#I think I'm okay just maintaining Japanese from now on and letting my other language skills go

[rnbwtrout]

It's always such a relief to find out I can still read and understand Japanese. I've seen posts a few times by people in their 40s and older who talk about how as you get older you lose hobbies and interests. I used to be very passionate about language learning; I guess in place of art for many years it kept me going. I've wanted to be a polyglot since I was 14 and Japanese was the first language I chose to learn. And I did, I studied pretty diligently in my free time since 2013. Becoming a translator was a big goal of mine; Another one of those goals that was just kinda made impossible by circumstance because I either didn't have the money, time, or access to a school or qualifying course. Now its 2025 and its been probably a year since I last picked up a book in Japanese. I think I've been scared to make time for it because language skills are finicky and its disheartening to find out you've regressed. But I picked up a book from my shelf, sat down with a dictionary, and was able to read the prologue with relative ease. I only had to look up maybe 10 words in 5 pages. Realistically, its not like 10 years of work will just disappear in 1 year. But still, I'm grateful. I hope I can make more time for it again.

[ckret2]

Do you have any fun ideas or headcanons regarding Aku and Jack's relationship? It's so weirdly casual sometimes

sure, a few random thoughts:

1- there oughta be more incidents where they show up to battle and one of them is like "i'm sorry, i'm just not feeling it today, can i take a rain check on this fight?" and the other one instead of going TIME TO PUSH MY ADVANTAGE AND FINISH HIM OFF FOR GOOD just goes "ah, yeah, sure, how do you feel about Tuesday" without even thinking about it. because it's funny. in canon typically aku's the one who goes whoa time out so we need some times where jack does it and aku's just like sure.

2- I think it'd be really easy to force Aku & Jack to team up. All you have to do is have Earth get invaded by something more threatening than Aku. The show's established that Jack's sword is the only thing that can kill Aku, but it's not the only thing that can overpower Aku; just within the show we know that the goddess of water is strong enough to prevent Aku from stealing her jewel, there's gotta be other forces that can take him.

Aku wants to hold Earth at any cost. Enough to recruit Jack? Sure; it's not the first time he's exploited Jack to achieve one of his villainous goals.

Jack wants to save Earth from evil at any cost; and Aku is an evil dictator who's hard to defeat, but this alien conqueror is an even more evil dictator who's even more difficult to defeat and whom Jack HASN'T spent his whole life specifically training to defeat. So better to work with Aku to defeat a would-be conqueror so that Jack only has to fight Aku, rather than let this other conqueror take out Aku and then try to fight that new conqueror without a superpowered shapeshifter's assistance.

It also doesn't necessarily have to be an evil conqueror. (Or, well, not conventionally "evil" by the way the show defines the good/evil dichotomy as something that can be inborn & tangible.) Like, say the gods that slew the black mass go "okay it's taking too long to kill Aku and we don't want his influence to spread off Earth. better just blow up Earth to be safe, we don't want a tiny scrap of Aku escaping like last time." Aku doesn't want that, Jack doesn't want that, now they have to team up. It's probably fine to kill some gods as long as you're eventually planning to go back to the past and undo the circumstances that necessitated killing the gods in the first place, right? right??

lots of options! If you wanna make it happen, you can make it happen.

3- if you headcanon that Aku spawned already knowing stuff because he was, like, absorbing info from his immediate environment and/or sucking info out of the brains of his victims or whatever (which is what I headcanon), then that means he and Jack basically come from the same culture, Fantasy Kingdom in Fantasy Japan. And Aku gave himself a Japanese name (and kept it for millennia rather than telling people to call him "Evil" in their own languages) so like, it seems likely that he was somehow magically culturally Japanese from birth.

And that means they're the only two people in the future from this culture. Jack runs into a few people trying to maintain Japanese culture, but they're thousands of years removed from the world he knew. If he wants to talk to somebody who knows and understands the world he grew up in, his options are this one immortal Shaolin monk (who's Chinese, so not quite from home), aaand Aku himself.

Which you can use for angst, of course. But you can also use it for clowning around.

Aku's at some meeting trying to strike up an alliance (which he totally plans to violate) with some alien demigod or whatever, and he's sucking up to the demigod to their face, and then under his breath he's talking shit about them in 5000-year-old Japanese, and one of the servants at this meeting involuntarily snort-laughs so hard he drops his tray, and Aku goes "what? ... THERE'S ONLY ONE HUMAN IN THE WORLD WHO COULD UNDERSTAND WHAT I JUST SAID" and jack rips off his disguise and goes for his sword and curses himself for his mistake but unfortunately aku was right the demigod's face DOES look like a goat's butthole and he did NOT expect to hear aku say that how was jack supposed to not laugh

Jack compares Aku to the villain in some play that was popular when he was a kid and Aku's like "that villain was a boss tho" and Jack goes "HE WAS LITERALLY EXECUTED AT THE END" and Aku goes "THANKS TO A BADLY-WRITTEN PLOT TWIST AND A DEUS EX MACHINA" and Jack goes "LIKE THE DEUS EX MACHINA I'M WIELDING??" and now they're arguing about the plot of a play that's been forgotten for millennia while a dozen allies/minions stand around awkwardly waiting for them to get to the point.

Jack's taking a day off because today happens to be some holiday from his home and he's confused that no one else seems to be working that day and everyone's like "oh yeah Aku kept that holiday, he actually liked it" and as much as Jack hates Aku for destroying all the good things from the past, now he kind of hates Aku for preserving one good thing, like what could this day possibly mean to Aku, how dare he taint it with his evil. (it's probably, like, Fantasy Japan Arbor Day or something. Aku's a tree, of course he kept tree day.)

Jack's taking a day off because it's his birthday and there's a huge festival going on in the city and he goes "what??" and everyone's like "oh yeah annual holiday, it's Aku's birthday" and that fucks Jack up a little.

4- the title of the guy in charge of commanding samurai was "shogun." Like that's what the word MEANS, it's the general who runs the army during an era when the army consisted of samurai. and Aku calls himself "the shogun of sorrow." which makes it interesting that the only threat to Mr. Guy-In-Charge-Of-Samurai is a single very determined samurai.

I imagine that for perhaps thousands of years—probably before he got his robot army—Aku likely had an army of samurai. Either humans forced to fight for him, evil humans voluntarily fighting for him, or some sorta shadow demon things he created himself.

(i think, in spite of Jack's influence, Aku may still have a tendency to turn to samurai as his default idea of Something That Should Be Fighting For Me—but that's a whole nother headcanon post.)

Jack doesn't seem to dig much into the history of Aku's rule—he's much more preoccupied with the current state of Aku's rule—but if he does do even a little digging, he'd probably find that, for millennia, the image of samurai has been Aku's earliest and most loyal warriors.

and if you roll with this headcanon, it says a lot that it took so little time for Aku to start using the phrase "the samurai" to mean "that one specific samurai that isn't loyal to me." Millions, perhaps billions of samurai may have been in his army over the millennia; but the one that stands out—THE samurai—is Jack.

5- idk if it says anything about his relationship to Jack Specifically but it's wild to me that Aku just left what's left of Jack's homeland. When Jack transported into the future, I assumed the city he ended up in was the same location he'd just left, and Aku had just stayed put for the next few millennia building the place up into his capitol as he expanded over the rest of the world. But no, Jack finds the ruins of his home, abandoned.

You could use it as an example of Aku's callousness—he was born here, he got his start here, but it meant so little to him that he just moved out one day without a glance back and didn't even think about the devastation he'd left behind. But that doesn't quite ring true to me. This location is ground zero for Earth's Aku-ification but it seems almost untouched by Aku's influence, as if he'd never been there. It wasn't destroyed. It wasn't razed to the ground. It was never built over with something new. I feel like there's a deliberateness to that abandonment.

I feel like he wanted to give off the appearance of callous careless abandonment—"oh, this place means nothing to me. I care about it so little I'm not even interested in calling attention to it by destroying it! I have zero emotions about this place. So don't notice it. It doesn't tell you anything about my history."