This had the potential to be the absolute pinacle of western animation. The beggining of season 5 made it feel like it was going to be just the most perfect cartoon we would be seeing in years. If done correctly, this show could have absolutely transformed the way western animation is taken.
But it didn't.
Does anybody agree with me? Does anyone else still feel mad at how it all turned out? It still hurts. So much potential destroyed.
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wah wah wah go shit in a diaper
The weakest episodes of this season were still on par with the weakest episodes of the rest of the show while the first three episodes were still the absolute best. Overall, season 5 delivered.
The problem is that most of the episodes were weak. The action was completely forgotten, the story didn't have any meaning to who was watching it and the ending was complete bullcrap.
nah
no
and wrong
Episodes 1-3 were pure unfiltered kino. I know that's a meme buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a cartoon as much as I enjoyed episodes 1-3 of S5 Samurai Jack. It felt like it lost its way after that. I still enjoyed what we got, but it felt like an entirely different animal from those first few episodes.
>Does anyone else still feel mad at how it all turned out
I don't because I'm mentally mature, so I simply got over my disappointment and cherished the season for what it was.
>the absolute pinacle of western animation
HOLY FUCKING SHIT YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS
if failed as a satisfying finale to the series, it has already ben forgotten and will be surpassed and better received by The Jungle Movie.
ITT:
>I don't understand what pilot episodes are, so it's Genndy's fault
>The Jungle Movie.
has to be bait
Ashi was a mistake. Like 90% of the seasons problems could have been avoided if she hadn't become a main character.
> ITT autist hack splerging over a show ending.
Go drown in a river of your own tears.
Ashi was a mistake
I don't think you do either, pilot episodes happen at the beginning of the series, not the season.
Then again, if you ask to leave Jack in the future, it wouldn't be very great. Going back to the past is the only solution.
Could have happened in a more meaningful way.
She hadn't become a main character. E6 is literally the only episode that focuses on her as a protag.
I think it's very meaningful in a sense that Jack doesn't know whether he did the right thing or not because he had to act fast and didn't have time to think of it before travelling back to the past.
Hi Genndy!
when did you become so crusty
Despite the shortcomings, I think s5 at least ended up being a fun conversation piece
>crusty
Are you six years old?
>the hero wiping out the entire future including his friends, allies and his one true love to save the past is considered a satisfying ending
No. Even the shitty IDW comic is better.
>The action was completely forgotten
Rewatching Samurai Jack when the new season was announced, that was the first thing I noticed. The CN Samurai Jack had a shit ton of great actions scenes, random episodes really surprised me with how good they were.
Season 5 started off great carrying that sense of action, but after a while everything just feel flat and sizzled out. Why they didn't have it end with a big fight scene like every person in the world wanted is beyond me. That final fight was just pathetic, any random fight against Aku during the main series was better. Some people say that's the point, that we know Jack can beat Aku, but that also forgets that this is supposed to partially be an action show and that the finale of such should probably be a pretty good action scene.
Why do people think that by removing the ultimate evil means that the characters that Jack met don't exist? Just because they didn't appear after Aku was destroyed, it doesn't automatically mean they're not there. They'll more than likely live in a peaceful world thanks to Jack.
She was a main character in the sense that she played a major role in the story and Jacks development.
>he says, after committing the most unoriginal bantz ever
try again
>I know that's a meme buzzword that gets thrown around a lot
Then stop using it if you want people to take you seriously, you fucking retard.
>Why do people think that by removing the ultimate evil means that the characters that Jack met don't exist?
Circumstances of fate. Think about all the people who had to fuck to make you - we're talking generations of people stretching back to the beginning of time. Shit, just going back a century, you have probably three to five generations of people having to fuck at just the right times to make the people who would eventually fuck and make you. All of that could've been undone if one of those people's circumstances had been different.
The same goes for Jack. That future was the result of Aku flinging Jack into said future; without Jack around to stop Aku, the world developed and changed and spun on with The Shogun of Sorrow in charge. Jack travelling back to the past and defeating Aku for good meant everything that was supposed to happen in the future timeline never happened - which means all the circumstances that led to the Archers, The Scotsman, the Woolies, Ashi, etc. also never happened.
You would not exist if history did the equivalent of moving an inch to the left and stopped your specific genetic line from reproducing long enough to make you. Why should we believe Jack moving history an inch to the left would keep the future he knew intact?
I see your point, but I just said that they could still exist, just as more peaceful races.
The show never mentioned what happened in the future, so the most obvious thing to think would be that none of it ever existed, including the people. Maybe that's not what Genndy had in mind, but it's the most logical conclusion.
I don't know why you felt the need to overhype everything, OP. I had a good time.
The last few episodes are so different in tone and pacing compared to the beginning of the season that it feels like they were handled by a different team entirely. We went from a a gritty Ronin style, lone wolf, survival adventure, to a cringey romance story with a few action scenes and penis jokes thrown in.
>and penis jokes thrown in.
you really fell for that meme huh
sad
You can do much, much worse than a revival still feeling like the original run after a handful of years. I'm satisfied by it being pretty good, as opposed to dogshit.
DUDE WITHOUT AKU I NEVER EXISTED LMAO
No, of course nobody else feels the same way you do. Out of the billions of people here on this planet, you are the only one with this opinion.
>First 3-4 episodes, pure gold
>Everything after that, weaker but watchable
Certainly disappointing in comparison to the first 3 episodes. The ending was a bit anticlimactic, too.
So...do you think Jack ever get married or died a virgin?
So pure speculation that exist only because they didn't show 3 seconds of Aku-less future?
Ashi was alive a few days, I really hope they fucked and that Jack wasn't so old fashioned that he waited for marriage.
He could be banging the cricket girl right now for all we know.
>WAAAAH EVERYONE TOLD ME THIS WOULD BE THE KINO THAT WOULD SAVE WESTERN ANIMATION AND IT WASN'T WAAAAH
Yeah, yeah, the finale was rushed and the pacing was fucked, we get it.
I thought you fucks were done whining.
S5 started out amazing, like top tier shit. The issue with it is that the rest isnt nearly as memorable.
Was it still better than most other cartoons around today? Absolutely, but that isnt really that hard.
That ending though, eugh. Talk about terrible. They did not handle that well at all. Its like they heard about the ending to Gurren Lagann and didnt understand anything that happened in it.
you sound like a tumblrite
Nah, you're just a baby.
The season was mostly good.
They tripped up with the pacing at the end, but otherwise it was satisfying.
Oh, and Ashi's final line being exposition was very dumb.
how? Becuase I can acknowledge that the ending was bad? That shit was fucking terrible.
Because I compared it to Gurren Lagann? That's how you do the "waifu is linked to the evil force's existence" right.
Because youre mad you cant come to terms with yourself that Ashi was a rushed concept and the ending was fucking awful? Because I think its THAT one.
Doing exactly that was the objective for sixteen years.
because you're acting severely melodramatic over a cartoon
>bringing up ashi out of nowhere
not really
helping your case there user.....
It was probably months.
People had to travel to and from all over the world to attend the wedding.
>Ashi
>Nowhere
Kek
After so many years, it was just impossible for any ending to be completely satisfying. 13 years had passed, we grew up and weren't the same as we were as kids/teens when the show was still new and much simpler in its story. While there's no denying Genndy should have tried to be more original with the finale than just pulling a full on TTGL homage, whatever else he might have come up with would have likely still left a good share of fans unsatisfied. You can argue about whether Ashi should have remained, should have died back in episode 3, if there should have been another 3-5 episodes, I doubt any of these "solutions" would have satisfied everyone when so many were just eager to see something that resembled a conclusion regardless of how fulfilling it was. Personally, I was fine with what we got, it was not perfect, but I don't see reason to turn against Genndy just for that along.
My previous statement holds true.
I think peoples expectations where overblown and they had strong nostalgia. I liked the visuals and it was an ok with an ok ending. Its like a 1 big movie that could have used some cuts but elements where kept in due to artistic reasons
This is Sup Forums. You could give everybody exactly what they wanted on a silver platter and they'll still find a way to complain about it.
Not to mention Aku's reaction is "Oh shit, he went back!", which implies that Aku knew something was going to happen to him.
Really, they should have had someone on Jack's team mention the probability of killing Aku in the past undoing the future, and giving Jack one final conundrum to contemplate over. This way, we could at least see how everyone like the Scotsman would feel knowing they could face complete existential erasure if Jack went back in time instead of just slaying the Aku in the here and now.
...
What is wrong with her mouth? It's so long
well most of his friends where dead so going back made some versions of them alive in the future
>Genndy stole a character from a shit Disney / Squeenix franchise that stole that same character from a shit Bleach movie
To this day I still have justification for hating that god awful Anime
Maybe, but everyone in the future is certainly not around anymore, at least the thems that Jack knew. There is always a chance that maybe shit rearranged like the ending in Mystery Incorporated and now everyone lives on in a future where Aku's influence never made it that far, so they're all much better off. Scotsman is just an overly doting dad with 30 or so daughters and no weapons, the dogs know their history and peacefully coexist with their former human masters as equals, and so on.
Really makes me wish Genndy would just make a bunch of extras for the DVD release.
What character in Blegh was like Xion?
I distinctly remember one scene (I believe Ashi was fighting the army during Jack's DMT meditation trip) where the soldiers all run to her and it looks like fucking polygons and circles. Like very basic concept sketch level
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Found it. Skip to 2:06. Looks like the Incredibles credits scene
Senna. Same shit too
>Can't remember anything
>Has unexplained powers and can transform like everyone else
>Develops a close bond with the MC who eventually has to protect her from the other Shinigami, who deem her too dangerous to exist
>Fades away at the end and nobody remembers
And my personal favorite:
>Predates the DS KH game by three years
Bleach may be garbage, but it will never be as terrible as Kingdom Hearts.
she's the deuteragonist, from the second the season started to the second it ended, she and Jack had equal focus as characters.
You can say that you didn't like her, but suggesting she didn't share the role of main character with jack is simple denial.
It was also the goal of idiocracy and yet the ending to that was way more satisfying because it kept the story simple rather than convolute it in an attempt to spite happy endings.
Not exactly. If that was the case he could have gone back plenty of times in the first season.
Obviously any ending would have detractors, but an ending with the implication that every single previous episode was undone is WAY too much of a wildcard to execute satisfyingly unless you are an absolutely brilliant story writer.
Genndy is not that, he is an excellent visual director for action scenes, and he sacrificed those for an extremely flawed narrative ending.
Regardless if it involved killing the love interest, retconning a beloved series entirely was a bad call.
Oh please, KH isn't that bad. At least it tries to be fun and doesn't make the MC be everything at once.
The future may have been undone, but Jack still experienced the journey. The problem isn't that things were retconned, it was that we don't get to see how Jack comes to terms with the fact that he basically unmade the future that was Aku. While it was understandable to have him ponder about his life without Ashi, they could have also included him wondering whether he was right to have returned and not just find a way to slay future Aku and rebuild the world.
>a show whose main strength is its visuals and action
>comes back with significantly better visuals and way more fluid and kinetic action
it's shit
Barring a few pacing issues, this season was literally everything everybody wanted, but no, Genndy is a hack for having Ashi be a main character, and not keeping Jack in the future even though it doesn't make any sense for the arc he goes through in this, or to his character in the first 4 seasons. It pisses me off because even had he stayed in the future, everyone would've been pissed because he left his people behind for Ashi. Theres no way something like this was going to satisfy everybody.
>the action was completely forgotten after the first 3 episodes
yeah okay user:
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GENNDY IS A HACK!!!
>The problem isn't that things were retconned
You may disagree with me but that was EXACTLY my problem alongside killing off the other main character in the most half assed contradictory way imaginable.
I truly don't care if Jack feels guilty about it, because logically he shouldn't remember anything to be guilty about. I care that a lot of characters, especially Ashi, worked their fucking asses off to try and make their lives better in a shithole world; and after 50+ years of said work, it all simply never happened. Adding to it, their fates and cosmic reward(in a series where the gods absolutely meddle in the mundane world and judge worthiness) after all that hard work were(debatable for non-Ashi, definite for her) complete and utter oblivion.
While I didn't feel like it would have been the best thing ever, I will agree that it was kinda shitty. The pacing was just god awful.
>everyone would've been pissed because he left his people behind for Ashi.
Idk man, even my friends that hated her the most were glad that she at least made Jack more happy then he has ever been after 50 years of misery.
And in that same vein, if he stayed in the future but it was on an entirely positive note(rebuilding with friends while his parents look from heaven at their son with pride), people would have gotten over the lack of returning to the past.
the inverse of that concept is part of the reason people were pissed at the ending we got, it turned what should have been an absolutely happy outcome into something sour for the sake of avoiding the "cliche" happy ending rather than just going full cartoon logic and letting Jack and Ashi have eachother in the new timeline.
>because logically he shouldn't remember anything to be guilty about
Based on what? Just because he killed Aku and undid the future doesn't necessarily mean he should have forgotten everything that happened. Time travel doesn't have any concrete rules to it because there's no basis to establish set rules for it.
>without aku, I would have never existed
If something NEVER existed, you can neither remember nor forget it because it was NEVER there. This is fact, not a time travel rule.
I do realize this may or may not apply to everyone else, but we didn't see his reaction to anyone other than Ashi so it's irrelevant.
Truthfully, the Jack we know should not even still be in the past after Ashi disappeared, because the being who was solely responsible for his return never existed.
Ashi simply faded away because she was tied to Aku, though for some reason managed to keep going for days/weeks after his death (not even with a "I fought to stay around a bit longer" before finally ceasing even though they could have easily have had her just become a sickly and weakened human because all the Aku juice was removed from her. She may have worded it like "I don't exist because Aku is gone" but it was meant more that she couldn't be alive since his essence was part of her, much like the blatant TTGL thing about Nia not being able to remain without the Anit-Spirals power to sustain her.
And like you said, if they were going for the paradox, then Jack would have just been back to square one with him dropping into the future and going through all that again.
But season 5 is far from being that.
Not for everyone. Some were fine with it, others weren't.
>This had the potential to be the absolute pinacle of western animation.
Settle the fuck down.
I'm sorry to be really dismissive, but the wording choice was, and I am quoting here rather than paraphrasing like you, "I would have never existed". dialogue is a conscious choice made by the writer to convey a concept, and outside of ad libbing, is not just a person using the wrong terminology. If she had(like you suggested) said "I don't exist because Aku is gone", that would convey a different concept then time erasure.
Aside from the linguistics and referring to the shows own logic(and one of the few episodes that are still canon), Aku himself is a piece of a bigger hunk of evil that was destroyed and left him alive, thus it would make no sense for Ashi to suddenly die alongside him for non time reasons.
No matter which outcome you take it as, its just as contradictory and nonsensical even by the shows own logics.
Well the same thing happened with Mass Effect. People care more about the characters from the future than they do the characters from the pilot episode.
I wish that were true, but it seems more and more that people care more about theme songs than everything else, and that's troubling desu.
Time travel often is contradictory because few bother to make solid rules for it. By most logical accounts, once you're pushed into the future (either by being frozen or whatever), you shouldn't be able to return to the point you came from without undoing what had helped bring you back. For the show, it does make enough sense, it was just hammy and mostly unnecessary since Genndy and whoever else he wrote with decided Jack need to have a bittersweet ending instead of a cheery one.
Multiverse theory, if one were to go for that. Of course, then that means future-Aku would have been alright, unless there was some weird cosmic tie that meant if even one variation of him died, they all died.
I don't think there needs to be universal rules for time travel, and it's fine to be goofy in certain ways. What there does need to be, however, is a set of rules within the fiction to dictate the limits and effects of time travel.
A good example for this is Bill and Teds rules(see: San Dimas Time), which are logically ridiculous, but they are set early on as a concrete law within the film, and tension/events that revolve around it make sense because they follow their own rules.
The key issue is that Samurai Jack isn't a time travel show, it's a monster of the week show about a vagabond with a sword in a sci fi setting, thus why actually using backwards time travel feels incredibly unfitting and out of place. Genndy never established rules for time travel likely because(guessing here) he didn't originally intend for Jack to return to the past, and didn't want to give away the finale by establishing them in the new episodes.
They kind of did establish a rule though, with the intro that played in every episode. Aku says "and undo the future that is Aku!", which greatly implied that Aku knew that if Jack returned to the past and slew him then, it would destroy both the future and its Aku. The problem we face with the ending is that there's no hint given to whether Jack is aware of this and how it would make him feel. One would imagine he'd feel some guilt about basically wiping out millions of trillions of lives (probably more if we count every all the lives from when Aku's empire began to its final point in the future), but instead he just looks sad about losing his love.
As for whether Genndy had something in mind, I think he kind of did. When the Duck Dodgers parody episode aired, Genndy (playing a Flintstones-like version of himself, but with future parts) basically boiled the narrative down to Jack learning to value the beauty and people of the future over what he had lost to the past. This was even further suggested as the route in an interview made a short time after that episode. Now, it's fair to assume that Genndy changed his mind as time went on, and possibly wanting to surprise fans who had come to expect Jack staying in the future.
Really, he should just make an alternate ending where Aku is killed in the future. Even if it's just as uneven as the ending we got for TV, I think that would at least satisfy some of the people who wanted to see Jack let go of his past in every sense of the word.
I don't really disagree with any of this, except I think the intro didn't establish the extent/limits of the time travel nearly enough to say that rules were given to us. Especially since the last episode revealed that the intro was just a propaganda piece from an unreliable narrator.
Eh, I think it was both. They took advantage of the show's silly nature to have Aku break the fourth wall by having the intro as propaganda, but it was also still a part of the show's structure and a (albeit very loose) confirmation that Aku's destruction in the past could indeed undo the future. Like I said, the problem for many is how the finale doesn't give any time to show Jack's thoughts on the fact that he basically unmade all of his friends and allies, which just comes off as coldhearted, though more so from the writes than Jack himself (who we can assume probably felt some horror at that fact, probably when Ashi faded away and her final words echoed in his head about her no longer existing).
I seriously feel like they could have had that one old dog, Rothchild or whatever his name was propose the future's collapse (maybe along with multiverse theory), which would have at least given Jack something other than breaking Ashi from Aku's thrall to think about.
>If I remain in the future, then I must forever condemn my people, and those who followed them in Aku's wake to their fates. However, if I am to return to the past, everyone here, and those before them, may cease to be.
Would have still had its share of corniness, no doubt, but I think that dilemma would have at least been pretty engaging.
If you are comparing those two outcomes directly, then the only way to make going to the past even close to the right choice is to remove any episodes with deities or a confirmation of heavens existence.
As it is, the implication of a mass afterlife denial is far too needlessly cruel for a kids show.
So when do we expect to get info on how the production of season 5 went? I'm curious to hear of what happened while they were working on it.
Not quite sure what you mean. Are you saying that by showing the gods and something like heaven, that everyone erased would go there and not just GONE?
It'll probably be something on the DVD release, which will probably have something promoting a "Complete series" set with every single episode from the original show to season 5.
The story had a satisfying enough conclusion, but the action was pretty fucking lacking after episode 3.
I'm saying that the show has canonized heaven, and shown that in at least two of these heavens, your soul is of the body you inhabited in life(Jacks parents were shown as themselves in some kind of afterlife as opposed to reincarnation)
thus:
>everyone who died under aku in the original timeline may have had a horrific death, but are chilling in some form of deserved afterlife, and in at least the case of Jacks parents, are happy
>everyone who ceased to exist cannot go to an afterlife if they never lived.
tl;dr past people at least had heaven as a makeup for their shitty lives/deaths, where future people got denied it.
Can't really be denied if they technically never existed. Yea, they did and then didn't, but it was probably like what some imagine death as; you don't know it happened. At least it's not like that freaky shit DBS recently pulled where characters watched and cried out as they were wiped out and KNEW it could happen to them. The thing about my proposed situation certainly would have had Jack's friends weighing the options.
>Get Jack back to the past, and undo everything Aku did at the cost of their own existence
>Help Jack destroy the current Aku and try to rebuild both earth and the universe.
Which does bring to mind another way to have made the "Back to the past" option more justified; if the universe were in such a bad state that even if Aku were killed then, it wouldn't have lasted for long. Yea, DBS did a similar thing (even going as far as to erase that "future"), but the problem with that was how Dragon Ball had previously (though not directly stated so itself) that multiverse theory was a thing. With Jack, the idea that he HAD to go back to ensure a better future (even though the people in it wouldn't be the same exact ones) would have at least given something of an impact than the "eh, I guess he feels back about the future being undone" some of us are assuming from the finale.
>Nine people then. What happens to the reality they were living? Does it just disappear when S changes the past? It's not as if it was only bad things that happened during that 10,000 mile trip. Maybe one of them fell in love with a woman working at a gas station they stopped at, and had a child. Maybe one of them picked up a homeless kid, who joined them on their adventure. That 10,000 mile journey would be full of stories. Friendships, farewells, romances.. The loss of those ninety lives is horrible and unfortunate, but what would re-writing their history mean? The nine who survived lived full lives. How can it be right to just erase all that? The survivors overcame their own misery and loss, and made the best they could of the hand they'd been dealt. Isn't that worth something? Isn't that the best thing that humans can aspire to? Is there really any point to a world where everything is happy? Are people who struggle for a better life just idiots? Being human is about fighting even when it seems hopeless, and finding happiness even in a world that hates it. Are you saying that's worthless?