Well, that takes care of Angel Beats! After getting rid of the smoke monsters, Yuri wakes up and everyone has already moved on. Way to thank your fearless leader, guys! The only ones left are Otonashi, Hinata, Fake Potter Guy, Yuri and Kanade. They have a fake graduation ceremony and then “move on,” one by one. I have a feeling the ceremony would have had a greater effect on me, had I graduated from a Japanese high school. They really sing school theme songs and that one universal Japanese graduation song?

The last two to go are Otonashi and Kanade, obviously. Otonashi decides to get cold feet and proposes that he and Kanade just chill in the purgatory world. He uses the excuse of wanting to help other poor souls, but we all know he just wants to take advantage of alone time with Kanade! Oh, and then Kanade tells him she already has his heart. Which is not a euphemism. His donor heart went to Kanade. She just went to the high school for the dead to say thanks. Hopefully the reason she died as a highschooler was not because Otonashi’s heart turned out to be a dud. “Thank a whole bunch for giving me a heart that just failed after a few years!”

It seems like fate is nice in this series, and everyone gets reincarnated and gets to live a happier life the next time around, as shown in the epilogue. All’s well that ends well, I guess (which is hard to determine with reincarnation).

Angel Beats kind of reminds me of a Japanese film called “After Life.” It also features a pretty mundane afterlife, though with a twist on “moving on.” You should check it out if you liked Angel Beats!

Overall, Angel Beats was pretty darn good. It’s the first anime that I’ve followed on a per week basis regularly and actually finished. I feel it could’ve worked well as a longer series though, since many of the characters had no backstory at all, and so their personalities just seemed forced with no reasoning behind them. And what was up with TK? I guess we’ll never know. Unless there’s a spinoff.