Angel Beats! #03 — The Power of Christ Compels You

April 16th, 2010

 

Oh Japan… you and your casual disregard for blasphemy.

Impressions:

The two best parts of this episode are the fact that Iwasawa is dead(er) now, so no more J-Pop (Hey, I can dream) and TK, who spent the first five minutes of Yuri explaining what was going to happen rocking out having a seizure in the background. Someone’s off their meds again. If only they would just let TK background dance through the entire show. Now that would be awesome. Instead, the rest of the episode was just a big ol’ cliched expositional dump of how Iwasawa was sad until music saved her soul and then distracting Tenshi through the acoustic guitar. Suck on that, Clapton. Angst is not evocative. Exposition is not development. You can’t just sit me down and tell me "You feel sad now." That is not how it works. This character had what… 10 lines and one bad pop song before she spat out her life story and then only a couple more before stymying a demi-god with the power of acoustic guitar and a school’s PA system. But again, she’s dead(er) now, so enjoy your 5 minutes of "Feel sad, now feel sadder!" Who needs things like development or storytelling when you can just have monologues shoehorned in to inflict on random strangers at the drop of a hat?

The grand plan and tiny excuse for the concert was just to break into Tenshi’s room and hack her computer with the power of Christ and learn… well… whatever. They ended up getting some insight into her powers, which you’d think they’d already know from fighting her for apparently as long as they have, but okay. Let’s run with that. What really bothered me the most about this episode was all the CG though, especially the damn unnaturally shiny guitar. I think they must have waxed it, along with all the other unnaturally shiny instruments. Otonashi also got some doofus points for practicing shooting a wall. Congrats. Now if one of Tenshi’s powers turns out to be the ability to transform into a stationary 20 foot by 20 foot barn door, he’s confident that he can hit her from within 25 yards. He must be so proud of himself.

Posted in Angel Beats! | 31 Comments »

31 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Gin says:
    April 16, 2010 at 5:16 pm

    They certainly aren’t holding back on taking people out. I thought we wouldn’t get until half way before someone got erased. To be honest, I’m not sure what to think of it, except that they are rushing it. That’s a twelve episode anime for you.
    And Aroduc, keep dreaming. Considering the number of singles the anime is apparently releasing under the band’s title, we’re going to get backups…either that or a magical resurrection.
    …On second thought, let’s just have TK just dance for awhile.

  • Lero says:
    April 16, 2010 at 5:46 pm

    http://blog.seiha.org/images2/angel3/angel3_21.jpg
    That big breasted girl from Saki but without them.

  • Anon999 says:
    April 16, 2010 at 6:47 pm

    There are some manga that should never be made into anime. This is one of them.

    • Aroduc says:
      April 16, 2010 at 7:07 pm

      Actually, it really feels like PA Works/Maeda Jun haven’t been able to transition out of the VN format at all. VNs typically lack the strong narrative perspective, so have no choice but to rely on a lot of exposition, but since that’s the way the whole story is presented, it blends in better. In more visually oriented media, that doesn’t fly. It’s a shame that they keep spending all this effort into overanimating meaningless scenes while just having characters monologue over stills for the important ones.

  • Captain Arepa says:
    April 16, 2010 at 8:44 pm

    “Suck on that, Clapton.”

    I loved this.

  • TJ says:
    April 16, 2010 at 10:55 pm

    Weakest episode so far. The concert needed to be paired up with some action, not some hacking attempt.

    • Aex says:
      April 17, 2010 at 9:48 am

      Seriously, just when you start to care about Iwasawa, she accepts reincarnation and is gone. So much for being devoted to the cause or whatever. Otonashi spent the entire episode looking like an idiot too. Good times.

  • decoy says:
    April 17, 2010 at 12:22 am

    That was wierd how TK in the first 3mins did a line from Nana Tamaki Get Wild

    • Benigmatica says:
      April 17, 2010 at 4:36 am

      Originally, that was from TM Network, then covered up by others! Yeah, that song was so good to hear!

      Sucks that Iwasawa got disappeared after that ballad…

  • Harbin says:
    April 17, 2010 at 1:30 am

    http://blog.seiha.org/images2/angel3/angel3_21.jpg
    No, she is loli rimi from chaos head, even have the same seiyuu :P

    • Albedo says:
      April 17, 2010 at 9:27 pm

      I can only hope that some awesomely sketchy mind-rape/masturbation starts going on soon. Chaos head was such an amusingly strange anime.

  • FlameStrike says:
    April 17, 2010 at 1:41 am

    Hm I didn’t think the Ep was bad. While I do agree there lacks proper buildup for Iwasawa’s character for one to care too deeply about her, her story was non the less interesting to me. I also enjoyed the animation during the concert scene.

    Eh I was under the impression that Otonashi was shooting empty cans? I think I saw one fly away when he shot at first. Then there’s the possibility that he’s trying to shoot the same place in the wall. You DO know that guns make dents in concrete right? It wouldn’t be too hard to check those to asses one’s accuracy.

    As for what they found about about Tenshi, the implications are pretty profound in terms of the world they are in. While the original premise for holding the concert was a bit weak, (Then again this is Yuri we’re talking about, she’s just itching for an excuse to do something flashy) they did get some results. I don’t think they could have realized she was using the same/a similar method as their imagination weapon making to manifest her powers just by fighting her. After all they are under the impression that as an Angel, she gets powers from god, so they wouldn’t think to question the origins of her leet hax.

  • Dual says:
    April 17, 2010 at 1:52 am

    Best episode so far.

  • X-3 says:
    April 17, 2010 at 1:53 am

    TK got one line, and it was unbelievably awesome. And it had a techno beat after it! He better keep rocking until the end(plus).

    Not sure what to think about Itasawa’s final rest. They just kinda said, “here’s her story, WHOOP she is now gone u sad?”. Not much time to develop or like her at all. Eh.
    Oh, and she’s missing from the ED now, replaced with CHRIST. If people keep getting their final rests, then eventually we’ll get an ED with little to no people in it.

    Not sure what to make out of anything they actually learned. That whole “Christ Defeats Axe-Guy with Pi” joke was kinda…strange though. In a suspicious way. Probably just a “they are dumb” joke, though.

    • Aex says:
      April 17, 2010 at 12:21 pm

      The blonde chick on the same side as her (from Girls Dead Monster?) is missing from the ED now too. Iwasawa makes sense, but why her?

  • The Phantom says:
    April 17, 2010 at 2:40 am

    Strange, was not expecting the lead vocal to disappear this early, when they started to show her I was expecing them to build her character a bit, heck at some point I was thinking about a love triangle between Otonashi yuri and Iwasawa, how dead wrong was I, lmao all of sudden poof she is gone -_-, and most did not even care about it.

    I am expecting more action from this show, if this is going to become a non sensical tearjerker wannabe this early I am dropping it.

  • lubczyk says:
    April 17, 2010 at 3:28 am

    It’d be hilarious if Tenshi was the new lead singer for Girls Dead Monster.

    • Yue says:
      April 17, 2010 at 5:05 am

      Hah! Can’t see it happening even with 20+ episodes. ^_^

      • Nanaya says:
        April 17, 2010 at 5:32 pm

        Well, I have the suspicion that it can turn into one of those ‘talk to her and she gets more human’ things with Tenshi. Like with Nagato’s character development in the Haruhi novels.

        I mean, has anybody even tried peacefully interacting with her (about things not related to their situation, I mean, just interacting in general), or did they immediately skip to shooting her on sight?

      • Yue says:
        April 17, 2010 at 10:21 pm

        [Kyon] did tried to talk to [Nagato] on the first episode but he got HANDSONIC’d. XD

      • Nanaya says:
        April 18, 2010 at 2:58 am

        Not quite. He went up to her, pretty much screeched in her face that he wasn’t one of the ‘NPCs,’ and essentially asked her to attack him. If anything, she was just being helpful.

      • Yue says:
        April 18, 2010 at 6:35 am

        From another perspective, you’re saying Tenshi hates explaining much and prefers a heavy-handed KO to newbies.

        Yeah, helpful indeed. ^_^

  • redlupine says:
    April 17, 2010 at 6:59 pm

    why was that blonde girl like dead?
    http://blog.seiha.org/images2/angel3/angel3_66.jpg

    the entire scene, she just layed there with a vacant stare

  • Anonymous says:
    April 17, 2010 at 11:56 pm

    Heh, I liked it. It brought home the idea of the school as the path to Nirvana.

  • Steven Den Beste says:
    April 18, 2010 at 2:26 am

    I’m registering my official prediction here, now: When Otonashi finally gets his memories back, it’s going to turn out that he’s Yuri’s younger brother.

    • Aroduc says:
      April 18, 2010 at 3:20 am

      Personally, I’m just praying that it’s not a blatant ripoff of Little Busters, only with science being used to make a virtual world for giving people mental strength instead of magic. Unfortunately, given what’s happened so far, that hope is dwindling.

      • Aex says:
        April 18, 2010 at 1:30 pm

        Well, at the very least I doubt anyone is gonna wake up and find out they’re still alive in this series. If I had to guess, I’d say that the ones that achieve spiritual resolution in some way (like Iwasawa) get reincarnated as humans, while those that just blindly go along with Tenshi without thinking get to be the water fleas. I definitely think the whole thing is a proving ground, just not sure for what.

      • queenie says:
        April 19, 2010 at 1:16 pm

        Actually that’s a good point.
        If you just go through the world as plainly as possible, it means that you don’t really care what happens to yourself, so you get thrown into whatever. While on the other hand, if you achieve spiritual resolution after saying that they way you left the world wasn’t fair enough and you didn’t get to finish anything, then chances are you’re probably going to become a human again.

        Pretty ingenious.

        And the episode wasn’t that bad. The ballads sad from reading the lyrics, but overall not so much. It was still a pretty sad look at someones life though, so I can’t say anything bad about that. How long is Angel Beats going to be anyway? With 12 eps, it seems to make more sense to go through everyone and how they died than to spend 6 episodes on developing everything and then doing multiple flashbacks with everyone in the final few minutes of an episode. But I’m probably wrong on that point, but whatever.