How Akudama Drive Challenges the Romanticization of Psychopaths

In the first half of the show, the personalities of the characters contradict each other in a funny way, creating an entertaining dynamic for viewers. But this anime is not your typical story about villains being more sophisticated than people expect. In the second half, with no outlandish mission or extravagant visuals to distract the audience, the main characters show their true colors while idle. The Thug and the Doctor are the most prominent examples of psychopaths whose inner self is somewhat diluted at first. But after their mission ends, they are clearly portrayed as the villains they’ve always been.

The Akudama with the longest sentence (up to almost 1000 years) is the Thug, a psychopath who loves red objects and decapitates people. While on a mission, he exudes a likable “Harley Quinn” personality, his most notable traits being infantilized demeanor and a spontaneous crush on the Conman, whom he refers to as his “angel”. What is particularly striking is how he has proven himself to be a useful teammate, as seen when he agrees to help Drac fight the executioners because he wants to protect Rascal and “be useful”. His creepiness comes through as he licks the blood off Swindler’s face, but the general humor in scenes such as when he gets excited about flying the shuttle bus and riding the Courier’s bike implies that his psychopathy and misdeeds should be seen as bizarre. When he and Rascal are paired together in a group chosen by Black Cat, he exclaims “Hurrah!” and jumps to her to hug. When she pushes away his face and rejects a hug, it points to his passive side, making him seem less threatening, like a fly that can be brushed off. In Episode 4, when Hacker explains how he is going to break open the doors of the Shinkansen, Thug tells Rascal in a simultaneous, quieter background conversation that he hopes he doesn’t die to kill her, but she takes it as a joke. This conversation is hard to hear and will likely go unnoticed given the carefree demeanor of the Roughnecks.

The Doctor is a stereotypical over-sexualized character with no clear purpose in the first half of the series. Her eccentric behavior and exaggerated ability to defy death is so absurd it’s actually funny. In Episode 2, the Apprentice slits her throat and cuts off her arm, but is later seen with her neck sewn up and her hand sewn on. When Hoodlum asks how she managed to survive, she casually replies that “a little self-medication goes a long way.” The show also places significant visual emphasis on her overly sexual design, potentially distracting viewers from her psychotic nature. In Episode 3, Swindler peeks into a room where Akudama is casually sitting and talking, the Doctor is smiling at a test tube, and the Thug is giggling as he presses the red button he found. Looking at them, she remarks that “even though they are Akudama, they act like they usually do.”

In Episode 7, the tone of the plot changes due to the death of Draka and the fact that the Doctor sells the team to the Executioners. As the characters return to their lives after the mission, the series begins to feel truly dystopian. The Bully is offered drugs in a dystopian alley to ease his depression, the Doctor ends up manipulating the Bully into diminishing his value, and the Rascal runs into traffickers. At the end of episode 8, Thug is shown limping with a bloodied leg while hunting Rascal, foreshadowing the end of his romanticized insanity and the emergence of his true desires.

The thug turns from an annoying nuisance to a deadly threat when it is revealed that his attraction to the Rascal stems from his desire to kill her. This explains the scene when he first meets her and gasps as if noticing something. All this time, he imagined a red halo around her head, which over time became more and more. He no longer pursues his target by pressing red buttons and staring at blinding red lights. The ruthless Thug from Episode 1, infamous for decapitating nearly 1,000 people, becomes bloodthirsty at all costs in the “Here Comes Johnny” moment with Rascal to boot (the title of the episode “The Shining” suggests that this scene is intentional). a reference to the 1980 film). Even Swindler is surprised as to why he was always protective of her, as he explains that calling her “angel” didn’t have the same meaning she initially thought. He sees all his victims as “angels” with red halos, and Swindler is his “ideal angel”.

The Doctor enters into a relationship with the Bully, but the series does not hold water, portraying their venomous, dysfunctional nature. In reality, Hoodlum doesn’t understand why she wants to sleep with him, to which she replies that she is “true to herself”, using her sexuality to manipulate others. Despite their implied closeness, the Doctor keeps a distance from him as she paces the room, initiating a monologue about wanting to experiment on immortal children in order to fulfill her desire to have complete control over life and death. At the same time, the Hooligan, as always, cringes in fear. This scene does not focus on the two of them as a “couple”, as its main purpose is to provide an intuitive analysis of the Doctor’s motives. There is nothing romantic or even oddly romantic about their meeting. Neither the Bully nor any of the other characters find the Doctor’s sexuality attractive, but instead view it as the source of their misfortunes. Bully’s cowardice and naivete is what causes him to rely on the Doctor for help, which ultimately leads to his death when he betrays her and they end up killing each other. They don’t have some edgy romance, but a tragic story of manipulation and betrayal.

The show’s motif is that the characters are vulnerable to succumb to their urges and die because of them. Even the Hacker and the Courier who help the Conman by sacrificing themselves for the kids end up clinging to their urges (find interesting tasks and do each job accordingly) as secondary motives for their actions. This anime gives the villains what they deserve and exactly what viewers expect at heart, but not before introducing the idea that they are parodic and “normal” at the beginning, which makes their eventual death both discouraging and predictable. . These crazy, eccentric characters end up appearing more realistic when not being used for comedic relief. They don’t deviate too much or too little from where they settled in the first half, remaining “true to themselves” until the very end.