If you were like me, you were entranced by last season’s gorgeous, genre-crossing work by Key, Angel Beats! The show started with so much promise based on an interesting storyline, fun characters, beautiful animation and credibility based on Key’s recent series. From there, fans were divided about whether or not the show met it’s early promise. I fall on the side of “yes it did.” I agree with the terrific post on Major Arcana, which argues that the series is more than skin-deep. Furthermore, the series is deep in spiritual themes – after all, it’s setting is in an afterlife where those who are conscious to it’s reality are suffering from thoughts of their life (and death) on the earthly plane. Obviously, this is something we’ll discuss in the future on this blog.
One wonderful part of the series was the ending (don’t worry, no spoilers here). It caught me by surprise, in a good way, even though I should have known that Key’s endings always get me. Still, as the series ended (and in fact, long before the end), a general view was that it was too short; the anime would have been strengthened by 26 episodes rather than 13. Well, at the very least, fans are getting a bit of what they clamored for. According to Anime News Network, the final episode, which is set to be released on DVD in Japan on December 22, will be bundled with an epilogue episode.
YES!
I thought Angel Beats! ended beautifully, but I can’t resist the opportunity to revisit (I hope) our favorite characters one last time. Yui and Kanade are fan favorites, but I’m also hoping to see more about Otonashi, Yuri and my favorite, Hinata. Here’s looking forward to the epilogue…and perhaps, in the future, a movie?
Can’t wait to see this. Not entirely sure if P.A Works would throw us an entire episode worth of alternate ending, but still…
The ending for the Angel Beats! isn’t the best of endings, so the possibility of having more Angel Beats! is definitely a good thing. They need to focus some story on TK!
TK needs to have his only story arc…he’s awesome.
I have just stumbled onto this blog, to find after five years of wondering whether I was going insane, that there are others who watch anime as I do, and who view it through a Christian lens like I do. As if this weren’t enough, here I find another person who liked Hinata the best of the [i]Angel Beats[/i] characters. I am guessing that you liked as much as I did both the delivery and circumstances of the delivery of his last line: [i]Ja na, shin’yuu![/i]
I haven’t put as much thought into this anime as into some others, because I didn’t find it as potentially personally transformational as I did some others. But the ending also took me completely by surprise, like probably nothing since [i]Fruits Basket[/i] has, and I too am still dying to know what TK’s deal is. 🙂
Thanks for the blog, and to everyone else for their comments, and I will keep reading.
Hey, well, I’m glad we can be insane together, ha! I hope that you’ll enjoy my posts and add to them through your comments. As for the ones you left here – I pretty much agree with everything you wrote. 😛
Oh, and have you been to the Christian Anime Alliance forums? There’s a real active, family-like community there of anime fans who are also Christian – might be worth it for you to check out.
I have stumbled onto that forum as well, and have lurked a bit but not participated yet. I know much more about web forums than about blogs, but at the moment I am preferring the quiet feel of your blog to the din of the CAA web forum (however friendly a din it seems to be).
I had originally written several more paragraphs, but I chide myself for writing posts that are too long on web forums, and for some reason I feel especially strongly that I’d better keep it short on Someone Else’s Blog. I will say that finding this blog is making me seriously consider starting my own on a similar subject, if I can only figure out how. I don’t think there would be too much overlap, since of all the series you mention, I have seen and enjoyed some of them, and taken note of others I’d rejected earlier but will now reconsider (like “Clannad” and “FMA: Brotherhood”), but you’ve touched on none of the series that I would call “personally transformational.” And why should you have? We are different people, and different people respond to different messages. 🙂
For now, though, I will definitely hang out here from time to time.
Well, again, welcome! And feel free to write paragraphs and paragraphs here – as much as you’d like!
It would be awesome if you started a similar blog! Please email me (beneath.the.tangles AT gmail.com) if you have any questions.
Also, if you’d like to “try it out,” I’d certainly welcome you to write a guest post, like the one I featured today (which was by another Christian blogger who, coincidentally, I know through the CAA forums). Just shoot me a email if you’re interested, and we can discuss. 😛
I will certainly think about it more, though I should really at least sleep on it first. I have known about the CAA forum and blogs like yours for less than 24 hours after all. It is a welcome enough shock, but still a shock after five years of thinking I was losing my mind. (And to think all I ever had to do was a Google search with the terms “anime Christian themes”!)
On another note, what’s the deal with the little purple guy I was given for an avatar? I certainly didn’t choose him. I was trying to figure out how to replace him with something else, except that he is growing on me. I am thinking of calling him Murasaki-kun and keeping him. 😀
Just let me know. 😉
Oh, your icon thingy…I think he’s the standard on my blog. You can set up an account at gravatar.com to use a consistent one when commenting on most blogs. That is, unless you want to keep Murasaki-kun. 😛