#helloiamadrawer

Super stoked that between the time you sent this and the time I got a chance to answer it, they'd reversed the decision.

in concept, giving individual reblogs their own notes isnt a bad idea. If I stick a funny comment on somebody else's post and the version with my comment goes viral, I'd love to get notes for that. I've got one post that went viral because somebody added a thoughtful essay to my two sentence shitpost and THEY deserve notes for that, because all the people adding thanks for the essay and contributing with their own experiences are talking to that essayist! And I've wanted to like different reblog chains on the same post for years.

but that needs to be in addition to getting to see every single note all together on the original post, not instead of. Right now I've got a post I made like a month ago that's racked up like 9000 notes because i was lucky enough that a big blog reblogged it. I love seeing all the tags and replying to comments & questions.

But if that change had been implemented a month ago, my version of that post would have like 300 notes, and the big name blogger who said something like "this is wild" would have the other 8700 that I'd never see.

So if Aku was a kind of fruit tree, which one would he be in your opinion?

honestly I don't think he'd be a fruit tree

tall, straight, narrow trunk; high short branches...

but if i had to, absolutely HAD TO pick a fruit tree—

samurai jack is all about using really really cliche/archetypal japanese symbols & tropes. the main character is a samurai but he doesn't wear armor, doesn't even wear a hakama, he wears a garment he calls a "gi" but is cut like a kimono because that looks more japanese. the embodiment of evil is named the japanese word for "evil." mister evil also names himself "shogun of sorrow" even though there's zero evidence of him doing any shogunning. etc. this extends to every part of the show. there's a scostman named The Scotsman. there's a puppet robot whose head pops off his shoulders named scaramouche. good is light, evil is darkness, the symbolism in this show is simple as fuck.

there's only ONE fruit tree broadly associated with japan, and it's one of THE MOST stereotypically japanese symbols; and in samurai jack, this tree in bloom is used more than once as symbolically representative of both jack's kingdom and of aku-free peace, and the burned/destroyed trees are used to represent aku's destruction; so unfortunately there's no choice but to make him a cherry tree.

Okay so let's look at the evidence here.

In Samurai Jack world nearly all robots fall into one of four categories:

Clunky-looking brightly-colored civilian bots that usually look like they came out of the Jetsons and that sometimes have emotions/personality (60%)

Scary-looking killer robots from Aku's army, usually beetles, no emotions (30%)

Humanoid robots, most of which are disguised as organics until something slices through their skin, and the rest of which seem to only socialize with other robots—and almost all violent (9%)

Even scarier vaguely humanoid robots designed and programmed specifically to kill Jack; they might have the slightest hints of preprogrammed personality (e.g., the Ultra-Bots), but no emotions (1%)

The only two exceptions—bots that are humanoid, have emotions/personalities, and mingle with organic society for long periods of time without violence—are X-49 (who is highlighted as the FIRST AND ONLY bot to have emotions in Aku's army at that time—and even at that he looks & acts like a normal group 4 bot) aaaand Scaramouche.

So we have a world where every other robot looks/acts like a preschooler's plastic toy blocks, a war machine, a Clockwork Orange thug, or the Terminator; and in contrast, Scaramouche:

is very human-shaped

is an attractive human shape (by conventional human standards, I mean—any Transformers fan knows nothing's sexier than these guys but I'm talking general population)

is effusively expressive and outgoing

calls everyone he meets "babe"

tells people to "whip out" their "swords" for him

is the only character in the show with the guts to say "penis"

wears bright red high-heeled boots

wears a trench coat with no pants—which is like, THE flasher uniform

and on top of that his trench coat is bright purple

Humans are gonna look at Scaramouche, see he's human-shaped in a world where extremely humanoid bots aren't common, note that everything else about his clothes and personality defies the patterns set by Aku's other killer bots, and ask themselves, well, what else might he have been designed for? What industry could benefit from a flirty humanoid robot in vaguely provocative clothing?

So here's what I'm saying:

It's not the first time someone's assumed this machine was built to fuck.

what was your first impression on Demongo and how did you react when he reappeared in season 5 of samurai jack? (I love this blue raspberry demon boi sm lol)

new follower btw

I post ridiculously long headcanon posts & i lure in new followers. once again my evil plot works

I don't remember my first impression specifically but it was probably something like "lmao silly voice." this isn't a knock against demongo, I love a good silly voice. I love a good pointy vampire too, which is definitely what his design evokes; PLUS a lava lamp. Hard to top that.

it interested me that he got hyped up like few other of Aku's minions ever did. Most of the assassins he sends after Jack that we spend any time getting to know are hired mercenaries or insentient robots. Demongo's a rarity in being specified as under Aku's employ, and his greatest warrior, at that.

and his gimmick also intrigued me. He's called one of aku's strongest minions—and all his strength is stolen from warriors more talented than him. He must have some skill of his own, to have caught the first one, even if it whatever he has isn't combat skills—unless that first warrior was offered to him as a freebie by Aku. Like a starter Pokémon.

But either way, the more warriors he collects, the less he has to use whatever initial skills he might've had.

And it makes him feel like a very Aku sort of minion, in comparison to the random bounty hunters and such we see. Jack essentially calls Demongo a cheat for acting like he's the skilled warrior when he's got enslaved ghosts doing the work for him, and Demongo acknowledges it; but Aku likely considers Demongo one of his top minions because he's a cheat, because his modus operandi is stealing and using what doesn't rightfully belong to him. Of course Aku rewards someone who got their skills via dirty theft rather than good honest hard work.

anyway i think my reaction when he showed up in season five was "LMAOOO BITCH WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE??" I wonder if he escaped, or if Aku kicked him out and told him not to show his lava lampy face again until he'd picked up enough slaves to make himself useful.

oh i'm saving that ask for an art, don't worry. it's gonna be silly.

But for my realistic/serious answer, i think this is the pit of hate:

Not that specific geographical location in Long Ago Fantasy Japan, but the goo itself. The pit filled with the cosmic darkness-evilness-hatred from which Aku was born.

After his birth, that pit & forest remain. Not all of it was used up to create Aku.

I think, when he built himself a fortress, he just pulled together the trees of his forest and sculpted them into a tower. (Or perhaps grew new trees; we don't know what happened to that forest in the eight years of Aku's imprisonment, but the emperor implies they might've got rid of it.)

Compare this tower to the pictures of the pit above. Same thing, just compacted all together.

And then he gathered up all that space tar and stored it inside his fortress. The tower extends as far down into the earth as it does up into the sky, and the bottom half is the pit of hate. It's like 1/2 tar pit, 1/2 magical void that psychologically torments you.

Aku's still psychically/spiritually connected to the pit. Like the pit is a tree, and he's a single leaf—the only leaf the tree has ever grown. It's one of the reasons he spends most of his time in his fortress: he's literally "rooted" there. Every time we see him get summoned and he shoots up from the depths like the world's meanest sunflower—

—he's extending out of the pit, exactly the way he did when he was born.

There are locations in his fortress where he's not directly connected to the pit (his throne, his bed), but his audience chamber where he seems to take all visitors? The core of his fortress, his forest, his empire? When he's there, he's rooted in the pit.

He CAN leave the pit behind indefinitely, he's not dependent upon it. He just doesn't like to.

And so if he teleports somebody into the pit of hate, like that alien from the water world? He's tossing them in the tar pit. Before Aku's birth this would be an automatic death sentence; but the pit's magical, Aku's magical, Aku controls the pit, if he says a victim survives then the victim survives, he can extract them later.

For most people it's a torture worse than death. You've gotta be pretty messed up to actually enjoy the Pit of Hate.

anyways suggestion: I was thinking just Jack with his hair down hitting this pose he would look slay I fear

I've been watching it in the background when I do art. I'm about halfway through season two. I like it, although it needs more Marvin. (this is a joke.)

(it isn't actually a joke, I like Marvin)

I'm surprised by how much I like Lola's character, considering she was more or less invented to be The Girlfriend and she's still playing that role here but with a completely different characterization. But she really stands out as her own character now, a worthy addition to the Looney Tunes roster. I haven't looked to see whether they've done more with this characterization of Lola since the show, but I hope they have. (tbh her chemistry with daffy is even better than with bugs. Not romantically, just as characters. the DMV episode was pure art.)

I don't. They kinda squick me out, sorry.

As a reader, it makes me uncomfortable to imagine myself inserted in a fictional setting—I'm just the voyeur watching what the characters do, I don't wanna be part of the action.

And as a writer, it makes me uncomfortable to create because of the constraints: there's an element of obligatory wish fulfillment to the genre, which means no matter what I actually think about the characters' characterization, I have to contort the characterization to fit what the asker wants, or else I'd be kind of a dick wouldn't I.

(ex: if there's a character who's a Tree Person whose family was incinerated by Fire People and now he canonically has an unquenchable burning hatred of Fire People and somebody sends an ask like "how would this character react to a reader who's a nice Fire Person who feels bad about his family's deaths? 🥺" then what the asker wants to hear is "this character will be surprised to meet such a kind Fire Person and learn to let go of hate thanks to them" or something, but what I'd probably really believe is "reader's gonna have to do a helluva lot more than be 'nice' if they don't want character to murder them in the middle of the night with a bucket of cold water." But that would be rude of me. That's not what the x reader genre is for. But I'm not gonna write something I think is OOC just because I know the asker wants to hear it.)

Plus, aside from the pre-assigned traits ("what about a reader who's goth?" "what about a short & fat reader?" "what about a reader who plays the same video game as character?" "what about a reader who's kind of a grumpy asshole but cares for the character?" ) the expectation is to keep the reader insert character as bland & non-specific as possible to maximize the amount of people who can picture themselves in that role. And I don't do well with that. I need to get deep in a character's head, and "aside from XYZ trait you've gotta make this character as average as possible" is by necessity pretty shallow. You can't give reader an in-depth backstory or anything.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the genre itself—perfecting the art of uninhibited wish-fulfillment that satisfies the desires of as many readers as possible is a noble profession that requires a specialized writing skillset. But it's not the genre for me.