Leave Me Alone Akira — Anime character Tetsuo from Akira screaming in pain while lying down

Leave Me Alone Akira

2022viral videoclassic

Published August 15, 2026

Leave Me Alone Akira is a video meme built from a scene in the 1988 anime film Akira where Tetsuo Shima grips his head and screams the English dub line while suffering psychic flashes. First posted to YouTube in December 2022, it broke out on TikTok in May 2023 as a sound used to caption anything the poster found emotionally unbearable.

anime manga tiktok sound trends movie quote memes delayed virality memes frustration memes

Overview

Leave Me Alone Akira is a video edit that loops the moment in the 1988 anime film Akira where Tetsuo Shima grabs his head, screams and shouts the English dub line "Leave me alone!" while psychic visions strobe around him3. In the original meme cut, those flashes are swapped for other characters or image macros, so Tetsuo appears to be tortured by whatever the editor wants to mock1.

The format works because Tetsuo's contorted face and the drawn-out scream read as pure, wordless suffering3. Once the audio was uploaded to TikTok, creators stopped bothering with visual edits at all and just paired the sound with text overlays describing the most trivial or humiliating scenarios they could think of2.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (source), TikTok (viral spread)
Creator
Aeinzalot; @mitcherru
Date
2022

The earliest known upload of the format was posted to YouTube on December 23, 2022 by the channel Aeinzalot, who cut the English dub scene together with a purple version of the Handheld Pupper (Geeble) character to stand in for Tetsuo's psychic flashes1. Over the following five months, that video pulled in roughly 70,600 views and 3,800 likes1.

The meme's format was straightforward, swap the thing Tetsuo is being tormented by, and the joke rewrites itself. Aeinzalot's clip is documented as the first discovered upload of the video edit on YouTube1.

How It Spread

The format started jumping platforms in April 2023. On April 3, a Tumblr user reposted a moldy version of Aeinzalot's edit and picked up around 3,000 notes within a month3. A week later, on April 10, YouTuber BigMouse re-uploaded the meme and hit roughly 10,000 views in the same window3. TikTok caught it next, with @matcha.rat.26 posting an April 18 iteration that replaced the flashes with Miku Nakano from The Quintessential Quintuplets, drawing about 17,800 plays3.

The breakout came from TikToker @mitcherru, who on April 24, 2023 posted a version using the Goku Xenoverse 2 Stare and pulled roughly 797,700 plays and 88,600 likes in three weeks3. Their upload's audio became the actual sound other creators grabbed. On May 3, 2023, TikToker @user121110987654321007 used it over a caption about "fumbling a bad bitch" and racked up around 1.3 million plays and 304,200 likes in ten days3.

Within three weeks of @mitcherru's post, more than 9,300 TikToks were using the sound3. The trend also bounced back to YouTube, where user kmlkmljkl uploaded a May 12, 2023 cut that used the original Japanese-language audio from Akira instead of the dub, gaining roughly 30,000 views and 2,500 likes in three days3.

How to Use This Meme

The TikTok version typically pairs @mitcherru's sound with a text overlay describing something the poster finds unbearable, embarrassing or agonizing, then lets Tetsuo's scream do the emotional heavy lifting3. The older video-edit version is usually built by keeping the Akira footage and replacing the psychic-vision inserts with whatever character, image macro or screenshot the editor wants to frame as the source of the pain1.

Frequently Asked Questions