slow down the plot's progress. For four seasons, Jack didn't HAVE an ongoing plotline. (season 5 is only different because the show was canceled and picked up 13 years later with the explicit goal of concluding the story in 10 episodes. if it hadn't been canceled, it probably woulda kept doing the same thing forever.)
Although the "kill Aku and get back to the past" frame narrative makes it SOUND like the show's gonna have a quest-oriented forward-moving plotline, in reality it's just as episodic as other kids' cartoons of the time. "Jack has another day looking for a time portal" is a self-contained storyline with no impact on future episodes just like a "Spongebob has another day flipping burgers at work" episode would be.
Aside from a couple two-parter episodes, and one (one) guy who's introduced in season 1 and pops up a couple times in later seasons, between episode 3 and episode 53 you could shuffle all Samurai Jack's episodes and watch then in any order and not miss a single thing or be confused at all.
Which, until about the 2010s, was usually how kids' cartoons were designed and aired; the one sense in which Samurai Jack is a "product of its time" is that it came before American kids' cartoons commonly had ongoing episode-to-episode plotlines, and in fact creators were pressured not to do that because it'd "confuse kids" when the show was (inevitably) aired out of order.
(like, one of my favorite cartoons of the time (buzz lightyear of star command, 2000) has a villain who—based on the order I saw the episodes in—was introduced, then captured; and a few months later he came back, and was killed; and a few months after that he was back in another episode, and was killed; and a few months later he was back. and i was just like "sure" because that's how cartoons worked at the time. as an adult i found out that this villain's episodes were aired out of order from how they'd been produced. if you put them in the proper order... he STILL dies and comes back to life several episodes later with no explanation. there was an entire episode with him i never saw as a kid; i couldn't tell i'd "missed" one because the episodes had no connection to each other and none of them explained how he'd come back from the dead.)
A FEW kids' cartoons had ongoing plots. Like, Beast Wars (1996) had a loose one; but it was 1/2 aimed at kids and 1/2 aimed at grown up Transformers fans from the 80s. One of the only examples of a contemporary show with any sort of plot progress that "sticks" was Invader Zim, also 2001; and even then, its plot progress was "in season 2, we might passingly mention something that happened in the season 1 finale." And that was pushing the envelope for the time. Invader Zim has multiple episodes that end with the main characters irreversibly mutated/mangled or has a year/decades pass, and the next episode doesn't even mention it, they're back in the same 6th grade classroom and fine.
Kids' anime had ongoing plots, and a few years after Samurai Jack some anime-style American cartoons started adopting ongoing plots—think Teen Titans to a minor extent, and Avatar to a much greater extent. But, for context, if you look at early fan reactions to the first few Gravity Falls episodes and at Alex Hirsch talking about the production of the show, even in 2012 a kids' cartoon having plot progress was seen as pretty revolutionary. Like some early GF fans were expressing disbelief when a line of dialogue in episode 4 referenced an event in episode 3 because cartoons didn't DO that.
So yeah, that's all valuable to understand when watching Samurai Jack for the first time: 1) don't get frustrated at the slow plot progress, because it isn't "slow," it's non-existent, each episode resets to the status quo and you're intended to watch for the journey not the destination; and 2) the animation doesn't support the plot, the plot supports the animation, so if you wanna fully experience what the show is trying to give you you've gotta be paying as much attention to the slow setup segments as to the action segments.
i really want to ask about nacho. How did a solemn character get to be called that. Is that an in story nickname? Or just your nickname for the character?
So like I mentioned in the tags, his real name is Ignacio. Comes from Ignatius, related to Latin "ignis" which means "fire." real badass name. He's a professional hit man, a real doomy-gloomy brooder type; and on top of that is not only psychic but also one of the strongest psychics in the known world.
There's another hit man, guy named Samuels, "South Dakota" Samuels. He's from Arkansas. He and Ignacio unwittingly get hired to take out the same target. (Real unpopular guy.) They cross paths while stalking the target, Ignacio tries to pull some psychic tricks to scare Samuels into backing off. Instead it just sort of impresses him. Now he thinks Ignacio is cool. Ignacio's not used to not scaring people so he agrees to team up and split the pay rather than fight over who gets to bring this scrub's head in. A month later they're operating as a team.
Nacho is, in fact, a real nickname for "Ignacio." That's where the food item got its name: Nacho's Especiales, named for their inventor Ignacio Anaya. So Samuels, who just can't be intimidated by Ignacio, starts calling him Nacho. Clients are slightly awed that Samuels gets away with that.
A few years later South Dakota Samuels and Ignacio retire from the wetwork biz, move to a small town where no one knows who they are, and get a reputation as the helpful friendly big guy down the street who used to be a soldier or something like that, and his spooky reclusive husband.
