Okay I don't get it, the series hypes up Aku as this big unbelieably evil being and, yeah he's a dick...

Okay I don't get it, the series hypes up Aku as this big unbelieably evil being and, yeah he's a dick, but he's really not that bad, he seems actually fair as a ruler and doesn't really do many terrible things. I mean there's been human rulers in real life with way less that are far, FAR more terrible than he has been.

>t. Aku

>Open up Earth as a galactic waypoint and trade-station
>Allows sentient beings to run free and keep their cultures

Is... Is Aku the good guy?

I wonder who could be behind these posts.

I like season 5, but so far I don't like how not menacing Aku has been. What made him so great before was that he'd be over the top comical like "THICC,"but then would be horrifying like his graveyard fight. So far he hasn't really felt scary beyond destroying an army, but even that felt a bit muted due to him just rolling over them.

I mean, not really any worse than your average pro immigration politician

In his defense on that, he's kind of depressed and doesn't feel much more need to be active. His fear of Jack is keeping him cooped up.

Hell, after bowling over Scotsman's army he just kinda sighs and groans. Dude doesn't have it in him anymore.

He's murdered most of what's good in the world and made a haven for villains. If you think Aku is good, user, I think that means you're a villain.

Aku redemption arc when?

He only destroyed people who opposed him

Someone didn't watch the last episode.

Having Sweden's immigration policy doesn't make you the good guy.

He makes people build shrines of him, then use them as slave labor to spin them around.

MOTHER FUCKER WHO'S DRAWING THIS SHIT

You forget that this was a cartoon network cartoon. The kinofags like to pretend that SJ wasn't ever a cartoon for children, and essentially just a vehicle for telling silly cartoon stories. I don't think Genndy unironically cared about the long-form story. Aku was only ever "evil" enough for the general scenario to exist, and outside of that was intended to be funny.

>*autistic screeching*

What did he mean by this?

Aku is cosmic horror/Lovecraft abomination.

In general, Aku is an unstoppable killing machine: only divine magic/blessed items like Jack's sword can harm him, let alone kill him.

He's also pure 100% evil to the point that the original series did SEVERAL episodes where it is established that goodness is a concept he is completely unable to wrap his head around.

That being said, Aku is a cosmic horror/Lovecraft villain and as such, is not a hands off tyrant that delegates ruling the world to subordinates. Partly due to laziness and partly due to it being "beneath him" to do all of the day to day tyranny.

But most of all, Aku is genre-savvy enough to know you can't be an evil overlord and have everyone under your boot, without either going bored with having no real threats to you. Or pissing everyone off to the point that eventually, everyone revolts against you because they'd rather die fighting you than live another day under your hellish regime.

As a result, Aku allows regions of Earth to go relatively untouched and unmolested, along with not going 100% conquest on the planet. He does so to provide hope spots for the population, to allow them to think live isn't hell on earth so that A. Aku can break them/conquer them at a later date at his leisure or B. allow people enough hope to get them to be productive subjects/get through the day without rebelling in mass because there is no other way

>Aku is cosmic horror/Lovecraft abomination.
No he is not. You can perceive Aku, he can speak to you, you can know his motives. There is something that can beat him. That is not a lovecraftian horror

>Literally made of pure evil
>Sets up a global system with the goal of creating as much suffering for as many people as possible forever
>Not that bad

You're right. But he is a FRAGMENT of one.

Did Aku ever violate the NAP?

Every hour of every day since the late Feudal Era of Japan.

I bet you everyone on the show uses doublethink to explain to themselves how what Aku's doing is different.

Destroyed a Forrest but left one tree as a reminder that this was a once beautiful place and that he was responsible

Really made me think over villiany

They shot him with a poison arrow. Thus violating the NAP first

But he was destroying Japan, and if it wasn't for the arrow in the first place, he wouldn't be alive at all.

Well, he specifically searches the universe for criminals, slavers, and other assorted monsters and asks them to make their home on Earth and makes the local's lives hell.

In response to Aku destroying their homes and people with his tree-spikes. They were trying to stop him from destroying their homes, something he did for literally no reason.

looks like we got a couple of Aku sympathizers

you are too full of Aku's hatred to see the truth

>Aku is an unstoppable killing machine: only divine magic/blessed items like Jack's sword can harm him, let alone kill him.
Well, we don't know this for sure, but the magic/blessed items sure seem to do the job pretty easily. If Jack didn't hesitate EVERY time they've faced each other he would never be in the future in the first place.

>actually fair as a ruler and doesn't really do many terrible things.
wanna know how you don't watch the show

I mean hes no dark force, but hes still evil, like Stalin basically

Aku's pretty much Nyarlathotep

fpbp

t. ashi

>Well, we don't know this for sure,
We pretty much know this for sure since only the elementals from the Gangster episode could keep him at bay and Jack's sword could harm him.

Anything that's been used against him, bullets, swords, monsters, hasn't been able to even touch him unless powered up by a magic/divine force.

We haven't seen much of the other scraps he's gotten into over the thousands of years he's ruled. Demongo's trapped souls were capable of being substancial threats somehow, I doubt all of them had magic weaponry.

>Demongo's trapped souls were capable of being substantial threats somehow,
Because they were criminals against Aku's law, not direct threats to Aku himself.

Remember that the Scotsman had a bounty almost as high as Jack's at one point, but he still died instantly against Aku.

>Inb4 he was old
But his magic sword wasn't, and that was still destroyed as well.

>but he still died instantly against Aku.
Yeah as a crippled 90 year old man.

Well it's not as if a weal chair bound century old Scot could put up any fight against anyone who can move, even with a magic sword.
Also, anyone else think that it's kind of stupid that the MAHGIK ROONS sword could get broken by a simple explosion? I mean, Jack's most powerful attack with his super-god-mode-indestructible sword didn't even leave a scratch, and Aku has all kind of magic but he isn't stronger than Jack's sword.

Aku isn't even a real "entity" so to speak. He's a fragment of a much larger being of pure evil, disorder, and chaos that nearly destroyed reality itself, and the gods just barely sealed it away, though they forget a single piece of it, which fell away and was hidden from them until it evolved into Aku. Aku is a piece of the personality from that omnipotent god of evil, and while he's become his own man, his existence is intrinsic to that former chaos being. At the end of the day, he's not so much independent as he is instinctively acting how that fragment of the god's personality would act.

By now, Aku has become lethargic and tired of ruling. He's all powerful, but can't stop Jack's sword. He's annihilated everything else in existence capable of defeating him that isn't a god itself, and now he's bored. Jack is running away from him, and everyone else runs away from Aku. It can get boring being the unstoppable god of your own world.

Once Aku realizes Jack lost his sword, he will kick into high gear and hunt him down, because Jack without the sword can't hold a candle to Aku's power.

He's responsible for all the stuff we see his minions doing. In the first episode we see women giving birth then having their babies immediately taken away to be brainwashed and killed if they're weak. That's pretty evil.

Is... Is Sweden the bad guy?

>a simple explosion

Nuclear eye lasers from a demigod of disorder and destructive chaos, user.

Aku's weakness isn't magic weapons, but divine weapons.

Aku doesn't give a fuck about magic, because he's the strongest sorcerer there is. The Scotsman's sword may've brought him back to life, but it can't hurt Aku because it wasn't given to him by the Gods specifically to beat Aku.

Jack's was.

>it can't hurt Aku
I guess we'll never know for sure. Celtic Gods might not be as tough as the major 3 gods of reality but I doubt they wouldn't hurt.

This whole thread is made of pure autism. Aku is a cartoonish villain in a cartoon for kids, 10% 'evul' and 90% silly. Any deeper digging is clutching at straws.

>Open up Earth as a galactic waypoint and trade-station
>Allows sentient beings to run free and keep their cultures

>Is... Is Aku the good guy?

You're close to breaking the conditioning, user. It's correct that Aku and real life globalism are the same. The reason they're the same though isn't because they're both good but because they're both evil. Just because you're virtue signaling about helping out refugees and eliminating borders to bring everyone together into a one world utopia doesn't mean you're a good guy.

jack's sword can't hurt innocents

>it wasn't given to him by the Gods specifically to beat Aku.
How do you know?

You're saying Scotsman's sword is sapient?

>anyone else think that it's kind of stupid that the MAHGIK ROONS sword could get broken by a simple explosion? I mean, Jack's most powerful attack with his super-god-mode-indestructible sword didn't even leave a scratch, and Aku has all kind of magic but he isn't stronger than Jack's sword.

I think you're "kind of stupid" for expecting A can't destroy C just because A can't destroy B and B can't destroy C. Real life itself doesn't work that way. Hydrofluoric acid eats through metal and metal cuts through plastic but hydrofluoric acid doesn't eat through plastic and plastic doesn't cut metal. This isn't any different from Jack's sword harms Aku and Aku breaks Scotsman's claymore but Jack's sword doesn't break Scotsman's claymore and Scotsman's claymore doesn't harm Aku.

A sword is an inanimate object, not an innocent. Breaking a sword != harming an innocent. Stabbing an innocent person = harming an innocent. Jack's sword didn't fail to break Scotsman's claymore due to not being able to harm an innocent, it failed to break Scotsmans claymore because the claymore's magic protected it. This doesn't contradict the claymore breaking against Aku, see acid / metal / plastic example above.

Magic blessings aren't real life either, dumbass.

You wouldn't be able to compare magic blessings to real life if they were the same thing. Learn how to use analogies, retard.

I get that, but it feels underwhelming when he's only had 2 scenes 5 episodes in.

Only the mentally deficient need to make analogies to try and prove their non-existent points. Your rationalization to justify the sword breaking is complete nonsense.

>non-existent points

You're confusing your personal failure to see a really clear and straightforward point with that point somehow not existing.

It's very simple:

A) "HURR why can Aku break claymore if Aku can't break katana and katana can't break claymore? That doesn't make sense!"
B) Not only does it make sense in the cartoon, but it even makes sense in real life per acid / metal / plastic example.

Then you showed up and started complaining the magic isn't real life, which is retarded because that has nothing to do with the original complaint this was addressing. If you want to go with "it's magic and doesn't follow rules or logic," then you can't complain about it not following your expectations for rules or logic. And if you don't go with that and do expect it to follow certain rules or logic, then the complaint is still wrong because even in real life that sort of three-way relationship can work just fine without violating logic in any way.

>Not only does it make sense in the cartoon
Explain it, then, you retard. How can Aku, an evil vulnerable to (and powerless against) divinity, destroy a divine Celtic object?

Samurai Jack always had a tongue in cheek quality to it. It took itself seriously but it also wasn't afraid to have fun with the characters. Aku is as evil as he needs to be. He rules the world, he wants to destroy the samurai, and he's a jerk to everyone. You want Jack to beat him but he never crossed a line where you can't enjoy him cracking jokes or acting silly in general. He's like most villains from kids shows, he especially reminds me of Mojo Jojo from Powerpuff Girls or Mandark from Dexter's Lab. He's whatever the writers need for him to be for that particular episodes and it works in this case. It was never Avatar the Last Airbender or something. Aku doesn't grow over time or change, he's just the antagonist. And in a show that isn't afraid to have fun that sometimes means having fun with Aku.

>How can Aku, an evil vulnerable to (and powerless against) divinity, destroy a divine Celtic object?
>destroy a divine Celtic object?
>divine
Where is it ever said the sword is divine?

I already did explain it.

>How can Aku, an evil vulnerable to (and powerless against) divinity, destroy a divine Celtic object?
>How can metal, a substance vulnerable to (and powerless against) hydrofluoric acid, destroy plastic?

And also you're now mistakenly treating the claymore and the katana interchangeably by labeling them both as "divine" when they aren't actually the same thing. Just because a god gets involved in artifact A and some other god gets involved in artifact B doesn't mean artifact A and artifact B are now identical and do the same exact thing under any set of circumstances.

Runic magic is powered by their gods.

>still using analogies
No, Aku is vulnerable to divinity in general. Not just the specific case of Jack's sword. This has been established many times.

this thread

>people arguing over bullshit

It's pretty God damn obvious they put a throw away line in an episode early in the shows run given the fact it was never referenced again. It wasn't important to the character, it wasn't important to the broader story, it literally doesn't matter. Genndy could barely remember that episode with the princess and the bounty hunters, you think he gave a fuck about a single line from season one?

I think it mentioned that Aku's modus operendai was not blatant destruction, but rather controlled calculated destruction.
He acts fair and nice, small scale, for the sole purpose of instilling or solidifying what little hope the people have. He does this because there is nothing more devastating that being able to take that hope away.
You cant torture a hopeless person. They welcome death and have nothing to lose. Someone with something, however minor it may be, can be hurt more than anyone.

The point is, Aku is so fucking evil, that he doesnt subscribe to mere human definitions of evil. He plays the big picture.

>it literally doesn't matter.
Don't create anything then, none of it matters

Literally stated and shown that the sword cannot innocents or good.

Aku tried stabbing Jack repeatedly with it, and it just bounced off him.

>Aku is vulnerable to divinity in general.
>This has been established many times.

It hasn't been established that Aku can be harmed by every single god in existence. There have been three gods, working together, who've harmed Aku directly, and also maybe those elementals harmed him that one time, although even then I think it was more that he wasn't able to overpower them, I don't think they actually dissolved part of his body on contact or anything. That's not exactly an enormous dataset to where you can reasonably decide that he's now vulnerable to any god you throw at him. And it definitely hasn't been established that Aku can be harmed by any artifact using runes associated with any god in existence. In fact it's been established that this isn't true if you believe the claymore was associated with magic from a god since it got broken by Aku.

They aren't his minions though. Although he does share responsibility for whatever crazy Akult crops up.

>Literally stated and shown that the sword cannot innocents or good.

Never said it didn't.

>Aku tried stabbing Jack repeatedly with it, and it just bounced off him.

Jack's an innocent. Scotsman's sword isn't an innocent. You need to be a person to count as an innocent. Jack's sword probably couldn't harm the Scotsman himself. That's completely different from it not being able to harm his sword. His sword isn't an innocent person, it's a sword.

>It hasn't been established that Aku can be harmed by every single god in existence.
It actually has. Most of the Gods don't care enough to interfere directly but they'll give humans a little hand every now and then. That's one of the reasons he tends to stay on Earth and isolate himself in secret places.

>we're already half way done
I'm not ready

>It hasn't been established that Aku can be harmed by every single god in existence.
>It actually has.

Tell me the exact scene in that TV series where it was "established" that Aku can be harmed by EVERY single god in existence. Give me a season and episode number and I'll go check.

Maybe he's bored, like Dr.Doom gets?

>wiping out over 10% of the population
Damn son

I don't remember the exact episodes but IIRC it's established that he has a weakness to magic and divinity. Any minor god would have both of those powers, and should in theory be able to do some amount of harm him, maybe in a very minor degree or a very major degree, depending on their power. This is going by the logic of the show and the character Aku, it was not stated that only the 3 entities that crafted Jack's incomparable weapon have the power to harm him.
Scotsman's sword breaking from Aku's explosion makes senses though. The assumption that it's invulnerable because Jack couldn't harm it falls flat when you remember that Jack doesn't have infinite strength, remember that he needed a robot arm to destroy certain ordinary materials, even using the magic sword.