Angel Sanctuary 20

Ok.  Wow, okay.  Yes.  It’s explained.  All of it.  Surprisingly, it mostly makes sense.  You wouldn’t have thought.

Let’s see if I’ve got this: God wanted the power of Adam Kadamon for himself, so he extracted Adam Kadamon’s powers and split them in two, Alexiel and Rosiel.  Then he sealed Adam Kadamon away and made her the mother of all angels.  By being born, all angels were committing sin since the way God had this set up, they had to consume the energy of the mother in order to be born.  God created Rosiel horribly ugly and as an inert lump of flesh.  Alexiel, wanting to save her brother, agreed with God that it would be done if she imprisoned herself in Eden.  One of the conditions was that she had to pretend to be at the most indifferent to Rosiel, and at the best say to hate him outright.  Alexiel agreed to this, and Rosiel’s hatred for everything grew and grew since God himself told him he had an ugly body that only he could love, plus all his servants told him all the time he was horrible-looking.  Rosiel couldn’t approach the Garden of Eden where Alexiel was kept since all the servants were being driven mad by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Alexiel was said to be a sinner because she was eating the fruit, and the last straw for Rosiel was when Alexiel wouldn’t agree to kill him with her own hand, since she was following God’s plan to show him no love or compassion.  Alexiel escaped with Lucifer when he tried to defile her, and she began trying to overthrow the cruel God she knew and gather the forces in hell, which is where she met Kurai.  The rebellion in heaven failed, she was tried and branded as a fallen angel, and her punishment was that her soul was to be reincarnated as a human… yadda yadda.  Rosiel was raised to basically be hated, because he was the Angel of Destruction, and in God’s plan, when he slayed the one he loved with his own hand, Rosiel would wipe out creation.  I can’t remember why it was that Rosiel had to be… freed or resurrected or whatever by Katan, but I’m pretty sure that was explained early on.  Rosiel’s evil comes from the fact that he was made by God to hate himself.  He wanted to go to Etenamenki to get the tablet not for any reason of power, but because he wanted to feel God’s love again.  Also, Alexiel didn’t actually love God.  She only said that at the trial so that Rosiel would never find out about what God really thought of him and what God had been doing to her for her love of Rosiel.

I couldn’t tell you where Metatron and Sandalphon figured into this ending.  All I know is that I’m pretty sure that Metatron’s name got translated as Megaton in the sidebar at one point.  Huh.

God wound up being the true villain of the series.  There was a brief scuffle with Rosiel where Alexiel was briefly awake in her own body, and then Setsuna scored some more wings and flew off to fight God.  It wound up being Lucifer and the Savior v. God.  Apparently the tablet everyone was trying to get wasn’t a tablet at all, and sealing up Adam Kadamon was the only way to… stop it.  Adam Kadamon was in no shape to do anyone any harm or good, though.  She was torn into pieces (she must’ve been a huge lady) and used by God for various purposes.

While the ending is terribly romantic, it’s a few steps shy of being the kind of romance that tugs at your heart.  I think this is probably because there was too much other stuff going on to fully exploit the emotional potential of the romance between Sara and Setsuna, but that final scene still feels great, and it was still one of the most romantic series I’ve read.  Setsuna and Sara make a great pair, but there are some other really good pairs too: Lailah and Nidhogg, Belial and Lucifer, Rosiel and Katan, some lesser pairs in Uriel and Doll and Raphael and Barbiel, and even some non-romantic relationships like Michael and Lucifer, Michael and Raphael, Zaphikel and Raziel, Sara and Lil, and Kurai and Setsuna… the character relationships were all amazing in this series.  I just wish there had been less of them.  Seriously.

I still marvel at the complexity of the plot and the amazing detail of the world that Yuki created from scratch.  It’s insanely hard to get into, and there’s a lot of unnecessary stuff going on, but it’s very, very rewarding, and I can see how this could be regarded as a shoujo classic.  The awesome art doesn’t hurt, either.  The cover to volume 20 is still my favorite piece of color art from the series, I fell in love with it when I saw it years ago.

Yuki writes some really bizarrely addictive sidebars.  I started skipping this feature in a lot of series I read (this is mostly thanks to Arina Tanemura, who writes some of the most inane stuff in them), but Yuki sometimes volunteers interesting information about the creative process, how fan input affected the series, and how she felt about drawing some scenes.  One of them made me laugh in this volume, it was something like “Oh, fans of so-and-so weren’t happy with this scene, I hated drawing it too, I think severed heads are creepy.  On a tangent, my birthday was in December and someone gave me a cool hat!”

Because they’ve never been translated into English, I’ve never played the first two Shin Megami Tensei games for SNES or the two original Megaten games for NES.  However, I sort of wonder if Yuki is a fan of the SMT series, and she does mention playing Persona, a spinoff game, but this crossed my mind in the very beginning of the series and here at the very end.  A common element in the early Megaten games was that demons were summoned and people were controlled by computer games, much like the computer program in Angel Sanctuary (though most of the controlling is done in AS and most of the demon summoning is done in SMT).  Also, were Angel Sanctuary a MegaTen game, Setsuna would be a “neutral’ alignment path, where he doesn’t side with angels or demons, but decides to go against anyone who opposes him.  In Shin Megami Tensei II, if I understand correctly, God is some sort of evil overlord character who has humanity bowing to his every whim, and the main character has to kill him in the end.  The similarities begin and end there other than MegaTen games also often have somewhat complex and convoluted plots with about a million characters, angels and demons, that appear (though usually as summon monsters).  Sometimes they have Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Lucifer, Uriel, Angel, Archangel, Power, Virtue, Throne, Principality, and Dominion in them.  Angel Sanctuary is definitely not a ripoff or anything, and neither the world or characters resembles any MegaTen game I’ve ever played, but I wonder if part of the inspiration for the series lies there.  And now you know I’m a big video game geek, too.

Reading it in one go like this was definitely the way to do it, because there’s no way I would have remembered all the characters had I read this bimonthly.  I’m so glad I read it.  Ridiculosly romantic and melodramatic, just the way I like it, it is certainly a fantastic girl’s comic.