I Got Major ‘Akira’ and ‘Elfen Lied’ Vibes From ‘Stranger Things’ Season Four

Stranger Things season four spoilers ahead.

Stranger Things season four was a return to form for the series. (Sans the Hopper stuff. So, so, so boring.) As a fan of anime, I have often loved seeing the series’ references to two anime: Akira and Elfen Lied.

Akira is the 1988 film based on the manga of the same name about Shōtarō Kaneda, the leader of a biker gang with a banging red jacket and bike, whose childhood friend, Tetsuo Shima, gains telekinetic powers after a motorcycle accident.

Tetsuo begins to act on his years of being picked on and mistreated by using his powers to unleash bloody destruction. The military tries to stop him, but they find they cannot control his powers. The titular Akira is a young boy who also had very powerful psychic abilities and caused the sudden destruction of Tokyo—a fact that the military hid after cutting the boy up into many pieces. In the manga, Akira has a different function, but that’s for another article.

Elfen Lied is an anime/manga written and illustrated by Lynn Okamoto. Once again, the government has been experimenting on kids. “Diclonius,” in the series, are mutated species that look like humans, but with horns on their foreheads and the presence of telekinetic invisible arms called “Vectors.” These Vectors vary based on the power of the Diclonius. Lucy, our main character, is a Diclonius in a facility for experimentation who escapes in a very iconic bloody moment, where she is cutting off heads while naked save for a helmet. She escapes, but is injured in the process and develops a childlike persona called Nyu that takes over at times.

In both series, we see children and childlike people being used for telekinetic experiments with secret histories being kept from the public. With Akira, we find out that in addition to Akira, other children, called Espers (ESPers), were part of these experiments.

The Stranger Things character of Peter Ballard/One/Henry Creel/Vecna, as played by Jamie Campbell Bower, strikes me as a strange combination of both Akira/Tetsuo/Lucy. Like all three, he possesses great abilities and, like Tetsuo, uses them for great destruction. Eleven, in comparison, especially this season, feels like she is in conversation with both these shows. In Akira—the anime—we are told that Akira was able, in his power, to ascend to a higher state of existence. He, like Eleven, was created by the government as a project to create psychic children to use as weapons.

It has always been my theory that the only way the Upside Down would be destroyed was for Eleven to become a part of it, and while a part of me hates the idea of Eleven dying, I do feel like she is meant to ascend in a similar way.

Lucy is a foil to Eleven, because it shows the darkness that she could have grown into—the hatred in humanity that could have come if she hadn’t escaped, especially if she’d become an adult. We see, in the flashbacks with Eleven, that the kids could be sadistic and that could have been her—just like Lucy—without Mike and the party. Now, I really dislike Elfen Leid, but I think its themes of humanity work well for Stranger Things, and I’m excited to see how the series wraps up and what will inspire them next. Always rooting for Sailor Moon.

(featured image: Anime Network, Netflix, Toho)