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‘The Summer Hikaru Died’ Is Still the Perfect Summer Anime
From its very first scenes, The Summer Hikaru Died cemented itself as the best anime series to drop in 2025. And that’s saying something given the lineup that it found itself in. In a year that brought us new shows like Sakamoto Days and Gachiakuta, and new seasons of well-established hits like Dr. Stone and Dandadan, The Summer Hikaru Died still managed to rise above by virtue of its incredible composition. And a year after its July 2025 release, it’s still the anime of the Summer.
Serialized in the seinen magazine Young Ace Up starting in 2021, The Summer Hikaru Died is the brainchild of mangaka Mokumokuren. The manga started in August of that year to instant and resounding praise, both from audiences and critics alike. By 2024, the series had been picked up for an adaptation by animation studio Cypic. Just like the manga before it, it became an instant hit, garnering a fanbase of millions in just months.
One year out from its release, the impact the show has had is undeniable, and easy to understand. It’s a genre-bending masterpiece that explores some incredible emotional depths and genuinely contemplative themes. Beyond that, it provides a supernatural mystery reminiscent of Twin Peaks, involving the dark history of a small town and the strange spirits lurking around it. It’s a one-of-a-kind show, and if you really must see it to believe it, you only need to watch the first four minutes before you’ll understand why it’s so special.
One Perfect Opening and the Beginning to a Summer of Horror
The show opens on a pretty conventional scene for a horror story: a young man running through the woods in the middle of the night. Yelling out through the noise of a storm overhead, the boy, Yoshiki, calls for his friend Hikaru. As he scans the darkness looking for him, we get our first glimpse at the strange entity inhabiting these woods: a monochrome, amoeba-like form, a pinpoint of red light growing brighter and brighter at its center. Laying on the ground elsewhere, Hikaru is dying. He quietly calls out for Yoshiki as his arm stretches up, reaching for that light. And as red fills Hikaru’s pupil, as he walks towards it in his mind’s eye, in the real world Yoshiki is letting out a guttural cry as he finds his friend’s body.
The Bus Stop Scene That Defines The Summer Hikaru Died
And then it transitions to daytime, half a year later. In the heat of the summer, it somehow becomes even more sinister. In the light of day, there’s an uncomfortable energy to the small town of Kibogayama. The heat sits in the air as a haze, the sun itself is piercing, the day is painfully slow. And most noticeably of all, the cicadas are screaming, like nature itself is aware something is wrong and trying to sound the alarm. Yoshiki and Hikaru sit at a bus stop, talking and eating ice cream, seemingly fine.
It’s at that moment that Yoshiki speaks up: he knows that the Hikaru they found six months ago is not Hikaru. And he wants to know what the creature masquerading as his friend is. “Hikaru’s” face begins to melt into that amoeba-thing once more, as the creature begs him not to tell anyone. And as it embraces Yoshiki and tells him he doesn’t want to kill him…Yoshiki actually hugs it back. He’s seemingly resigned to accepting the abomination in front of him. To the point he’s even open to it playing the part of a dead friend.
An Ingenious Fable About Identity, Belonging, and Love
It doesn’t take long to realize that what you’re watching isn’t a simple horror mystery, or a coming-of-age, or a love story (but you’ll find plenty of people debating its exact classification online, trust me). It is all of those things, yes, but it’s also much more than the sum of its parts. The Summer Hikaru Died is a genuinely ingenious fable about the nature of identity, belonging, and love that interrogates these aspects of humanity thoroughly.
The questions it asks in this interrogation are hard to ignore, and maybe even harder to answer. What does it mean when grief becomes a form of love, and vice versa? How much of your love is tied to an idea of someone rather than who they really are? How do you keep going when the person you tied so much of your sense of belonging and safety onto is gone? And how does your very existence and sense of self change when you try to replace that person?
Exploring Grief, Estrangement From Self, and Queerness in a Familiar Place
The exploration of these questions is also heavily the reason for Hikaru’s effectiveness as a quintessential queer love story as well. They’re the reason why it’s one of the best of all time as far as anime is concerned.
Yoshiki’s journey of grief and his struggle with understanding his feelings towards both versions of Hikaru is painted in familiar brushstrokes for many queer people. Living in a small town, feeling completely and firmly in the outgroup, the set dressing is intentionally familiar. The show often likes to play in that familiarity to engender an otherworldliness, as you might have guessed from the description of the opening above. It’s an up-close sort of distance, representative of how out of place the main characters feel even at home.
How The Summer Hikaru Died Turns Nostalgia Into Existential Horror
Cultural festivals, excursions to the beach, breezy summer nights, these elements that are supposed to bring you nostalgia instead tip the scales to incongruity, to feeling out of place. There’s always a catch to these good moments that the show exploits for an emotional gut punch, especially in the seventh and twelfth episodes of the season. The harmony of good memories and warm weather turns into the dissonance of feeling like you have nowhere to run. It’s a sensation not unlike the opening of the show in those dark woods: of being lost in a place that should feel familiar, explored, but is ultimately much more isolating and terrifying.
One could argue it’s that very unfamiliarity that causes Yoshiki’s choice to keep the new Hikaru around. Yoshiki is rudderless in a culture and society he was always promised he’d find a place in but never really found. The one person he found solace in is gone, no matter how hard he tries to deny it. He’s isolated from even his family, who are as ghostly as the spirits manifesting around town. Yoshiki bears a burden that is impossible for the people in his life to understand, but one that many viewers will know all too well.
The Emotional and Narrative Entanglement of Yoshiki and Hikaru
And then, that struggle is compounded with another burden in having to manage and look over the creature impersonating Hikaru. In turn, the false Hikaru’s secret becomes his secret. Likewise, the false Hikaru’s attempts to adapt into human society draw obvious parallels to the queer experience. He might have the memories of the boy that was Hikaru, but there has been an intrinsic change in how he identifies that upends everything for him. He’s met with suspicion and even outright hostility on all sides; his very existence is a fight for survival. With attacks coming from the most unexpected angles, there’s a layer of subtextual discomfort about the persecution of queerness added to the show’s more literal haunted horror.
The relationship that the duo develops as they try to find a sense of normalcy, and the supernatural discoveries they make in the process, are so deftly interwoven that the two journeys become one and the same. They are inextricable, and that makes the writing of Hikaru so much stronger for it. It feels more purposeful, and more touching emotionally as you see these two try not just to survive, but to discover who they really are. And by that twelfth episode, what their relationship has turned into reaches this emotional crescendo that leaves you wanting so much more.
The Summer Hikaru Died is in no uncertain terms an emotional tour de force, and this is only barely scratching the surface of what makes it so strong. If you missed the boat on catching this show when it first released, let this article be the signal that you should absolutely dive into the unparalleled experience that is The Summer Hikaru Died.
The works of Stephen King are back in the spotlight once again, if they ever really left. Mike Flanagan’s Carrie series is set to release on Amazon Prime this October 7th, and the heat is on. This would be the fourth run at the tale of a tortured psychic girl suffering through serious religious trauma and bullying; it’s also the first successful television series adaptation. Famously, the 2002 TV film was supposed to serve as the pilot for an extended Carrie series, but that never got off the ground.
There’s a variety of reactions to the show already; from complaints about getting another Carrie White that doesn’t look like Carrie White, to thoughts about introducing other psychic students into the story. It’s fair to say there’s, at the very least, renewed interest in re-evaluating the many adaptations of Stephen King’s works. Old habits die hard.
There’s a ridiculously large swath to choose from, ranging from the obvious classics like The Shining and Pet Sematary, to irregulars like The Langoliers and The Night Flyer. If you’re feeling especially bold, you might try a King original like Storm of the Century or Rose Red (I’m overdue for a watch of Storm anyways). But among all these lies one of the strangest and most forgotten King adaptations. One that was sold as an adaptation of a single novel, but is really a spiritual sibling to the entirety of Stephen King’s canon. That adaptation is the SyFy original series, Haven.
The Silver Age of Supernatural Television Drama
The development of Haven sits smack dab in the middle of what I would call the Silver Age of Supernatural Television Drama. The hypothetical Golden Age that precedes it isn’t pinned to exact years but rather defined by a few masterpieces of evergreen television. These are the shows throughout the ‘90s that really impacted cable TV at large. The obvious cultural touchstones of the genre: The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and most importantly Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which would see monumental success. They were rapidly followed by the likes of shows like American Gothic and Roswell. I would count Smallville too, but again, blurry edges.
The Silver Age then is marked by an explosion of shows, not necessarily being created as knee jerk reactions to that success, but certainly heavily inspired by these network defining hits. Shows that enjoyed the episodic “monster of the week” format while retaining a focus on the interpersonal drama between its characters. They debuted as their progenitors ended or went late in their run, effectively meant to “replace” them.
This time saw the rise of J.J. Abrams renown with the shows Alias, Fringe, and most importantly, the mega-hit Lost. The most successful of all of them, Eric Kripke’s Supernatural, is still reverberating through pop culture today after its 15 year long run. And for my fellow Warehouse 13 enthusiasts, you know that this is the era that the highly underrated show thrived in.
Also, MTV’s Teen Wolf was there too, I guess.
From The Dead Zone to Haven Island
Among these much more successful shows was an odd little Stephen King adaptation: USA Network’s The Dead Zone. It was a very fast and loose interpretation of King’s novel of the same name. You know the one: go into a six-year coma, come back with psychic powers, meet an evil politician, race to stop him from causing the end of the world. Also, Anthony Michael Hall is here too, I guess.
As one might expect, the premise was rife with procedural potential. Despite a solid initial viewer base, The Dead Zone ran for 6 seasons before being cancelled due to waning ratings. But two of its writers, Sam Ernst and Jim Dunn, ended up as showrunners for a similar but even stranger translation of King’s work: a television adaptation of the book The Colorado Kid called Haven.
When The Adaptation Is Unrecognizable
Haven premiered in July of 2010 on SyFy, joining during a great (if not the best) era for the network. There were phenomenal runs going on with Merlin, Warehouse 13, and later the American remake of Being Human. And, unsurprising to anyone who got 20 minutes into the show’s first episode, “Welcome to Haven”, it fit in much more with those shows than it did with its source material. In fact, the premise betrayed all expectations for fans of the novel.
What The Colorado Kid Is About…
For context: the book is about an intern at a newspaper, Stephanie, trying to solve the bizarre death of a nameless drifter with her new bosses, Dave Bowie and Vince Teague. Details are sparse, and what few the trio have just don’t line up. What results is a hard-fought battle to finally crack the case of who, or what, killed the Colorado Kid. More importantly, The Colorado Kid is pretty explicitly a mystery novel about mystery novels; it has a victim, but there’s little information about the killer, and that’s intentional.
The blank space in this case is the focus. King is really more interested in observing how an audience interfaces with a mystery and what makes them so compelling. He spells all this out as much in an afterword, down to explaining why he wanted to write the story and his perspective on “wanting” an answer being better than “knowing” the answer.
…Is Far and Away from Haven’s Premise
The TV show Haven, however, is very, very different. The show follows FBI agent Audrey Parker (Emily Rose), who is drawn to the town to investigate the inexplicable murder of a criminal who escaped federal prison. When it’s revealed he was killed by impossible means, she soon discovers a phenomenon known as “The Troubles”: the sudden and often subconscious manifestation of dangerous supernatural abilities in the townspeople of Haven. As Audrey realizes her past is intertwined with The Troubles, she attempts to solve the mystery of what’s causing them and who she really is as she becomes entrenched in the lives of Haven’s locals.
Different versions of newspaper owners Dave and Vince, as well as The Colorado Kid himself in season 2, do show up in Haven. But fundamentally, the show is an entirely different beast tonally. It is far and away from the novel, and strangely enough, that was at Stephen King’s request. He initially told Ernst and Dunn when the show was being pitched to ABC to spice it up with more supernatural elements.
Hence, how it ended up as a monster of the week show on Syfy. Double hence, how it became an unrecognizable adaptation of a hardly supernatural book. If I had to compare it to any of the Golden Age shows, it’s most obviously inspired by The X-Files. That being said, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to Fringe. Especially given how, like Fringe, Haven becomes really, really serialized rather than episodic.
A Flat, Kind of Cheesy First Season That Grows on You
The initial monster of the week format set up in Season 1 does carry into the following four seasons, but it becomes very clear that there is a main mythology that will take precedence by early Season 2. While the supernatural mysteries that make up the bulk of the episodes are solid (see episodes 1, 4, 6, 8, and 10 through 13 for the best of the first season), they’re mostly establishing the groundwork for Audrey’s personal narrative arc.
The mysteries are also the backdrop for Audrey’s budding love triangle with local handsome cop Nathan Wournos (Lucas Bryant) and local handsome rogue Duke Crocker (Eric Balfour). The romance is kind of terrible, and unfortunately very frequent since they’re often cooperating to solve the mysteries together.
So, that’s all I’m going to say about it in an effort to be kind.
Haven Season 2 Deepens Audrey Parker’s Mystery
Haven’s first season is mostly tame, erring on slightly underwhelming, with some very cheesy dialogue and drama. The characters aren’t nailed down as anything but loose pastiches until the last several episodes. By then, they’ve built some weight and dimension to them. Where Season 1 leaves off is a pretty solid cliffhanger that will have you at least curious enough to venture into Season 2 if you’ve watched this far. It serves as the first big bite into the intrigue of the question “Who Is Audrey Parker?”, which is the central pillar of the show.
Season 2 is much more engaging, and the episodic mysteries feel much more significant and dangerous. Eventually, the mythology around Audrey and the Troubles sprawls out into a maze of even more questions involving secret societies, split personalities, time travel, and tears in the fabric of reality. That last bit might stand out to fans of The Dark Tower series, and that’s because I’m talking about exactly what you think I’m talking about (no spoilers!).
A Stephen King Adaptation About Stephen King Stories
The show is only somewhat effective at establishing its mythos around Audrey and The Troubles. But I have to appreciate it for what it manages to do in the process, especially throughout the second season as it gives us one good solid villain to follow in the malicious Reverend Driscoll. He is a classic King-style villain, and an embodiment of what Haven really excels at. The same way that The Colorado Kid is a mystery novel about mystery novels, Haven is a Stephen King adaptation about Stephen King Stories.
This goes beyond the fact that they’re effectively trying to find a new person with the shine every week and stopping them before they have their own personal “Black Prom” level meltdown. The show is chockful of references, small and large (the vast majority are sight gags referring directly to Stephen King stories) to his writing. There’s an abundance of episodes whose plots are overtly reinterpretations of King’s works, especially in season two with various homages to It, Maximum Overdrive, and The Dark Half.
And even when the show doesn’t have a one-to-one analog with a King story, it excels at stocking Haven Island with a variety of secondary characters that genuinely feel like the cast of a Stephen King book. The dialog might be corny and the residents strange, but it does feel like a lived in setting, a hallmark of the author’s many fictional small towns in Maine (which get namedropped a decent amount in the show, obviously, they’re all neighbors). Also, when we get the answer of who exactly Audrey is, it actually does end up connecting to the greater Stephen King mythos in a way that is surprising and kind of fun, even if the ending is a little underwhelming and gives Buffy finale flashbacks.
Haven Isn’t Half Bad
At the end of the day, I can’t confidently say Haven is a great show. Especially with how it drags in a lot of places (that double-wide trailer of a fifth season is particularly egregious). It can be exceptionally hit or miss. But it’s so uniquely dedicated to recapturing the vibes of a Stephen King story, that I have to admire it when it does succeed, when some might find that a futile task. Paradoxically, the further it gets away from the source material it was barely riffing off of, the more King it feels.
It is at the very least an incredibly unique show in the Silver Age of Supernatural TV, and if you can tolerate the melodrama of your Supernatural’s and Warehouse 13’s, you’re likely to find some amusement in it even if you’re tuning in and out while watching it. More than ten years out now from Haven’s 2015 finale, it’s safe to say the series won’t click with everybody, but for fans that enjoy homages to the prolific horror author’s extensive repertoire, you’ll be hard pressed to find a show that shows more love to King than this.
Let’s look back at a time none of us really want to…December of 2020. Trump is in the final few months of his first term as President. The nation is still in the midst of the COVID pandemic. With dictatorship, political and social unrest, and a pandemic sweeping the nation, it felt like either the best or the worst time for something like The Stand to return to American pop culture.
The Stand’s miniseries remake came out in 2020. Generally, the consensus is pretty negative. The original Mick Garris series from the 1990s is also very flawed and received an extremely mixed reception, but it has also garnered a bit of a cult status. None of this is too surprising, seeing as the novel is a grandiose epic that is a daunting task to adapt perfectly. Regardless of iteration, though, it unfortunately seems like a fairly relevant text for troubled times, and seems to continuously return to the zeitgeist in times of recession or despair. So…why exactly does it keep coming back?
The Stand in the 1990s
The Stand was originally published in 1978, and was a smash hit. For those unfamiliar, the novel is a post-apocalyptic, fantasy-horror epic concerning the outbreak of a deadly disease called Captain Trips’. Groups of pure-of-heart Survivors are brought together by premonitions of a psychic woman named Mother Abigail. She is a symbol of everything good in the world. Meanwhile, a demonic drifter named Randall Flagg begins to collect vagrants to build a fascist regime out of a gutted Las Vegas. Commercially and critically, the novel struck a chord with audiences everywhere. King was well-known already for Salem’s Lot, Carrie, and The Shining, so a horror-adventure epic felt like the next step for him. In the 1990s, a complete and unabridged edition was published, clocking in at over 1100 pages. This edition is where the novel’s political analysis can really start.
One notable detail changed from the 1970s edition to the 1990s uncut version is the inclusion of contemporary details. The timeline was changed to cement the book with a sense of timelessness. One haunting detail in particular is the comparison of the disease to the AIDS epidemic, which was devastating the country in the 1980s and 90s.
While the comparison is not a major detail of this changed text, it feels very purposeful in its playing into the politics. With the fictional Captain Trips’ connection to the U.S government’s failure to help/control the disease, one can feel the frustration with the Reagan cabinet’s handling of the pandemic during the 1980s. The miniseries premiered in the 1990s as well, so it makes sense that some of these same frustrations might be the catalyst for the book’s first major adaptation.
The Stand in 2020 and 2026
This was touched upon in the intro, but like the 1990s, 2020’s decision to adapt might have lined up perfectly with the world’s current affairs. COVID and Trump are clear, commonly stated comparisons to Captain Trips, as well as Randall Flagg. With Trump back in power in 2026, the CDC is gutted, giving way to poop lettuce and a rise in Measles. One can begin dog-earring the old mass market paperback of The Stand and pull their collars in nervousness.
Randall Flagg’s attention to Las Vegas coincides with Trump’s love of all things gold and grand. The faux-royal look, with redecorations to the White House and a hideous ballroom, might remind constant readers of Randall Flagg’s move to Las Vegas. All of the garishness is but a fake distraction, decorations so his followers do not see that the promises are all fake. At the end of the day, it is all designed to serve Flagg and Flagg only. It might be time for another adaptation soon…
Apocalypse fiction, and Hope rooted in Horror
The Stand is a testament to the power of horror and genre fiction. The reason horror has maintained its cultural relevance more than any other genre is its relevance to cultural fears and worries. All the way back to Night of the Living Dead, the genre had recognized the world around it and found ways to tell stories to allow a sense of escapism, and an outlet for anxiety. The Stand is possibly the greatest example of this.
The Stand will always be relevant, unfortunately, because there will always be Randall Flaggs. There will always be Captain Trips’. This incarnate evil will always exist in some capacity in society, in one way or another. However, there will also be Mother Abigails. There will always be Tom Cullens. The Stand exists for catharsis, yes, escapism, yes, but also as hope.
As we see at the end of the novel’s extended edition, Randall Flagg does not die-he just is reborn in a different time period. On the other hand, after Mother Abigail’s death, she continues to speak to the survivors as well. There will always be evil, but there will also always be good. The Stand is a testament to the cultural catharsis of horror, but also the necessary hope rooted in the darkest stories we tell.
