Angel Beats! - Speculations & Theories
 

This thread is aimed at Angel Beats! viewers and its purpose is to provide a place for spoiler free speculations and theories. Having them in a central location may help focus the discussion instead of spreading speculations over the various episode discussion threads.

You are NOT allowed to:

1) Post anticipations of future events (whatever their sources might be, 2ch, official site, magazines etc). Just keep in mind: the only preview that isn't considered spoilerous is the one that comes at the end of each TV episode.
2) Formulate speculations based on fruition of said anticipations of future events.

This thread must remain spoiler free. If you need to post about future events you already know please use the Angel Beats - Spoilers and Speculations (based on web previews) thread instead.

Now that we know that Angel isn't endowed with her powers by some god, I was thinking that she might be a spirit who feels the need to police everyone else. Or maybe she does answer to higher up who just doesn't grant her disciplinary skills

Perhaps Tenshi is a high-tech android who was developed by some military who intentionally gave her the form of a young girl to make her unsuspecting.
However, tenshi developed a conscience and turned against their makers, who then "killed" her, and she appeared there.

I think Tenshi is a miko of a shrine and she is trying to cleanse the school of "ghosts" so she is not actually dead.

Since the SOS members lol vanish when they wonder in the NPC realm for too long it must mean they are soulbound to their current area.

Others who are also soulbound cant reach them because their locations are too far apart.

I like this. If I wrote the story, something like this would occur. XD

My guess would be Tenshi is someone who lost something close to her because she neglected it, and now she's trying to make up for it.

Speculation for EP5 (based on EP4 preview) - "Christ" gets a perfect score on the tests and disappears

Just sayin' :p

I'm surprised how inactive this thread is. Usually I expect much more!

So with that having been said...

Heh, there's plenty of theorizing, it's just mostly still in Generic Discussion and various Episode threads.

I'm a bit suspicious of Yui appearing devilish while Tenshi having many angel vestments. I don't always jump at the easy symbolism but it's still got me a bit suspicious.

The Yui-Tenshi divide is interesting too, apart from their appearance. Yui is depicted as a sociable, groupie / rock-and-roller chick while Tenshi is the prim, by-the-book, piano-playing class president.

It might appear that both camps are vying for influence over the souls of the afterlife?

Oh but Yui can't really be Tenshi's rival. She's your usual imouto-san type, and is not dramatic enough for the part.

This anime's way over my head. It's kind of like "Kick-Ass"; a mish-mash parody of 50+ anime out there and tons of character archetypes and in many cases, their respective personality archetypes recycled.


The world they live in is a bit Higurashish and I have to wonder whether it's an alternate dimension in which everyone's given a second chance. They've all died as ghosts with dissatisfying memories lingering over them. As we've seen with the rock band singer and almost with the baseball guy, disappearance occurs after the members of the SOS(*cough cough*) SSS either come to accept how their deaths happened or move on with no further regrets. All the team members have some kind of grudge or regret. Maybe this world is no more than a manifestation of their inner distraught feelings.

Tenshi/Angel is definitely an important character. Probably not a cold-hearted killer as she's shown. Love how she resembles girls in 50+ other anime I've watched in both appearance and personality.

Well until I see them animate the backstory of Yui and Tenshi, I'm not fully convinced they are / were humans. ;)

My speculation would be that:

So we all know that one of Angel's skill "Harmonics" is supposed to be cloning herself, right?I always wondered why Angel seems to be not feeling any pain by Otonashi's gunshots, but maybe that's because the Angel we know is not the real Angel. The real one is somewhere else while the current Angel is the Angel-clone made by that Harmonics skill.

Angel Tenshi (lol attempt to combine both conventions) Speculation from Ep3:

Well I can only say one thing really...

"Same boat"

My speculation:
She uses the world's self-repair mechanism (show in the self-repairing walls and light posts in Ep01) and manipulates it via coding language to create her weapons/abilities. To make sure these work, she models them first in her PC. How she applies coding logic to the world is the big mystery here, and seeing how she has access to technology that looks magical to the SSS, she might have been in this world for quite a long time.

On harmonics:
Seeing as it's the last skill shown in the list, it is possible that she is still in the process of developing it.

Maybe Tenshi imagines that she is in a "film" when she activates her powers, since the weponz guild forge their weapons from memories, Tenshi's computer is just to make any attack she wants to create effective.

I'm sure there has to be a reason why they're trying so hard to avoid anyone flat out stating their cause of death.

Me thinks they all did commit suicide. And maybe the reason why Otonashi can't remember isn't because his cause of death involved head trauma...

I'm of the school of thought that Angel is some sort of caretaker who's job is to help souls pass on/reincarnate etc (note her comment 'It's almost like I'm the bad guy'). In which case Yuri and co are not just fighting against God, they're fighting against 'natural order' and their own ability to pass on.

I don't know about that, it could just be an act to deceive them all. And she did interrupt Hinata's disappearance. You know the saying 'the devils greatest trick was convincing the world he didn't exist'