Akira
test post about Akira (add picture, review, etc.)
There are stories you like, and then there are stories that totally rewire your taste. Akira did that to me.
I donāt mean ārewireā in the casual, hyperbolic way people talk about favorite media. I mean it in the way a city changes after an earthquake: the skyline looks familiar, but the foundations are different. Somewhere along the line, Akira became the reference point I kept returning to. Sometime last year in Korea, I went to a ė§ķģ¹“ķ (a graphic novel cafe) and picked up Akira for the first time in years. After picking it up, I tore through the entire series again, rewatched the movie a few times since, and just can't stop thinking about it.
To me, cyberpunk is a genre about what happens when technology outpaces morality and power outpaces accountability. Akira is one of the clearest and most iconic versions of this, and it came out in 1982!
My experience with Akira is split across two media: the graphic novel (Katsuhiro Otomoās sprawling manga) and the animated film adaptation (Otomo again, condensing an epic into a two-hour fever dream). Together, they form a kind of one-two punch: the manga gives you scale, machinery, politics, and consequence; the film gives you impactāpure audiovisual force.
Neo-Tokyo isnāt just a setting. Itās a character built out of concrete, signage, riots, and bright neon against the dark, polluted sky. Itās the kind of city cyberpunk loves: overdeveloped and under-governed, where social order is something the state claims to maintain while barely understanding the forces itās provoking.
The graphic novel is expansive in a way that feels almost architectural. Otomo is meticulousāabout streets, uniforms, machinery, crowds, and the small bureaucratic moments that make a society feel real. The plot isnāt just āteenagers, psychic powers, catastrophe.ā Itās also governance under stress. Itās institutions making choices. Itās the way emergency powers get normalized. Itās factions scrambling to control something they donāt understand because admitting ignorance would mean surrendering authority.
And the characters, especially Kaneda and Tetsuo, feel like the perfect cyberpunk pressure test. Theyāre not shiny heroes with moral clarity. Theyāre teenagers with anger, insecurity, loyalty, pride, and a need to matter in a world that treats them as disposable.
Tetsuo in particular is one of the most unsettling figures in sci-fi because heās both victim and threat. He embodies a theme I keep noticing Iām drawn to: power that arrives without wisdom. The tragedy isnāt only that he becomes dangerousāitās that he becomes dangerous while still emotionally trapped in the same wounds that made him vulnerable in the first place.
The movie is a different beast. Itās not āthe manga, shortened.ā Itās its own artifact. Streamlined, intense, iconic.
People talk about the animation (rightfully), but what makes the film unforgettable to me isnāt just technical skill...itās the confidence of it. The film moves like a machine that canāt be stopped. The motorcycle scenes arenāt just cool (the iconic Akira slide!); they establish speed and danger as the natural rhythm of this world. The violence is sharp and sudden. The government feels panicked. The atmosphere feels electrically doomed.
And then thereās the body horror.
I donāt even need to describe it for anyone whoās seen it. That sequence is one of the most effective āyou canāt unsee thisā moments in sci-fi cinema. Itās grotesque, tragic, and strangely symbolic: power mutating into something uncontrollable, identity dissolving under the weight of forces too big to carry.
Over time, Iāve noticed that my favorite sci-fi tends to share a few āAkira fingerprints,ā even when the tone is totally different:
Cities as systems, not backdrops
I love when a place feels politically aliveāstratified, surveilled, chaotic, built by competing interests.
Power with consequences
Especially when itās institutional: militaries, corporations, governments, labs. And when itās personal: what happens when an individual suddenly becomes a weapon.
Moral ambiguity
Characters making understandable choices inside an unjust structure. No easy heroes. No clean victories.
A sense of scale
Not just ābig explosions,ā but big implicationsāsocial collapse, legitimacy crises, and the feeling that history is turning.
The sublime and the terrifying in the same frame
Sci-fi thatās both awe-inspiring and unsettling. The future as miracle and nightmare simultaneously.
Cyberpunk can sometimes get reduced to an aesthetic: neon, rain, synthwave, trench coats. Akira is a reminder that the aesthetic is supposed to point to something deeper. Fear, upheaval, alienation, and the question of who gets to steer society when everything accelerates.
A lot of sci-fi ages by becoming quaint: its imagined technologies get surpassed, its political anxieties get replaced by new ones. Akira doesnāt feel quaint. It feels evergreen in the most uncomfortable way.
Because the core of Akira isnāt about āthe future.ā Itās about what happens when institutions treat people as materials. When trauma becomes policy. When youth get written off until they erupt. When power becomes an end in itself. When a city tries to build over its own scars without actually healing them.
Thatās not a 1980s fear. Thatās a human one and one that feels even more relevant today.
And thatās why Akira didnāt just make me like cyberpunk when I was younger...it made cyberpunk feel like the genre that actually gets it.
Revisiting Akira felt like checking in with an old friend. It reminds me why I fell in love with sci-fi in the first place: not because it promises shiny futures, but because it uses imagined worlds to interrogate real power.
If youāre a longtime cyberpunk fan, Akira probably lives somewhere in your DNA already. And if youāre not, itās worth engaging with it as a foundational text of modern sci-fi culture.
Itās not just influential. Itās radioactive.