Background

Ashi
Occupation: Assassin

First appearance: Samurai Jack Season 5, Episode 1: “Episode XCII” (March 11, 2017)

Backstory

Long ago in a distant land, Aku, the shapeshifting master of darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil. But a FOOLISH samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose him. The two did battle in Aku’s lair, with the young prince nearly emerging victorious… but before the final blow was struck, Aku tore open a portal in time, sending him thousands of years into the future where Aku’s evil was law. The nameless samurai known only as Jack wandered the land in search of a way to return to the past. All the while he battled the various robots, bounty hunters, aliens, and demons that worked under Aku, aiming to undo the evil that was him.

But following a humiliation whereupon Jack became unworthy of his magic sword and disappeared into the wilderness, fifty years had passed. Time had lost its effect on the samurai, but the suffering continued. And as Aku’s grasp choked the past, present, and future, hope was lost. But Jack had not disappeared… not entirely. And what was left of him needed to be hunted down and destroyed before he got back, back to the past.

Fortunately for Aku, he had once visited one of his most loyal sects during that gap, a cult of women known as the Daughters of Aku. Offering a drop of his evil essence to the Mother of the cult for amusing him, he failed to foresee what he had then created. The Mother drank the essence, and proceeded to give birth to septuplets. These seven would be raised together, their skin burned black as the darkness they were spawned from, and their only way of life was the death of the samurai.

And when they were finally set loose to embark on their final mission, one would surpass the other six. One whose skill, whose passion, whose dedication and whose potential for power rose above the rest. One who would fight the samurai and not only live to tell the tale, but take a path that steered the destiny of time itself.

The One True Daughter of Aku: Ashi.

Alongside her sisters, Ashi tracked Jack down and ambushed him, but despite their best efforts, they fell one by one until Ashi was the only one left, hanging from a cliffside by her kusarigama. After falling to her presumed death, she survived and continued trying to kill Jack regardless of her circumstances. It didn’t matter if she was trapped by her own weapon, eaten by a monster, or being saved by Jack. Her mission ingrained in her since birth remained the same: Kill the Samurai!

But right when she was about to kill Jack, a ladybug happened to fly by, reminding her of when she found one as a child, only to have it crushed by her mother, who deemed it a distraction unworthy of Aku’s reign. And now she’d watch as a similar ladybug flew into Jack’s hand… and he released it unharmed.

Seeing this sort of kindness and tranquility from anyone, let alone her mortal enemy, surprised Ashi. After witnessing this and reflecting on his previous attempts to save her life, Ashi slowly broke free of the conditioning her mother had placed in her all her life. As she traveled alongside him, Ashi would learn more about the world as a whole, including how Aku had destroyed nature and how his rule preyed upon the weak, leaving nothing but death and destruction.

During a mission to save some brainwashed children from being implanted with mind control chips, Jack would mysteriously disappear, blaming himself for the kids’ supposed deaths. Ashi wandered the land trying to find him, and her journey would lead to her encountering many of Jack’s allies, showing her Jack’s impact on the world.

After preventing Jack from committing seppuku, Ashi helped him regain his sword, battling an army of orc soldiers and even her own mother, killing the High Priestess with one of her own arrows. As they traveled the land to finally end Aku’s reign, Ashi and Jack’s relationship would slowly turn from being allies to something more intimate and they eventually fell in love. But when it finally came time to confront Aku, the sorcerer smelled something strange: his essence inside of Ashi.

Manipulating the remnants of him in her body, Aku forced his daughter to fight Jack, eventually bringing them to the surface and fully corrupting her. Now trapped inside her own body, Ashi was forced to watch as Jack surrendered and was taken prisoner, about to be publicly executed on live TV.

Fortunately, Jack’s allies would arrive in time to free him and battle Aku’s forces, and in the ensuing battle Jack and Ashi would use their love for each other to overcome Aku’s command, giving Ashi full control. Using her new powers, she created a portal in time to send her and Jack back to the past, allowing him to finally return home and kill Aku.

Though the day was saved and Aku was slain, Jack would still have one final tragedy befall him. Just as they were about to be wed a few years later, Ashi suddenly collapsed. Since Jack had killed the past Aku, this meant Ashi was no longer born, and she faded in his arms, leaving only her empty kimono. Grief-stricken, Jack mourned the loss of his fiancée, but was given the strength to move on when he saw a ladybug. The same creature that inspired Ashi’s change of heart would give Jack the courage to move on and forge a better future despite his loss.

In the game Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, things take a different turn when Aku interrupts their return to the past, separating them and sending Jack to a pocket dimension filled with his past enemies. Unable to reach Jack directly, Ashi would occasionally appear through a temporary time portal to offer him advice to keep going, even begging him to spare her sisters this time around. Despite his best efforts, Jack was once again forced to kill the Daughters of Aku, including the past, evil version of Ashi thanks to Aku pushing her onto his sword.

Reanimating her with his essence, Aku would force the dead Ashi to fight Jack to the death, only for the real Ashi to destroy her copy and finally help Jack reach the past. Jack killed Aku, and by destroying a series of gold medals he‘d corrupted, his influence was weakened enough that Ashi remained alive, now accompanying Jack as his wife.

Personality

As a Daughter of Aku, Ashi was raised one thing with one thing and one thing only: "DESTROY THE SAMURAI!" This, understandably, did NOT give her a well-rounded education, especially not in a social sense. While Ashi was able to hone herself in combat, to the point where she can let out a war cry with the best of them and knows more about how to kill a man than talk to one, she's not very smart and can be incredibly brash and stubborn.

While she’s able to adapt to unpredictable fighting styles, this doesn’t extend to understanding the natural world or just living society. A stag, which she and her sisters confused for a minion of Aku just from its antlers, completely baffled her by not killing a smaller, weaker doe. Though compared to her sisters, Ashi was the closest one to being curious about softer, kinder things, which often got her punished. Her repression of this would be one major factor in her redemption.

Ashi also lacks knowledge of things such as modesty; she'll scrape off the charcoal that was burned onto her skin no problem and make a leaf dress to replace it, but she'll also end up completely naked with no real knowledge on the purpose of clothing. While the above was eventually remedied by learning from, learning about, and falling in love with Jack, it wasn't easy.

Even as Ashi became more knowledgeable, she was still incredibly stubborn, quick-tempered, and easily frustrated. However, this stubbornness allowed her to express more direct heroic determination, such as her escape from the Dominator and her steadfast loyalty to Jack. Even her loyalty to Aku was, at first, a form of loyalty to what she felt was right, and she found herself horrified by everything she'd been led to believe beforehand. She wasn't bad, just forged that way.

By the end of the series, Ashi had, in her own way, become an incredibly kind person. Still ruthless, still brutal, but with gentleness, love, and compassion as well, even willing to sacrifice herself for worthy causes.

Experience

As a Daughter of Aku, Ashi has been trained from childhood as an assassin who can fight in any condition, including underwater, in complete darkness, or naked. She’s killed every soldier in this massive army with her bare hands without visibly tiring, then went on to fight her mom to the death. She’s also helped Jack fight off a group of alien tiger men and Lazarus 92, a massive swarm of parasitic alien bugs.

She’s displayed some quick thinking in general and during battle, like creating new clothes out of surrounding plants, turning a ram horn into a makeshift dagger, using broken glass as shuriken, or finding a way to attack Jack with her kusarigama while it was restraining her.

Due to her training being incredibly limited to the cult she was literally born into, however, Ashi’s knowledge of the rest of the world is limited and her experience is incredibly specific. She’s proven to not even understand basic modesty, ending up naked several times without being embarrassed. (We see you there, Genndy…) This isn’t a Starfire-like situation where fish out of water characters simply have a different concept of modesty, this is a matter of her never being raised with such foreign concepts in mind, since that wasn’t “kill the samurai”. So while she is skilled at what she’s been trained to do and adaptable in many different forms of combat, her conventional wisdom and experience is woefully limited.

In short…

Jack is smart.

Aku is pure evil.

Ashi is neither.

Arsenal

Kusarigama

A chain sickle Ashi’s frequently used in combat. It can extend to insane lengths to restrain others, attack from afar, lift them into the air, or disarm them. She can also use it to swing through her surroundings and save herself from falls.

It was destroyed when a sea monster shot her and Jack out of its blowhole, but she seems to carry a spare since she uses one in a later episode.

Bow

After killing a cult member with her own arrow, Ashi stole this off her body to help her sisters during a training session.

Ram Horn

Used as a makeshift dagger while fighting the High Priestess.

Glass Shards

Used as makeshift shuriken while fighting Lazarus 92.

Double-Sided Blade and Riot Shield

Used against Lazarus 92 while investigating the lab it had escaped.

Broadsword

Used to fight Jack while under Aku’s control. After having her latent Aku powers awakened, it became the same material as her skin and is constantly on fire, but was later destroyed by Jack.

Skills

Stamina

While never shown often, Ashi has displayed some immense stamina, taking down every single orc in this massive army without any injuries before fighting her mother to the death, only passing out after killing her.

Agility

Ashi is able to parkour off stalagmites, leap above attackers, and perfectly balance herself atop narrow pipes and scaffolding while investigating a factory.

Martial Arts

Ashi’s displayed some impressive skill when fighting at close quarters, having used it to fight off an entire army and help Jack against a group of tiger men.

Marksmanship

During her training with the Daughters of Aku, Ashi showed proficiency with a bow and arrow, using it to kill some of the cult members who were fighting her sisters. When fighting an army of orcs, she was able to throw broken spears into their heads with complete accuracy (0:38-0:40), and she could bifurcate the bugs comprising Lazarus 92 with broken shards of glass.

Stealth

The Daughters of Aku have all been trained to be so adept at stealth that they can completely blend in with the shadows.

Powers

Enhanced Senses

As part of her childhood training, Ashi’s senses have been trained to their absolute peak, letting her dodge arrows in total darkness and fight in those same conditions.

Hammerspace

Ashi has used this to pull her kusarigama out of thin air.

The following are attained after being corrupted by Aku:

Aku Physiology

Thanks to her body becoming a shapeless black blob like her father’s, Ashi can now twist her neck 180 degrees, stretch her limbs as long as she wants and turn them into blades, shapeshift into anything she can think of, and even absorb entire beings into herself.

At one point, her body’s dark mass became a writhing ocean that Jack tried to pull her out of, implying it was supposedly intact beneath all this, but that is provably not the case based on other shapes she’s taken. Much like Eddie Brock’s body inside Venom, the anatomy of the human inside is “ehhhhh don’t worry about it.”

Pyrokinesis

Lets her summon fire and imbue it into her weapons and limbs.

Laser Eyes

Red-hot beams Ashi can fire whenever she wants. She’s used this to counter Aku’s eye beams and incinerate a copy of herself.

Time Portal

By letting out a sonic scream, Ashi can summon a time portal around herself or another person to send them to any point she wants. She used this to send herself and Jack back to the past.

Resistances

Ashi

Electricity:

After enduring prolonged torture from The Dominator, Ashi was able to directly overpower his electrocution and beat on him.

Aku Body Resistances:

Taking on the powers of Aku, Ashi has several immunities and resistances both shown and implied. See Scaling and Q&A section for additional details, as the specifics on what is a resistance and what translates into immunity is better addressed there.

Forms

Daughter of Aku (Controlled)

Thanks to Aku “bringing out the best” in her, Ashi’s latent powers were awakened by Aku and she was placed under his complete control. This turned her body into the same amorphous, pitch black material as Aku, and she gained his horns and fiery eyebrows.

While in this state, Ashi’s subconsciousness is left to struggle for control against her body, and she gains the same weakness to Jack’s sword (0:51). Fortunately, Aku’s influence can be overcome, either temporarily with sufficient enough pain or permanently using the power of love.

Daughter of Aku (Free)

After Jack’s love for her freed her from Aku’s influence, Ashi gained full mastery over her powers as a Daughter of Aku and obtained new ones like laser eyes and time portals. (Supposedly she had them all along, but this was her first time demonstrating them. Once again, see the Q&A.)

Strength

Daughter of Aku form

Speed

Durability

As a child, she withstood the following:

Daughter of Aku form

Scaling

Ashi’s nearly killed Jack and actively fought alongside him during Season 5, and considering this was after 50 years of constant fighting, Jack would’ve realistically honed his skills and become far superior to any feat he, his allies, or his one-off enemies performed during prior seasons. This would include allies like the Scotsman, who he fought for over a day during their first meeting, the monkeys who taught him to “jump good,” and the various bounty hunters and robots he defeated.

Samurai Jack

The Scotsman (and his wife)

Destroyed alligator robots by headbutting them
Blocked Jack's attacks and kept up with him
Was unharmed by missiles that destroyed an outhouse and being crushed under a collapsing castle
A copy of him was able to fight post Season 5 Jack but was eventually defeated
His wife destroyed an army of robots, ripped them apart with her bare hands, and seemingly collapsed an entire castle by running

Misc. Allies

The Robo-Samurai beat Aku with its fists
The Monkey Man could jump high above the trees and into the night sky in seconds
The Thief blocked and deflected machine gun fire with his briefcase (he was an ally in the comics, so he counts)

Misc. Bounty Hunters and Enemies

Ezekiel Clench traded blows with Jack, smashed him against some gears, and was the first to recover when they were both electrocuted
Josephine briefly restrained Jack to let Ezekiel beat him up
One of the Ultra-Robots blew up part of a city (487.57 tons of TNT - 3.87 kilotons)
Princess Mira, Jujunga, I, Am, The Gentleman, and Boris all fought Jack in the time it took a drop of water to hit the ground
Battle Through Time has various copies of Jack’s old enemies (and the Scotsman) show up as bosses or mini bosses to fight a post Season 5 Jack. These include:

Daughters of Aku

As its sole surviving member, Ashi should be superior to the feats shown by her sisters.

As a group

Blitzed Jack and destroyed his armor

Individually

Aku

Aside from him being the source of her powers, Ashi’s been able to match his shapeshifting and the power of his eye beams while he was trying to kill her and Jack.

Casually smashed through buildings
While giant-sized, he destroyed the Emperor’s home with a massive blast of fire (33 megatons of TNT for the fire, 1.2 gigatons for Aku existing at that size)

Part 2 of the episode depicts him using his eye beams instead

Left a massive crater when he destroyed the last remaining time portal (694.5 kilotons - 83 megatons)
Can roll over an entire army
Killed the Scotsman with one blast from his laser eyes
Created a pocket dimension with no past or future that exists “between time,” which he controls (17:18-17:40) and collapses upon his defeat (Inapplicable; See Q&A)

This dimension seemingly contains a sun (136 quettatons)

Dodged attacks from Jack even when he was enraged
Can travel interstellar distances in a short, unknown timespan
Aside from his eyes, his body is unable to be harmed by conventional weaponry

Feats

Nearly killed Jack multiple times
Helped Jack free some children who were kidnapped by the Dominator
Gave Jack the strength to keep living when he was on the verge of committing seppuku
Helped Jack fight a group of tiger men and Lazarus 92
Killed an orc army, the Dominator, and the High Priestess
Broke free from Aku’s control with Jack’s help
Helped Jack finally get back to the past
Got married to Jack in Battle Through Time

Weaknesses

Despite her pain tolerance, a hard enough blow can knock her out for some time and she can’t survive mortal wounds. She also has no inherent resistance to poisons and needs help getting them out of her system.

While her skill with the kusarigama is impressive, she’s not strong enough to escape it on her own if it’s used to tie her up, though she can still use it if she gets in the right position. And while she’s proficient with close-range weapons and (makeshift) shuriken, she lacks any experience in handling firearms.

Even though she inherited Aku’s powers, it’s unknown if she can actually use all of them. Her screentime is mainly spent on basic powers like shapeshifting and pyrokinesis, with only a few miscellaneous powers like laser eyes and time portals showing up near the end. Even if we say she knows how to use all of them and completely inherited his immortality, that wouldn’t mean she’s completely invulnerable. Aku’s been physically harmed before, and strangely enough, his eyes can still be harmed conventional weaponry while the rest of his body can’t. It also doesn’t let Ashi come back from having her body blown up, as she demonstrated against a copy of her.

And as seen by her canon death, altering the timeline in a way that affects her existence will cause her to fade away.

Ashi is also not very difficult to outthink. Her training is very specific, making her brash and giving her a significant lack in experience. An experienced strategist able to survive her for long enough will be able to maneuver her into a trap, it is simply a matter of comparing the powers that will allow one to keep her there.

Q&A

What's with Aku’s dimension feat?

This blog goes over it in more detail, but for a brief explanation in our own words:

The Samurai Jack wiki describes Battle Through Time as “The player controls Jack as he travels through different timelines towards his final showdown with Aku,” but nothing in the game supports the game’s setting having multiple timelines. It’s described as a “pocket [Aku] created between time,” and it’s unlikely this “pocket” is a single, unified area. As shown from the transitions between levels, Jack’s clearly being dragged from one time portal to the next and ending up at specific points in the timeline.

As far as Ashi is concerned, she's only able to initially reach out for Jack between these points until she's able to access them more directly later in the game chasing after him, aka she's in the portal herself when he's about to be taken through elsewhere.

So despite what the fan-based wiki claims, there’s nothing in the game to imply its setting consists of multiple timelines.

Does this mean the pocket dimension is completely irrelevant to the debate? Possibly not. Aku created this dimension and it starts collapsing after he’s defeated. As shown in an earlier level, this dimension appears to contain a sun, and since Aku created the dimension, this would arguably extend to him. To generate a sun like our own would require an energy would require 136 quettatons of TNT, which is well beyond anything else in Samurai Jack, to the point where it could easily be considered an outlier.

Should Ashi have all of Aku’s powers in her Daughter of Aku form?

Regardless of the potency of the actual abilities demonstrated by Ashi on screen, a few things have to be remembered regarding her actual use of them.

First off, Ashi did not actively get to see Aku perform all of these attacks herself. Her first time meeting Aku directly was the first time Jack was reunited with him following that fifty-year timeskip. She might have heard a few details talking to Jack, but nowhere did she get to see most of what Aku could do for herself. Yet, she was able to match Aku blow for blow briefly, both in power AND manner, and then open a time portal without watching Aku do it. You could try to force an explanation that Ashi would have received such education under Aku’s control or that there was some connection through their minds, but this is conjecture at best and would still imply she has these capabilities after regaining some self-control. On that note…

Second, we see her performing some of these abilities in Battle Through Time, like when she pulls out the laser-eyes on the time-bound version of herself from within a portal, or the recurring abilities to reach from within her portal to the game setting occupied by Jack. She actively resists Aku’s actions independently of him in order to use the powers on her own.

Third, during her initial ‘death’, it is not as if she suddenly died because Aku no longer lived in the present day. It’s because thanks to the defeat of Aku in the present day that Ashi would never have been born in the future. That being said, Ashi does state that she felt Aku has left her, and there is no strict definition of whether this is her ability to sense his presence or his power being gone from inside her

However, with the alteration to the ending done by Battle Through Time, she is freed of the consequences of erasing Aku altogether, so she should supposedly also be freed of what killing Aku means for her power, whatever that might have meant. One must also note that while Aku awakened Ashi’s power from her body, it was always there, as Aku was able to sense his essence inside her before it was brought to the forefront. He’d separated it from his body to put into that goblet, and this young woman is where it ended up, both human and Aku.

In short, Ashi can act independently with many of the powers she possessed in the Daughter of Aku because the absence of Aku is not a proven deterrent to her existence nor those of her access to his powers following Battle Through Time.

Does Ashi have Aku’s immortality?

While Ashi shares many powers with her father, some of them are brought into question as to whether she shares them fully. One of these is her inability to be conventionally killed, as repeatedly demonstrated by Aku. Aku can be punched, stabbed, burned, blasted, grabbed and thrown, even occasionally feeling pain from these, yet he’s fine. Even the Emperor, in his fateful battle with Aku, managed to defeat him using the only weapon that was supposed to be able to harm the demon, yet he survived in the form of a tree. It wasn't until Jack repeated this that Aku finally died. So, does that apply to Ashi? The answer, surprisingly, is no.

In Battle Through Time, Jack fights a time-displaced version of Ashi twice, once in her baseline assassin garb along with her sisters, and again later on in full Daughter of Aku form. In neither case does he actually kill her, but after the second encounter, the quote unquote “real” Ashi does, appearing from a time portal to laser eye the wounded doppelganger once and disintegrate her. As this is not a clone or facsimile, but rather a version of her displaced from the normal timeline, it’s as if she fully killed, for lack of a better term, herself. And while an argument can be made that it took the power of Aku to kill the blood of Aku, this is not provably demonstrated anywhere else.

Even when Jack was possessed by Aku's germs, another of his strange vulnerabilities, it didn’t take the shapeshifting master of darkness himself to eradicate that part from Jack. Therefore, it’s not proven that it would require the same to destroy Ashi. Whether she shares this property with her father or not, Ashi can be conventionally killed. It just won't be easy to get through her inherited powers to do so.

Conclusion

Like my last blog, this was a collab effort between me and Morkez Marihser, fittingly enough for a blog between Mara and Ashi. I started this one as a spur of the moment idea after realizing we had listed out everything for her already, so I figured why not just make a full blog for Ashi?

For this one, both of us watched Samurai Jack, though in my case it was to get some clips for this. Still, going through the series again gave me a lot of nostalgia from when I watched this with my grandma as a kid. It was still just as good as back then, and the episode with Jack and the robot ninja was just as cool as when I first saw it. I did think some episodes were a bit weird like when Jack was naked or the time he dealt with a farting dragon, but they weren’t bad, just really out there.

Season Five was almost perfect. As someone who watched it when it was airing, it was cool revisiting the darker, grittier tone and some of the comedic moments got me to laugh. Ashi was an interesting sidekick and her development over the season was written extremely well. It was satisfying to see Jack finally defeat Aku for good, but I’ll admit the wedding scene in the finale is extremely contrived and brings it down a bit.

Good thing Battle Through Time exists! Admittedly I haven’t had much time to play it recently, but I loved what I did go through (except the Beetle Droid boss. They’re a pain in the ass), and it at least makes up for the ending.

And just to go on a slight tangent, my grandma found out about season 5 a few years ago and watched all of it. She didn’t have any problem with the blood, the occasional language, or the ending, which was really confusing. From past experience, I thought things like explicit violence and characters saying things like “damn” and “penis” would’ve made her shut it off, but she went through the entire thing and didn’t complain. She watched all that, and from what I’ve been told, she let my aunt watch Highlander The Series, a series where every episode’s fight ends in (off screen) decapitation… but when I was in high school and we watched the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist (another show she really liked), she forced me to skip an episode because Scar called Kimblee a bastard once. This isn’t relevant. I just wanted to bring up a weird thought I had while rewatching Samurai Jack.

Credits

Saul’s VS Blog: Aku vs The Lich and Cleverly_Clearly’s Samurai Jack, Scotsman, and Aku respect threads for some of the calcs and links
Morkez Marihser for helping with research and writing

Ashi (Samurai Jack) Analysis Blog