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Old 2010-06-26, 10:21   Link #222
Ice Block
less qq; more pewpew
 
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Philippines
I'm here to answer all your questions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
1. Yuri said that nobody who commits suicide comes to the school. But...why? It makes no sense now. If they are dead, and they are there at that school to come to terms with their bad life..... then wouldn't there be a ton of suicide victims there?! I mean.... suicide victims I would suspect had unhappy lives and would need to come to terms with their lives, right? They more than anyone were so unhappy with "living" that they ended life themselves.
This is not the only afterlife. There are many like it, but this is the one that Angel Beats covered. This version of the afterlife is specifically for people who had lived an unhappy and unfulfilled/tragic life and died as high school kids. Basically, youths deprived of their youthful days. I imagine there are separate afterlife worlds for both older and younger people.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
2. How did Kanade who got Otanashi's heart, find herself at the school long before Otanashi got there?
Time in the afterlife does not flow in the same manner as time in real life. For example, real life time may be seen as one continuous straight line, while time in the afterlife may look like isolated points, disjointed segments, a sine curve, a circular loop, etc.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
3. If they are dead, then how the heck can Kanade say "Your heart is beating right here." No it's not. Your dead. It would be DEAD too.
Their brain is working. Proof: they can move, among other things. Their organs still function. That's why you can be killed (and respawn after a while).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
4. How can Otanashi's body react to the heart? It's dead! But....if we somehow think that they were in a coma, and they just never showed it..... wait.... that won't work either. Why? Because Otanashi doesn't even have a heart! So how can a guy without a heart (supposedly dead) have a body that can react to an equally should be dead heart inside a donor girl?
This is the afterlife, where we have souls. Also, Otonashi's heart is definitely not dead: see #3 above. They are not in a coma -- that theory was built upon lack of evidence and was debunked by the AI last ep.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
5. If they are all dead.... then what the heck was up with Yui and Hinata's storyline? We saw future flashbacks of Hinata coming to Yui's bedside while she was STILL paralyzed. What? Was that an LSD, PCP, Angel Dust (rofl) induced flashback? >.< If they are dead, then that makes the HinataXYui pairing far less romantic.
Those weren't future scenes or flashbacks. It was just a what-if scenario.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
6. God..... remember Him? His name was behind the graduation banner in the last episode. Yup.... we sure got to know more about that plot.....didn't we....
The characters had no way of concluding the existence of god. Even the AI didn't know, and apparently the Programmer didn't either. Can you prove god exists in real life?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
7. The MATRIX Overseer.... what? Did KEY finally watch the Matrix Reloaded and decid to pay homage? There was hardly any explanation for this or meaning.
There was a Programmer who fell in love. Then, his beloved disappeared. As time went by (perhaps when he was trying really hard to pass on), he discovered a 'bug' in the system wherein people without any regrets would be mistakenly thrown into that afterlife. This would make them stuck there, unable to move on.

Realizing that he is one of these rare occurrences, he held on to the faint hope that his beloved will return to the afterlife in one way or another and he decided to wait it out. Then, he went mad from the waiting, and he eventually developed a software that would handle this bug if it ever happened again -- the Shadows of Angel Player. Before he converted himself into an NPC, he made a construct who would handle this program.

Whether his NPC self was the construct or not is debatable though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
8. The Characters in the last episode..... SERIOUSLY?! All of them changed on the dime. I mean, everyone but Hinata changed. You could barely recognize Yuri, Otanashi, or Kanade at all. Did the creators decide to have us suspend belief and pretend that a tremendous amount of character development had suddenly occurred during the brief off screen time? lol
3-day timeskip. Also, Yuri had finally accepted and reconciled her regrets, and she no longer needed to be the leader after so long. These naturally caused a big change in her facade. For Kanade, she was already quite open in Ep12, and it was hinted that a lot happened in those 3 days. Kanade composed the mapo tofu song, printed the graduation banner, etc. She probably even socialized with the remaining SSS (Noda, Shiina, Ooyama, TK, Matsushita, Fujimaki, Takamatsu, Takeyama, Yusa).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
9. So what happened? I mean it... what in the world happened at the end? Guess what... we still don't know. Why? Because they wouldn't tell us. Reincarnation? Comas? Evil Shadow Monster Locke? Oh wait...strike that last one. Wrong show. >_>
Reincarnation.

And they are all dead. There are certain beliefs on reincarnation that allow the soul to carry over some remains of your previous incarnation. They use this to explain those things wherein you just think something looks familiar for no real reason at all (which is what supposedly happened at the after-credits scene).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
5. Oh really? You do realize that would make nearly half that episode worthless for the story as a whole.
Nope. You missed the point of that ep. It basically told us that Yui was able to get over her true regret of always having to rely on her mother since she was able to envision a scenario where this happens. Watch it again. Also, the relevance of that episode to the overall plot was to get Hinata on Otonashi's side.

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Originally Posted by alu546 View Post
Seemed that way, but the Kanade x Yuzuru thing was felt a few episodes back, guess they just didnt build up to it.
Kanade x Otonashi has been there since Ep05/06.

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Originally Posted by alu546 View Post
No word on what happens to otanashi alone in that world either. Nothing is known what happens postgraduation either. Just vague assumptions.
He disappears/moves on afterwards (see ED, post-ED). Unlike the Programmer, he was able to recover from the loss of his beloved.

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Originally Posted by roankun View Post
It was seriously painful... Yuri suddenly turned into a real tsundere (and yes, I know, character development crap, but still, one episode doesnt cut it). And I have a lot of other complaints, but the biggest one is Otonashi.
Yuri always had tsundere tendencies. Go read Track Zero.

Quote:
Originally Posted by roankun View Post
That 'I love you Kanade' came out of nowhere. I really thought he loved her, but only like the sister he used to have. It looked like that! That being that sort of love is just... just... I can't accept it. (And that's not just because I'm a YurixOtonashi shipper.
He was desperate. He wanted Kanade to stay, badly, so he put out all his cards. Sadly for him, Kanade did not approve of Otonashi's apparent selfishness.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt122005 View Post
They were reborn huh? Wow...isn't that convenient. What's more... they even look the exact same! Wow... That's pretty convenient too. And whoa...judging by the headphones...they got reborn almost immediately after their deaths. Oh my... I hope their friends and family aren't freaked out by possibly seeing a clone of their dead loved one walking around.
They didn't look exactly the same. There were a few differences. Also, if their reincarnations didn't share similar character designs, how would the viewers recognize them?

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Originally Posted by jinnous View Post
Fourthly, did Kanade actually love Otonashi back in the end? Or did she just indirectly rejected him? I don't know, I am kinda dumb, so make it explicit! (Which I am sure a lot of us wouldn't mind seeing too.)
Debatable. She was basically rejecting him since she couldn't stay with him forever in that world(If I told you my feelings, I'd disappear). She didn't want to make that world become a paradise and lose its meaning by allowing love to manifest and proliferate. She also probably believed that it's better to leave newcomers to their own devices, since people are bound to rebel when you try to force your beliefs unto them.


And as for other issues concerning The Heart:
Organ donation causes you to give up your organs. Thus, Otonashi's heart no longer belonged to him, and he didn't have it (afterlife world probably made an artificial heart to compensate for this). Since his heart was donated to Kanade (and she accepted it), it now belongs to her. Thus, when she died a few years later (heart transplant patients don't live for too long), Otonashi's heart was already considered part of her body by her soul which was sent to the afterlife.

On the other hand, disabled people like Yui, Iwasawa or Hinata did not give up possession of any of their body parts. Even though some of their body parts were not functioning or even separated, these body parts still belonged to them. Thus their souls still considered them part of their body.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon View Post
And that's all well and good.

It's doesn't excuse the anime for being a narrative mess, though.
Can't be helped. They made it into a mixed media project because Maeda apparently got struck by inspiration and proceeded to write far too much for a 13-episode anime. All the things that were cut from the anime due to time constraints are / will be covered in the novel (Track Zero; prequel), manga (Heaven's Door; this will supposedly cover everything, including the prequel) and drama CDs (DVD/BD extras). See:
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Maeda is having a lot of difficulty coping with the length of the anime. However the parts that couldn’t make it into one season of 21 minute anime episodes aren’t going to be lost forever. Some of them will be written into the Angel Beats! novel which will be running in the magazine starting from this month, and it might be interesting to do them as a drama CD, but we plan to do something with the parts that couldn’t make it into the anime.
Quote:
The Aniplex producer of Angel Beats!, Hironori Towa, was interviewed in the November 2009 issue of Dengeki G's Magazine, where he commented that a 13-episode anime with about 21 minutes per episode was not enough to tell the whole story of Angel Beats! Maeda had envisioned. Therefore, the various additional media, such as the illustrated short stories and manga, contain some of the story that was unable to make it into the anime because of time constraints. Towa wanted fans of the series to be able to enjoy it to the fullest by exploring all of the media types.
http://zepy.momotato.com/2009/09/28/...-the-producer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_B...ime_production

Edit: Alright, done. If you've got any more "plotholes" or inconsistencies, feel free to point them out and I will do my best to explain them.
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Last edited by Ice Block; 2010-06-26 at 11:35.
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