I rewatched the 1988 movie adaptation of my source recently and I keep coming back to something that I think about every time I rewatch it now. In April 2025 was the first time I experienced this and this is my first time trying to write something long-form about it. What I wanna talk about is the idea of "the reality versus the fantasy" when it comes to the movie and my fictionkinity.

When I get to explain my identity I try to say that the movie isn't "canon" to me but the manga is. I hold Akira (1988) as close to myself as I do the manga. It's special to me in its own way. If I didn't watch the movie, I wouldn't have eventually realized I'm Tetsuo in the first place. The version of my fictotype in the movie is still me in a way. Looks like me, acts like me; all that. The actual difference comes from the events. The events of the movie never happened.

At least, they didn't happen like that.

Watching AKIRA and reading AKIRA are two different experiences for me. I've watched the movie at least 16 times, where as the manga I've read all the way from the first to last book only 2 times. If the manga is "canon" to me, why haven't I read it a hundred times more than the movie? The manga is everything to me but it's too real. I'm very "canon-compliant" so most of the stuff that happens in the books really happened in my past life. It's the most accurate account of those events. If reading the manga is like reliving my past life, watching the movie is like... watching a movie I just happen to be in.

The movie touches on a lot of things that are in the manga but the manga wasn't finished when the movie was in production. Most of the plot beats for the film end up borrowed from the first 2 volumes of AKIRA. The events that happen in the movie are an alternate version to how they happened in the manga and in turn how they actually happened in my past life. Nothing about the movie is more intense in this aspect than when it comes to the end.

I finally end up in the Olympic stadium, Kaori finds me and I tell her about how "Akira" isn't real and people just wanted to follow someone who could destroy things. The Colonel appears and tells me to go back to the lab where I can get medicine for my accelerating powers and not die. I bite back at him and refuse that. He shoots me and my arm mutates. Kaneda appears. We fight. Suddenly my entire body mutates and I grow into this huge mass of warping flesh that looks like a baby. Kaneda gets thrown into my mass and I'm conscious and telepathically speak to him about the pain I'm going through. It's graphic and most people's only memory of watching Akira (1988). The other ESPers manage to "revive" Akira and he creates a singularity to "take me away." Kaneda tries to save me and ends up in the singularity. He sees my memories, he sees the memories of the other ESPers, he understands what "Akira" is. He gets pulled out of the singularity, survives and tells Kai and Kei that I'm "gone" and rides off into the distance with them. Roll credits.

So what really happened? My mutations were this drawn out process that took a few days. Honestly, I could even say it took as long as "AKIRA" does because the moment my psychic powers awakened on that night in March, my goddamn fate was already written. Whatever. When my mutations actually started it was mostly in my right arm. It changed and twisted and bloated and it hurt so bad. Then I blacked out the first time my body changed into a mass of flesh. I had no idea what was happening to my body. Then it happened again, and again, and again... Every time my body fully mutated, I can only remember darkness now.

When I fully mutated it was like getting stuck between sleep and waking up. I couldn't feel or remember anything in that state, but the moments I would regain control over my powers and change back to myself reality hit me. My mutations were so painful and they lasted what felt like forever and it was fucking terrifying. To top it off my body wasn't the only thing breaking down; so was my mind. My powers were swallowing up my personality. I swung between feeling like I was the most powerful thing on the planet to begging for help and being terrified to being so angry at what was happening to me. It's hard to describe the mindset I was in because it was all over the place.

When I finally died it wasn't under the open night sky and a bunch of stadium lights. I was deep in the underground chamber Akira used to be in. Kaneda had shown up with some others. I managed to control my powers long enough to crawl toward him and I cried that I was dying and begged for him to help me while he stood there staring at me in disgust and fear. It wasn't like the damn movie where he screams my name over and over and runs toward me trying to do something. He couldn't even believe it was me. In my final moments he wouldn't do anything. Then I died. I have no conscious memory of what happened next but I lost control for the last time and mutated into that giant "baby" again and pulled Kaneda inside of me.

I went on a rampage, going for this other psychic who was antagonizing my mutated state, trying to draw my power to its peak so that I could actually be killed. I fully awakened and started to destroy what was left of Neo-Tokyo when I was finally "defeated." Kaneda got pulled into the singularity with what was left of me. He went through space and time, he saw all my memories flash before his eyes, he learned what the powers were, he learned what happened to Akira and the other ESPers. We spoke one last time as kids. He got pulled out as the singularity was disappearing and he survived and lived in a world I wasn't a part of anymore.

If somebody told a shortened version of what really happened to me and what happened to me in the movie, they seem really similar on the surface. When you get into the details, the difference in how much faster and even kinda "painless" my death is in the movie compared to when I actually died, is so obvious. The idea of "reality versus fantasy" becomes too strong to ignore.

The movie is a fantasy. It's a fantasy that my death wasn't so drawn out and the pain didn't happen over and over and got more intense over days, becoming so difficult to comprehend that I didn't even think it was real at one point. It's a fantasy that Kaneda actually tried in some way to help me. Before Kaneda saw me for the last time, we had this intense fight where he beat the shit out of me. He fights me in the movie but all he does is shoot a laser rifle at me.

The movie's a fantasy that almost everything I went through that changed my past life never happened. That's exactly what makes it easier to watch so much. The movie I can put on and enjoy but the manga I have to prepare for, even though deep down I enjoy reading it just as much if not more. Touching on the fact the manga wasn't completed when the movie was in production again: Sometimes I wonder if the movie was never made, would the movie's ending instead be the manga's ending and would it feel wrong to me? In that hypothetical, would I even be able to remember what really happened? Would I just have to accept the ending as it is? Who knows. That's not how things went so I don't actually worry about it.

I rarely say this word but I love Akira (1988). I don't hate that movie and I don't want my essay giving any hint of that impression. I don't feel hurt by it for being "wrong" or different or like a "fantasy" that I keep comparing it to. But when I think about the stuff that really happened and what it means that the movie is so different...

Maybe I wish the fantasy was true sometimes.