I've been part of the nerdy SKU analysis community for about seven years, and in all that time, no one anywhere, myself included, has agreed on a single explanation of Akio Ohtori. The other characters are often similarly the subject of such inconclusive debate, but it's seemed to me that agreements and conclusions have always been the most absent in any consideration of who, what, and why Akio is.
I do not offer here one complete essay on my version of Akio, but several short essays, from different angles and on different things. A comparison I notice in June, a facet of his personality I concern myself with in July. If you notice the frequent presence of Freud and Jung, don't blame me; I'm just running with the names Ikuhara dropped. My intention here isn't to in one swoop fully describe all that (I think) Akio is. I won't even necessarily stay true to my own interpretation of him. Instead, like all analysis of SKU, the most I can hope for is to see where a train of thought takes me, and offer you innocent bystanders a chance to come onboard.
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One way to look at Akio and Dios are in the Freudian terms of Eros and Thanatos—the life and death drives. Eros came first in Freud’s studies: it’s the sex instinct, and all the baggage that comes from sex. The desire for life, preservation, survival, and sensuality. The creation drive, realized mostly in reproduction. Later, Freud coupled this with Thanatos—the death drive. The negation urge, the need to put out your own existence. These are equal and opposite contrasts in the human mind, and a functional person needs that balance to be roughly equal. If you’re more one than the other, it presents problems. This is not something to view as two sides of a coin, but rather two ends of a scale that must stay balanced. Unfortunately, for Akio and Dios, it’s realized as the former.
Dios is all Thanatos. He has no life drive of his own, no urge to preserve himself, and one can safely assume (due at least to his age), no real need for sex. Instead, he behaves with self-destructive abandon. You could even go so far as to say he’s suicidal, for the degree to which he pushes himself. On the other hand, Akio is all Eros. Aside from the obvious presence of an overwhelming sex drive, Akio embodies the life instinct because unlike Dios, he’s extremely self-preserving. There’s no room in Akio’s mind for accepting any change in him—he goes to great effort to preserve both who he is and the circumstances around him that permit him to stay that way. He is so hung up on his own survival that he refuses the usual form the life instinct takes—reproduction. He doesn’t accept the Eros/Thanatos cycle where he lives on in those that follow, while he himself must die. After all, you need some degree of the death drive to accept that fate.
The problem with being all Thanatos is quite clear. Eventually, that drive will realize itself in the most ultimate sense, and you will die. If one has no regard for their own survival, they’re eventually going to perish, which is exactly what Dios does when Akio comes along. The problem with being all Eros is slightly less apparent. These two sides are supposed to complement each other to make a person who is willing to, within reason, take risks. It’s the death drive that makes you think jumping out of an airplane would be great fun; it’s the life drive that tells you to wear a parachute. Akio is completely unwilling to take real risks in the name of growth, and because he’s held fast in a state of self-preservation, Akio doesn’t develop. Instead, he stagnates. Any change that would require he set aside a part of himself and replace it with something new is never realized.
The Eros drive is one of creation through reproduction, but Akio is so self-centered he rejects this. Instead of creating another, Akio creates only for himself. The world around him is his own creation, a coffin he designs, and in this strange way, he realizes the creative drive of Eros without that focus moving off of himself to his offspring. While he’s supposed to want to create and construct other lives, he doesn’t—he only wants to create for himself.
This is a primary reason Akio’s character is seen to be pathetic in the context of the series. The people around him grow and develop, they break their own shells, forcibly at his own hand, but Akio himself is incapable of this. You could even say that forcing hand is another means of satisfying the reproductive element of his life drive—he’s effectively a father figure to many of the characters. He overlooks their development (for better or worse), and eventually cuts them loose. But because they’re never his own children, he’s operating on a loophole that keeps the death drive out of the picture. He’s not giving a part of himself to his children, and he doesn’t have to survive into the next generation. He stays what he is while he effectively raises the students around him. In this way, he has many children—one can easily assume most of the student council graduates of Ohtori Academy are just as psychologically marked with the evidence of his parenting as they are by the efforts of their own parents.
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As selfish as Akio clearly is, that alone doesn’t explain the enjoyment he clearly gets out of antagonizing and torturing those around him. A man might be selfish, but Akio’s a little more than that. He’s a dick. His selfishness isn’t just funneled into what benefits his position. He’s not just selfish about power, money, or sex. He’s also selfish about entertainment. What would seem to entertain him is other people suffering. It’s this that really makes him a horrible person: his sense of humor. It’s not that he’s selfish and has no regard for others. It’s not that he does terrible things—it’s not that he can kill, molest, and ruin the people around him. It’s that he thinks it’s funny to do so. It’s that these things please him. It’s not just that he suffers no moral conflict in his behavior. It’s that he chuckles when he misleads Utena into thinking he’s something he’s not. It’s that he laughs (inwardly) when he tells Touga he’s taken for his what Touga wants and knows he’ll destroy. It’s that he grins at Mrs. Ohtori’s shame and disgust with herself, knowing it’s largely his fault she feels that way.
Akio’s abusive nature is built almost entirely on his sense of humor. It’s not a joyless pursuit driven by psychological need. Abusive behavior such as Akio’s might be seen as vengefulness. One can certainly see why Akio would be a vengeful creature. However, the man we see in the show doesn’t appear to harbor a specific hatred of those around him, or regard them as people who have wronged him and must be punished. He blames the world for Anthy’s situation, and says so outright. It’s the world’s fault that Dios died and his power was sealed away. Yet aside from that the motive makes sense, it’s hard to support its being there during the series.
This is to say that I think, at one point, it was. It’s hard to conceive of a character with a history like that never once feeling the compulsion to revenge himself on the masses that violated him. It’s not difficult to assume that Akio was at one point very hung up on revenge. Early on, when it was still fresh in his mind and in the mind of the world? Definitely. But in the series he doesn’t seem all that interested in his abusiveness qualifying as wrath. Concerning the apparent conflict in Akio believing he ‘chose the devil’s path’, and blaming the world for Dios’ fall, these two ideas don’t disagree as they appear to. It was Akio’s decision to become what he became and he’s glad he did. It’s the fault of everyone around him that they had such a hissy fit over it. Like Milton’s interpretation of Satan, he sees his position as his own decision, and faults the powers that be for having a problem with it.
As for that vengefulness, where did all that go? Was it resolved? Heavens no. Did it simply fade out? Not quite. It evolved into something that’s no longer vengefulness. It shaped itself over ages of time into something much easier to live with day to day. Wrath is consuming and bitter, where amusement is satisfying and enjoyable. The cruelty in what strikes Akio funny might be the evolution of a psychological need he once had to see people suffer. The need’s no longer there, but he continues to act on it, not out of vengeance but out of the pursuit of pleasure. As he got used to the presence of cruelty in his life as a means of revenge, he began to like it. More and more for its own sake, until finally the need died and only the act remained, lingering on because he’s learned to love it for its own sake.
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