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- “Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape shifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a foolish samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time, and flung him into the future where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to return to the past and undo the future that is Aku.”
- ―Aku
Aku is a character and the main antagonist from the Warner Bros and Cartoon Network (Now moved to Adult Swim) animated show, Samurai Jack. He is an evil shape-shifting demon and dictator that took over the world and ruled it for countless eons, He is the arch-nemesis of Jack.
He always antagonized Jack and tried often to attacked and destroy him when he is weaken but always failed.
While he is portrayed as an evil and a threatening villain, he is a source of comedy in the show, due to his outrageous design and sometimes wise-guy behavior, that was supported by Mako's over the top voice-acting
As Of Episode CI in the series finale, Aku is finally destroyed once and for all when Jack used his sword with Aku still inside into the ground that caused his castle to explode.
Background[]
Aku was burned from the surviving remnants of The Black Mass, a non-sapient life form that is the source of evil itself. It was defeated by the combine mites of Odin, Ra and Rama but not before a remnant of it escaped the confrontation eventually landed on Earth that is Aku himself destroying the age of the Dinosaurs that is known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.
Over years and eons, the fragment of Aku evolved into an ever-growing ominous forest of black tree-like spikes, which surrounded a tar-like pit at its center, that devoured any living thing that dared to enter. Eventually, it caused The Emperor to decided that he must kill it to protect his people. a Buddhist Monk gave the Emperor a poison elixir. the Emperor rode with his calvary and his personal army but they were killed when the forest began to gradually kill off all of his men, with the Emperor as the Sole Survivor of the slaughter. When he arrived at a black lake in the forest's center, he quickly doused one of his arrows into the elixir and fired it into the lake, now believing that he destroy the evil forest with the arrow.
But surprisingly, the poison magic in-fact did not killed the forest but galvanizing the evil mass into a humanoid form: it gave it intelligence, sentience, and shape-shifting abilities. Which now led to the existence of Aku himself and inadvertently thanked the Emperor for helping him gaining a physical form, The Emperor quickly attacked Aku with his his mundane and mortal weapons, but it didn't inflict any harm or wounds upon Aku. then Aku easily attacked and defeated the Emperor with him strapping the Emperor to the side of a tree to force him watch as Aku destroyed his Kingdom and slaughtering his people. However, Unknown to Aku, The Deities had sensed the good in the Emperor and Odin eventually summoning him with the help of his horse, Sleipnir. The Deities used their powers to create a single sword (Which eventually became Jack Sword in the future) that was capable of harming Aku. After the Emperor is armed with the sword and a magical suit of armor, He plunged to the battlefield and battle against Aku. Aku eventually was defeated and sealed away in the form of a jagged black tree in a devasted wasteland but not before he vowed that one day he will return to rule the world once more. During the battle against Aku, The Empress gave birth to a son, when he learned this, he was determined to learn from the catastrophe of his battle against Aku and awarded that one day he will return to the world once more. Eventually, The Emperor hatched a plan that would set Jack on his eventual years of training.
Personality[]
Aku was Evil Incarnate; Arrogant, Cruel, temperamental, callous, sadistic and dominating. He forced everyone to obey him or be obliterated. He ruled the Earth with an Iron fist and did not take kindly to disobedience, Aku is also responsible for causing countless and multiple genocides such as him destroying cities, villages, and small settlements being completely destroyed, alongside all their inhabitants.
Power and Abilities[]
Aku is showned to be the strongest entity in the Show, He had many large powers that even Jack himself admit that Aku is a personification of Primodial evil itself, Only a few people are capable of challenging him.
- Near-Immortality: As a supernatural being, Aku was ageless and nearly immortal. He required no sustenance and was not harmed by mortal means. Only the power of righteous spirits or divine weapons like Jack's Sword, or divine entities, were capable of doing severe harm to him
- Shape-shifting: Aku could change into virtually any form that he desired, from a giant dragon to a small insect, or even a beautiful woman. Aku was able to seamlessly change his size, liquefy himself, or stretch and expand his body. He could even replicate into clones of himself to be in numerous places at once and his mind inhabited numerous bodies. At one point, Aku even manifested a second version of himself who acted as a psychologist. In a way, Aku performed talk-therapy on himself. He typically changed into animal forms during battle, such as a scorpion or an octopus and adapted to the situation. On one occasion, Aku also transformed into a huge, amorphous mass of darkness that greatly resembled the evil entity that he had previously once been/was spawned from and altered parts of himself at will.
- Supernatural Physical Abilities: Aku could alter his physical capabilities to virtually any level that he needed or wanted due to his magical shape-shifting abilities. Aku manifested superhuman strength, speed, endurance, and senses. No parameters or upper limits were established that regarded those capabilities.
- Regeneration: While Aku was completely resistant to most forms of attack, he was not invulnerable; items such as Jack's Sword or magic such as divine energy could damage the substance from which he was made of. However, Aku was able to regenerate to a large degree, even against attacks such as those. These sort of assaults tended to create large, burning holes or gashes in Aku wherever he was struck, which he could close back up with effort. However, his ability to regenerate in those situations was limited. In many of Aku's confrontations with Jack, the damage that was caused by the sword whittled away at his overall mass and his ability to regenerate in the short term, until it tended to leave him as a very small animal of some sort, such as a frog or a mouse, at which point further attacks would have presumably either sealed him away as Jack's father did, or killed him as Jack intended to. Given time however, Aku always restored himself without being any worse for wear. Aku was also observed to succumb to physical pain that involved blunt trauma of equal mass in relevance to the size of his form at any given time, although he was shown to quickly recover from such injuries.
- Dark Magic: Aku was an all-powerful wizard who had vast supernatural powers at his command:
- Eye Beams: One of Aku's most commonly utilized attacks, that ability tended to manifest as beams of white or red light that typically incinerated the objects that it made contact with. It could be used either as continuous beams of light, or as staccato bolts of energy. Aku had used that ability in numerous battles with Jack, and also used it to destroy the majority of Jack's past kingdom. Aku could also harmlessly teleport beings to places of his choosing through that power. The beams could also slice through objects like a plasma torch, or caused them to explode.
- Aku also used a variation of that ability to restore or recreate whatever he chose: he restored Scaramouche's body with them.
- Remote Viewing: Using mystical forces in his lair, Aku could create images on the walls in order to view whatever he wished. Aku tended to use that ability to simply watch Jack travel while he stewed in his unhappiness at being unable to kill Jack.
- Teleportation: Aku used that often for quick appearances or escapes, and to appear before those that he had business with, such as the Imakandi.
- Elemental Control: Aku could magically project and control the elements of the physical world. Those abilities included breathing and projecting streams of fire from his body, manipulating the earth itself, conjuring thunderstorms at will, or emitting waves of sonic force. By combining fire breath with his eye beams, Aku could also project beams of electricity.
- Telekinesis: Aku was shown the ability to manipulate objects through focus alone, even from far away distances. While he used that ability, Aku's eyes tended to flash white.
- Necromancy: Aku was shown to be capable of animating countless dead bodies and bending them to his commanding will.
- Precognitive Dreams: On one occasion, Aku was shown to be capable of receiving premonitions of his own future through his dreams, which he could then act upon to try and prevent or change them.
- Possession & Infection: Aku could use small portions of himself to infect others with his evil. The only time that this was seen was when he incidentally spat up a tiny portion of himself at Jack, which, over the course of a day or so, possessed Jack and gave him the appearance and personality of Aku. On a related note, Aku could also use portions of himself to give power to machinery, as he demonstrated by doing so with the Ultra-Robots. That ability could also work on Aku's biological offspring, since they already had his essence and were a part of him.
- Interstellar Travel: Aku was capable of interstellar travel, well beyond the speed of light.
- Time Travel: That was the very ability that Aku had used that sent Jack into the future at the beginning of the series, though he only used that once and it was a one way portal forward in time. However, due to its side-effect, Jack did not age even after 50 years in the future.
- Object Materialization: The ability to create matter and materials out of nothing: Aku once used that ability to conjure treasures in the presence of the Imakandi. Aku also used his eye beams and created a new body for Scaramouche.
- Corruption: One of Aku's most powerful abilities. Using dark magic, Aku could mutate normally harmless beings into monstrous versions of themselves. During his last known encounter with Jack, Aku used that ability and transformed three small rams into monsters in order to fight Jack. It was also shown that if the corrupted creature died, the spell was broken and the creature transformed back to its original form. Aku also used that power to curse the Well of King Ozric and then later corrupted Jack through his supposed illness. Aku was also able to infuse that power into techno music to corrupt teenagers in "Jack and the Rave". This power extended to the fact that Aku could create life in a way, as shown when he gave the High Priestess a sample of his essence that was originally intended in the use of worship to presumably conceive the Daughters of Aku, as well as enabled him to control or corrupt any and all of his offspring into his likeness, who were complete with supernatural powers.
- Eye Beams: One of Aku's most commonly utilized attacks, that ability tended to manifest as beams of white or red light that typically incinerated the objects that it made contact with. It could be used either as continuous beams of light, or as staccato bolts of energy. Aku had used that ability in numerous battles with Jack, and also used it to destroy the majority of Jack's past kingdom. Aku could also harmlessly teleport beings to places of his choosing through that power. The beams could also slice through objects like a plasma torch, or caused them to explode.
- Combat Skills: Despite never having been shown to have trained at all in any form of Martial Arts, Aku was a very skilled practitioner in hand-to-hand combat. Though not a match for Jack, Aku was at least capable of defending himself reasonably well against Jack during their duel, while he limited himself to human physicality. Aku was also shown to be a fairly skilled swordsman: In Episode XXX: Jack and the Zombies, Aku stole Jack's Sword and was able to force Jack (who was armed with a sword and a shield) into a defensive posture during a bout of swordplay. However, it should be noted that on that occasion, Aku was not limited in the scope of the powers that he could employ.
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- HIM, A Villain from the Powerpuff Girl Series was rumored to be another form of Aku and Professor Utonium that is theorize to be one of Jack descendants due to their similar appearance that giving a possible reasons why HIM always targeting the Powerpuff Girls. HIM tyrannical reign in Speed Demon is theorized to be the start of the reign of Aku but this theory is debunked when Aku gets destroyed once and for all in the show's series finale.
- Ironically, He is one of the show most evil and immoral villains due to his enslaving nations, geocoding and torturing for fun despite his comedically tendencies.
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