r/samuraijack • u/Time-Weekend-8611 • 10d ago
What was the world like under Aku's reign?
Aku is supposedly ruling over a post apocalyptic dystopia but there are scenes which indicate that daily life and society are proceeding more or less normally.
Like Jack once found himself in an underground rave club. And Scaramouche smuggled himself into an elaborate hairdo of what looked like a rich girl boarding a luxury cruise.
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u/ckret2 10d ago
What's the "supposedly"? Yeah, he's ruling a dystopia AND life is going on normally for most people. That's how humanity works.
Every dictatorship in history has been full of people trying to live their normal lives beneath the oppression. Every war zone in history has been full of people trying to live their normal lives around the violence.
What makes a dystopia a dystopia isn't the complete LACK of normal life, but how likely & how badly your normal life could be fucked over.
Jack only finds, what, a mere four towns that have been completely and totally slaughtered by Aku's assassin bots? Three by the ultra-bots and one by Scaramouche? Hey, four isn't a very big number, right?
In a non-dystopia, the normal amount of towns COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED by killer robots is zero.
Plus that town the ultra-bots burnt down to test their weapons, after being built by a guy who LIVES in that town. In normal nations, governments give their top weapon engineers a big paycheck, not a demolished hometown.
Sure, there are other towns that haven't been destroyed. Life goes on in those towns. So what? You're living under a government where annihilating an entire town that didn't do anything, solely to piss off a guy who isn't even IN that town, is a normal public policy decision. Even if your town is full of loyal model citizens, your government can AND WILL do that to you AT ANY TIME.
The guys running shoe stores and ramen shops still live in a dystopia—they're just the lucky ones. An innkeeper can run a business and lead a normal life for decades, up until the day Aku sends a DJ to brainwash his daughter and her peers.
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u/Grouchy-Editor577 9d ago edited 9d ago
Aku is honestly pretty chill as a ruler. Just keep your nose down and you'll be good, unless your town/family happen to get caught in his crosshairs of either something he can exploit or something he sees as a threat. -He didn't care about the dog archeologists digging stuff up and trying to uncover their ancestral history until they discovered jewels he found useful and wanted more of.
In a way, Jack's presence in the future probably made life harder for people, since Aku's drive to kill Jack made him increasingly irritable and desperate, resorting to whatever he could to annihilate the most threatening person to him, leaving a pretty bad shockwave in its wake.
It's not until season 5 when he sinks into depression and his anger simmers down that life returns to "normal" as he isolates himself in his tower and distances himself from what's going on outside.
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u/ckret2 9d ago
Yeah, as a ruler it seems like usually Aku's malignant but not aggressive. His biggest threat to the people is his policies—inviting in alien criminals, executing people who try to escape the planet, doing nothing about gladiatorial rings that kidnap people or giant rampaging monsters attacking and/or farting on towns—but he's not like, actively going out to massacre people himself. His conquering years are behind him, now he just wants to collect fancy jewels and bully visitors to his throne room.
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u/Time-Weekend-8611 9d ago
I meant dystopia as in something straight out of Mad Max or Walking Dead where society has completely broken down and people live as either scavengers or small tribes. Not something that has functioning towns and underground clubs and pleasure cruises.
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u/ckret2 9d ago
When I hear "dystopia," I think 1984 or Hunger Games before I think of Mad Max or Walking Dead.
The show never tried to claim that Aku's future is in a state of total societal collapse. Heck, in the opening monologue for four seasons he says "where my evil is LAW"—so like,, there are laws, which means a government and some kind of established social structure. He's a conqueror & dictator, not an apocalypse.
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u/The-Son-Of-Suns 10d ago
He was living in cartoonist fascist dictatorship. Doesn't mean beings didn't have their own hobbies. Didn't seem like a good future to me with normal lives.
Season 5 showed that he allowed violent people from other places to ravage innocents on Earth.
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u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 9d ago
Scaramouche is an assassin working for Aku who wiped out a village and it was completely legal because he was one of Aku's assassins. If someone works for Aku they do whatever they please and his evil nature means you aren't going to be employed by him unless you are a depraved mass murderer.
In the pilot episode we saw that the talking dogs were enslaved to dig up jewels for Aku and had to work themselves to the bone to meet Aku's quotas. Because if they didn't meet his quotas he had them crucified.
Season 5 revealed that even if Aku isn't personally operating things in his regime, he still has a system in place where evildoers from across the universe are welcomed to Earth, and land other people are already living on as their homes. It doesn't matter that other people on living on the land, the villains crush them underfoot. This is likely the source of many of the other villains in the series.
When Jack met the Spartans, we learned of a mechanical beast that had been stripping the land with its machine army, and they had been fighting the army for five generations.
This is getting into creator statements, but the writers confirmed that evil wish granting well which enslaved the three warriors and turned them into the blind archers was created by Aku. In season 5 we also that gigantic city sized thing that Jack states Aku unleashed on the world. While Aku released the Minions of Set to kill Samurai Jack, given the other things we've seen Aku turn loose, it's entirely possible he would have let these immortal monsters that could be slain by a god out to wreak havoc on the world just for fun.
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u/Super_Kami_Jojo 8d ago
It's fun seeing a system where there's an all-powerful god being ruling. The only law is whatever he says at the time. Here's a googolplex of money, go nuts. Money is just whatever he says it is. The only real currency is the amount of ass you kiss on Aku. Better make that statue of him real good
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u/Grouchy-Editor577 10d ago edited 10d ago
I like to think Aku did the "tyrannical dictator" bit for a few hundred years after he secured the world under his iron grip, but probably eventually got bored and figured the message had been sent, so he became increasingly more lax about it, letting people mostly live their lives and do their own thing so long as they didn't outwardly oppose him. He probably took most of his aggression out on Jack's family and village out of revenge for imprisoning him, then as he expanded his influence, he was more forgiving to those who fearfully submitted to him and passed it on in his growing population.
In episode 2, before he learns of Jack's presence in the future, he seems pretty reasonable when he's negotiating with the Vadaquian, only reasserting his authority when the young one insults him, but otherwise allowing them to live on Earth so long as they pay tribute to him as a form of monthly rent. And in episode 13, before he decides to fabricate stories to the children who aren't as afraid of him as their elders, he considers going full evil to scare them into submission since they've clearly never witnessed him do anything drastic in their lifetimes.
This could also maybe be why there are always small villages that seem "untouched" after all these years. It's probably more so areas that Aku forgets about for a while until he needs to occasionally refresh his threat status, then leave alone until new areas inevitably crop up from the rubble like flowers in concrete- rinse and repeat.
Aku has beaten the main game and is now just maxxing out his stats and collectibles.