Angel Sanctuary 5

Yeah, yeah.  Once again, general spoilers, no major story revelations or anything.

As I hoped, the tiers of hell sort of became more clear.  Setsuna finds himself in the… judgement area, with Enma-O and Uriel, the angel of death.   I think.  At least, I know he’s dealing with both at the moment.  Uriel passes judgement on human souls and either passes them off to heaven or tosses them into the fires or into the now-non-existent Gehenna.  He may not actually pass them off into heaven, they may be beyond that before they reach him.  I can’t tell.  Any sense I may make of this is immediately nullified by the fact that Uriel lives in Yggdrasill and rides a dragon called Nidhogg.  Not only is Kaori Yuki crossing her mythologies here, she also freely admits to inventing a lot of stuff, which is fine, it’s a story. Nothing is going to make much sense here anyway unless she explains it, and I can’t begrudge her making up stuff for a story.

We learn that not only are there seven great angels, there are also four powerful angels that are in charge of each of the elements.  We hear about all four of them through the course of this volume.  It seems to me like they would wield the most power, or at the very least Uriel is the most powerful character we’ve yet seen.  Yet Metatron and Sevothtarte are the rulers in heaven, and Metatron is just a kid.  I don’t know, I suppose that’s why there’s a lot of infighting.  Uriel doesn’t want any part of that, at least.  After hearing so much about Uriel and his powers, he is now my favorite character.  I just wish he weren’t so emo.

Rosiel’s pet is escaping, and he doesn’t seem to like it much.  I’m sad that this has to end so soon, since I sort of liked the fact that this extremely powerful being in charge of heaven fed his enemies to a monster and left body parts Godfather-style in people’s beds.  I’m not entirely sure I approve of Tiara, but from what I’ve seen, I kind of like him/her.  Though God knows that the last thing this story needs is another minor character tangling with a minor character.  Hopefully Tiara gets a bigger part soon so I can see more of him/her.

The friend I mentioned last volume leading Setsuna around hell finally implodes, and a lot of the volume is spent either in a flashback of his life, with Setsuna pleading with him to find reason in living, or with Setsuna saving him.  As it stands, he may become some sort of slave to Setsuna in the same way Katan is a slave to Rosiel.  Fine.  He’s grown on me since he’s reappeared.

Exposition exposition.  Lots of new characters.  I like the explantions of what’s going on.  There’s an extremely rich mythology being created for us.  I just kind of wish I’d get to the part where something happens in this mythology.  Of course, a lot of it is still murky, and there’s still about 420 of the 500 characters in the series left to go, so I think there’s a whole lot more exposition to come, unfortunately.