As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Why did the Espers assault Tetsuo's mind with images of Akira earlier in the film, during which he makes it clear he doesn't know who that is; and later, attack him three-on-one in his hospital room in a certain famous scene still in the dark about Akira? This is what sends him on the offensive to the Baby Room and escaping to find Akira's containment unit in the first place. Kiyoko also has a vision of Neo-Tokyo's impending destruction, surely provoking Tetsuo, who is full of teen angst and whose psychic abilities mirror Akira's is a bad idea?
- One, because Tetsuo's mind reminds them of Akira. Two, because psychic powers aren't very clean in this setting. The epsers understand each other perfectly and their surface thoughts are probably bleeding over. Three, they still have the minds of children. They aren't thinking about whether or not Tetsuo knows who Akira is, they are just trying to deal with a threat.
- Why did Kaneda just rush into attempting to kill Tetsuo. While I personally don't have a problem with it (seeing as how Tetsuo had become a legitimate threat) a lot of people tend to cite Kaneda's lack of attempting to talk Tetsuo out of it as a flaw on the film and manga's part. They also say it makes Tetsuo and Kaneda look like they were never that close to begin with since both of them just rushed into attempting to kill the other without giving it to much thought. So I'm just curious if there's a particular reason why Kaneda never tried to talk him out of it?
- The thing is that Kaneda isn't actually that smart, or that heroic. He's not one for giving inspiring speeches beyond "Let's go crack some skulls". Hell, despite his mutation Tetsuo is no genius himself. After Tetsuo kills Yamagata he has crossed the Moral Event Horizon line. Kaneda doesn't need to have some sort of gradually dawning realisation to know that Tetsuo has turned into something terrible - he's just killed one of his best friends almost arbitrarily, right in front of another of his friends. As Kaneda says, "He's our friend, not yours! If anybody should be killing him it should be us!" As his life-long friend, he feels he is the one to decide if Tetsuo can be redeemed. But he's not much of a talker and for that matter, Tetsuo's not much of a listener.
- In the Manga, Kaneda hesitates to kill Tetsuo on their first encounter, because they used to be friends and he hasn't seen the carnage inside the warehouse with Tetsuo slaughtering the entire Capsule gang. Yamagata begs him to kill Tetsuo but he can't bring himself to do it. After Yamagata is murdered and Kaneda sees the carnage, he realises that Tetsuo has changed and that he must be killed.
- The same applies to his right hand man, the man in the suit. While he needs Tetsuo's power to keep the Empire stable, there's only so many times you can see your minions explode before you try to kill the bastard. If Tetsuo's powers weren't so clearly unnatural or powerful, talking would be a preferable option. Since Tetsuo is that powerful and psychotic, all talking would do is open you up to become a nice smear on the wall when you could've at least been shooting him instead.
- In the manga, after Tetsuo damages the moon, the tides on Earth become much more extreme. Why? The moon hasn't gotten any closer to Earth, and the total mass of the moon and its ring shouldn't be any different than the moon's old mass.
- The chunks of the Moon are much closer to the earth. Many of them actually impacted on the surface, and it's 70% water...
- Regarding the movie: after seeing Tetsuo in news clips from a TV store window, how did Kaori make it from seemingly downtown Tokyo to the Olympic stadium on her own in what had to be a war zone?
- Maybe this sounds a bit trivial and blunt, but what did Kaneda mean when he said: "I promise... that the next time I'll stay with you. All night long."?
- That he was going to have sex with her all night long. Kaneda is as romantic as a dead canary, but Kei seemed happy about the idea.
- In the movie, why build such a massive underground facility just to keep frozen a bunch of vials containing tissue samples?
- Cloning? If you're referring to Akira being body parts in jars, it was probably to keep him from destroying Neo-Tokyo again.
- No one really knows how psychic powers work and the body parts may still be somehow dangerous. They rather have them frozen for study and buried somewhere that no one will ever find them. It also helps that Akira detonating kick started a world war. The Japanese government would have a lot of reasons to burying the cause of the war.
