The cyberpunk anime Akudama Drive made its mark on the Fall 2020 anime season with its eye-catching, vibrant aesthetic. It follows a young woman, who is officially referred to as “Ordinary Person,” as her life takes a tumultuous turn when she encounters six wanted fugitives known as Akudama (“bad person” in Japanese). When the criminals threaten to assassinate her, she assumes the alias “Swindler” and pretends to be another Akudama. She fights to maintain her precarious lie as she becomes acquainted with the mysterious strangers. Don’t be fooled into thinking of this show as merely an archetype of any other cyberpunk media. Akudama Drive is a unique spin on violence and promiscuity wrapped in the guise of chaotic edginess.
In the first half of the show, the characters’ personalities bounce off each other in a hilarious way, creating an entertaining dynamic for the audience. But this anime is not a typical story about how villains are more nuanced than people expect. In the second half, without an outlandish mission and extravagant visuals to distract the audience, the primary characters show their true colors during their idle states. Cutthroat and Doctor are the most prominent examples of psychopaths whose inner selves are somewhat watered down at first. But after their mission ends, they become explicitly depicted as the villains they always were.
The Akudama with the longest sentence (culminating to almost 1,000 years) is Cutthroat, a psychopath who loves red objects and beheading people. During the mission, he radiates a cute “Harley Quinn” persona, his most notable traits being his infantilized behavior and spontaneous crush on Swindler, whom he calls his “angel.” What is especially striking is how he establishes himself as a useful teammate, as is seen when he agrees to help Brawler fight the Executioners because he wants to protect Swindler and “be useful.” His creepiness is shown through him licking blood off Swindler’s face, but the overall humor in scenes such as when he gets excited about flying in a shuttle bus and riding on Courier’s bike implicates that his psychopathy and transgressions are to be seen as quirky. When he and Swindler are paired together in the Black Cat’s chosen group, he exclaims, “Yay!” and leaps toward her for a hug. When she pushes his face away and rejects the hug, it implies a passive side to him, leading him to appear less threatening, like a fly that can be swatted away. In Episode 4, while Hacker is explaining how he intends to hack the Shinkansen doors, Cutthroat tells Swindler in a simultaneous, quieter background conversation that he hopes he does not die so that he can kill her, but she perceives this as a joke. This conversation is hard to hear, and it’s likely to go unnoticed considering Cutthroat’s lighthearted demeanor.
Doctor is a stereotypical oversexualized character without a clear goal in the first half of the series. Her eccentric behavior and exaggerated ability to defy death is so absurd that it’s amusing. In Episode 2, Pupil slits her throat and cuts off her hand, but she is later seen with her neck stitched and hand reattached. When Hoodlum asks how she was able to survive, she nonchalantly states that “a little self-medication goes a long way.” The show also places a considerable visual emphasis on her overly sexual design, potentially distracting viewers from her psychotic nature. In Episode 3, Swindler peers into the room, where the Akudama are casually sitting around and talking, Doctor smiling at a test tube and Cutthroat giggling as he presses a red button he found. As she watches them, she remarks that “even though they’re Akudama, they act kinda normal.”
In Episode 7, the story takes a tonal shift due to Brawler’s death and Doctor selling the team out to the Executioners. As the characters return to their lives post-mission, the show begins to feel truly dystopian. Hoodlum is offered drugs in a dismal alley to ease his depression, Doctor eventually manipulates Hoodlum by degrading his worth, and Swindler has a run-in with human traffickers. At the end of Episode 8, Cutthroat is shown limping with a bleeding leg, hunting for Swindler, foreshadowing the end of his romanticized insanity and the emergence of his true desires.
Cutthroat turns from an annoying inconvenience to a deadly threat when it is revealed that his attraction to Swindler stems from his desire to kill her. This explains the scene when he first meets her and gasps, appearing to notice something. All along, he had imagined a red halo around her head that had grown larger over time. He no longer pursues his drive by pushing red buttons and gazing at dazzling red lights. The ruthless Cutthroat from Episode 1 who was notoriously known for beheading almost 1000 people becomes thirsty for blood at any cost with a “Here’s Johnny” moment with Swindler to boot (the episode title, “THE SHINING,” conveys that the scene is an intentional reference to the 1980 film). Even Swindler is surprised at the reason he had always protected her as he explains that calling her an “angel” did not have the meaning she had originally thought. He sees all his victims as “angels” with red halos, and Swindler is his “perfect angel.”
Doctor engages in a relationship with Hoodlum, but the show doesn’t pull its punches when depicting their toxic, dysfunctional nature. In fact, Hoodlum is confused as to why she would want to sleep with him, to which she replies that she is “being true to herself” by using her sexuality to manipulate others. Despite their implied intimacy, Doctor maintains distance from him as she walks around the room, beginning a monologue about wanting to experiment on the immortal children to fulfill her desire to have complete control over life and death. During this, Hoodlum, as always, cowers in fear. This scene doesn’t focus on the two of them as a “couple,” as its main goal is to provide an intuitive analysis of Doctor’s motivations. Nothing is romantic, or even weirdly romantic, about their encounter. Neither Hoodlum, nor any of the other characters, see Doctor’s sexuality as attractive, but instead view it as a source of their misfortune. Hoodlum’s cowardice and naïveté is what leads him to rely on Doctor for help, ultimately resulting in his death when he betrays her, and they end up killing each other. Rather than them having some sort of edgy romance, they are a tragic story of manipulation and betrayal.
The motif of the show is that the characters are vulnerable to succumb to their drives and die to them. Even Hacker and Courier, who assist Swindler by sacrificing themselves for the children, ultimately cling to their drives (to find a fun challenge and to carry out every job, respectively), which serve as secondary motivations for their actions. This anime gives the villains what they deserve and exactly what audiences expect deep down, but not before introducing the idea that they are parodic and “normal” in the beginning, making their eventual deaths simultaneously disheartening and predictable. These crazy, eccentric characters eventually feel more realistic when they are not used for comedic relief. They do not deviate too much or too little from how they are established in the first half, being “true to themselves” until the very end.