"Let there be light!"
Our Angels Are Different in Anime & Manga.
- Ah! My Goddess: Angels are Winged Humanoid Cute Mutes, except when singing — or at least the audience can't hear their speaking voices. They serve as the personifications of goddesses' souls. They also hatch from minuscule eggs. It should be noted that since the goddesses (and demons) are actually ten-dimensional horrors who disguise themselves as human so that they don't scare everyone they meet shitless (they're scary enough to strip away a man's sanity), the angels are probably just as or even more terrifying.
- Angel Beats! only has one angel, who is always referred to as "angel" in English or "tenshi" in Japanese for the first few episodes. She tries to "obliterate" people to force them to leave the afterlife and get reincarnated, and has some Pokemon-esque "guard skills." Eventually they learn that she isn't an angel — she rejects being called one, and is really more of a Techno Wizard — making the title a bit of a Non-Indicative Name.
- Angel Sanctuary — Where they do drugs, have reincarnated incestuous lesbian relationships and brainwash people through video games. Also, some have disabilities, some are born with only one wing, Metatron is a perpetual infant, and Rosiel doesn't just go batshit insane; in the end, he starts aging backwards and decaying in the first place. Also, Rosiel's beauty is because he removed Alexiel's skin and grafted it onto his own body. Let's face it, Rosiel is about as far into WTF territory as you can get.
- Berserk: The Godhand's members are referred to as Five Angels despite looking demonic. Powerful elemental beings are also seen as angels by the Crystal Dragon Jesus church.
- Bizenghast has the souls set free from torment turn into angels with long white robes and haloes of flame.
- Black Butler (2008): We have Angela/Ash, the on-command gender-bending Fallen Angel. But of course, this one also has those big, white, feathery wings to make it all better. They're trying to purge England of the unclean and useless.
- The Sternritter from Bleach can enter Quincy: Vollständig, giving them a halo and "holy wings" made of spiritual energy. Each member's Vollständig amplifies their unique ability and has a name fitting of an actual archangel. None of them have the archetypal angel wings, but rather take the form of pixels, jaws, thunderbolts, bones, hearts and even just rods. However, the Elite Guard gain said wings, after being revived and strengthened by Yhwach through the sacrifice of almost all the other remaining Sternritters.
- Sternritter X, Lille Barro, of the aforementioned Elite Guard, takes this up to eleven with his Vollständig, "Jilliel" (ironically making him the closest interpretation to the original Bible's description among them), with an armored, armless form that can't be hurt, a halo, four pairs of wings reminiscent of a seraph, and holes all over his body and wings that unleash his power. He transforms even more when he gets damaged: into a giant owl with a long neck, deer-like legs, long and lanky humanoid arms, the wings from his first form, and a halo above his head. Taking the angel parallels even further, he states that, as he is the first Sternritter bestowed a Schrift by Yhwach, he's the latter's greatest creation, and refers to himself as a "Messenger of God" with God being Yhwach.
- In Bloody Cross, the only pureblood angel shown is Tsuduki, who tends to act childish, immature and manipulative. He also doesn't appear to have wings or any other angelic features. The Manga also features a number of half-angels, who are all cursed to die when they turn 18 because of their heritage.
- Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan: Holy crap, these are not the angels you expected! They'd be cuter if they stopped maiming/killing Sakura-kun.
- Nadeshiko Kinomoto from Cardcaptor Sakura. An already rather angelic-looking woman (by conventional Western definition of "angelic"), she died and got a pair of wings in Heaven.
- The moon-guardian Yue could arguably also count.
- The angels in A Centaur's Life are human. Literally! They're considered a race of humans, just like imps, centaurs, satyrs, or mermaids, even able to interbreed. This is a world where there are no 'normal' humans. Angels are set apart from other humans by having feathered wings only useful for keeping warm, no tails, hair that grows into the structure called a 'halo', and unique small round ears. Angels have no special powers but are very loosely associated with spirituality.
- A Certain Magical Index:
- Most angels appear to mostly be decent/lawful neutral guys, but if separated from Heaven, they will go absolutely berserk in their attempts to get back. While they will try to get back in the least destructive way possible, if all other options are lost, they literally have no choice but to cause widespread destruction (like nuclear war levels of destruction) in order to fuel their re-ascent. Also, No Biological Sex is in effect.
- The Archangel Gabriel is shown on Earth, having been dragged down from Heaven by an unintentional spell known as "Angel Fall", which would normally be impossible, if not for an unknown event in the recent past or distant future known as "The Distortion of the Elements". This swapped its natural element of water with fire and incarnated it into a female form, weakening it significantly, but still leaving it one of the most powerful beings in existence. It was capable of turning day into night, and rearranging the stars to create a massive world-destroying magic circle, while idly fending off powerful attacks from Kanzaki Kaori, a powerful holy mage in her own right, at least by human standards.
- Chronologically, the first angel we see is an artificial science angel, born from the Level-Upper Network. It is a strange, fetus-like creature that lashes out at anything nearby, and is driven by the collective rage and despair of the ten thousand linked espers that created it.
- Kazakiri Hyouka is another artificial angel, born of the AIM Diffusion field. Although under normal circumstances she's just a human-shaped shell with a really good Healing Factor, with the right stimulus she can become a creature capable of putting an Anti-Magic field over the entire city.
- Certain espers can also "Awaken," which allows them to awaken their angelic forms, presumably having something to do with AIM fields. A level 6 esper is basically an angel.
- In Chapter 61 of A Certain Scientific Railgun, using information gathered from the Level Upper incident, Misaki Shokuhou's Amplifier Artifact is stolen and used to force Mikoto Misaka to join with the MISAKA Network, causing her to undergo the level 6 Shift and Awakening her angel form. It's explained that at 53%, she'll lose her human mind (presumably when she passes the point of no return and becomes a true angel), and at 100% she'll destroy herself and the city (when she tries to ascend to Heaven but fails because there is no more room for any more angels).
- There is the greatest secret of Academy City, known by the code-word DRAGON: the otherworldly being known as Aiwass. It is an existence somewhat similar to an angel, but obviously different at the same time. Nobody really knows anything about Aiwass (You Cannot Grasp the True Form being in full effect), though what is known is that it is the single most powerful entity yet introduced.
- In A Certain Scientific Accelerator, a demon hijacks the Rosenthal family golem spell (with the help of an esper researcher desperate to get his sister back) and downloads the memories of the ten thousand deaths of the MISAKA Network in order to artificially increase its esper power and become a level 6. The result is a massive necrotic slug-like monster with angel wings.
- Chrono Crusade: In the anime version, Father Remington claims that he's "not unlike an angel," leading many fans to speculate that he's a fallen angel. (He's shown to live over a century, so there's something up with him.)
- Digimon:
- Most of the angels in Digimon are pretty blond Winged Humanoids, while most Fallen Angel Digimon are black-clad Winged Humanoids with really sharp claws. The Angemon and Devimon "family" are quite large, mostly consisting of advanced, female, or Palette Swapped versions of the original, with the number of wings increasing with the level of power. (Lucemon may look like a child, but he's got 12 wings to Angemon's six and is not a nice guy. This is the part where you run away.) Cherubimon's the exception to the rule. If they become corrupt, they evolve into fallen-angel counterparts. Oddly enough, the fallen angels outnumber the regular angels, thanks to Evil Is Cool.
- Holydra/Magnadramon combines this with Our Dragons Are Different and Mega Neko.
- Within the Adventure continuity, angel-type mons have a type advantage over Nightmare Soldiers, which comes very much in handy.
- There is a list of the more well-known ones on Digimon's work page.
- In Doctor Slump they look like little winged people without reproductive organs. They also have antennae that shoot lightning. Earth's god put an angel egg on the planet to ensure humanity would remain primitive since other species did terrible things with advanced technology. Angels can replicate by eating enough metal which ensures there would be none of that if human beings discovered how to refine ore.
- A Dog of Flanders (1975): The angels that carry Nello and Patrasche to the afterlife resemble the Bible's depictions of cherubs, with their rosy cheeks and wings, child-like appearances and blonde hair.
- Dragon Ball has the same angels found in Dr Slump and Dragon Ball Z: Revival of F goes on to reveal slightly cuter variation of them that soothe souls who are being punished in hell. Dragon Ball Super reveals that the race of blue-skinned, white-haired people with violet eyes and blue Holy Halos who serve as attendants to certain gods first revealed in Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods are themselves another type of angel. In addition to prodigious destructive power surpassing even gods of destruction, these have been shown to possess The Power of Creation, usually associated with the Supreme Kais, making them some of the most versatile beings in the setting and much stronger than any of the protagonists.
- Earthian: Angels oversee Earth in pairs from their place on Eden. Each pair is made up of an angel who gives humans (also called "Earthians") positive points for good deeds and another angel who gives them negative points for bad actions. If the total point tally ever reaches 10,000 negatives, the angels will destroy Earth. The angels are classic light-haired and white-winged humanoids, with the exception of one of the main characters who has dark hair and wings like those of Lucifer's, or fallen angels. They're also forbidden from having same-sex relations, which creates a quandary for the two very male main characters.
- Ergo Proxy: The Proxies are sort of like angels, although the word is never used. They exist to fulfill the will of a Creator i.e., humans who fled from Earth in the far past, and have nearly god-like powers. Two of those shown, Kazki's Proxy and Monad Proxy have wings, and the former calls to mind Fallen Angel imagery (he's an evil Bishōnen whose true form is a black, horned creature). There's also the fact that Ergo Proxy the protagonist Vincent, thus an Angel Unaware calls to mind the Angel of Death with his Catchphrase, "I am Ergo Proxy, the agent of death."
- Genesis of Aquarion: our angels are, put bluntly, weird. In order: their morality is myopic at best; while some of them (most notably Apollonius, Touma, and Futaba) are Winged Humanoids (and some of them even have feathers for hair), they vary enough to include sphinx-like figures and their Looming Menacing Bat-Winged Leader With The Helmet (™); yes, they are supernatural…kind of…we think; yes, most of them are indeed jerks; they are fairly humanesque, although they would vigorously deny this; and they cannot fall from any kind of divine grace per se, although Apollonius certainly gave it his best effort. Other differences: they are capable of breeding with humans, with a couple of major characters being descended from Apollonius and the human warrior Celiane; they reproduce by means of the Tree of Life, which has to be illuminated by Solarwing's power before it will be restored; their feathers can store information, and can be implanted into a human to grant superhuman piloting ability at the cost of hideous pain; and they treat humanity as livestock, harvesting us to feed our life energy to the Tree.
- In Heaven's Design Team, angels serve as an intermediary between God and the Design Team. They look and act like regular humans, and don't seem to have any different physiology or powers than the Ambiguously Human Animal Designers themselves. Additionally, a Fallen Angel in this series is just a regular angel that was transferred to a lower "company" position in the Hell Division, usually through angering the boss (God).
- Heaven's Lost Property has Ikaros, an "Angeloid" that fell out of the sky. She, like every Angeloid, grants every command the "master" gives, even going so far as attempting to kill herself after mistaking a bad joke as a command. She has variable feathered wings, sometimes bright white and emanating energy. All angeloids are self-aware winged androids (hence the name) built for very specific purposes (which leads to them having various lackings in other areas such as weak body build, low intelligence or no emotions) and generally treated as products by their masters. These masters look like the more traditional angels, with two or four feathered wings. They are actually a highly technologically advanced ancient civilisation.
- High School D×D: Angels follow the typical fictional depiction (halo, white wings, more wings with increasing rank) but their names, roles, and hierarchy are based heavily on actual scripture. Said details are a bit of a slurry of everything Abrahamic but this is explained as an in-universe deception. Further, since God Is Dead as a casualty to the Great Offscreen War, there haven't been any new angels in far too long and their numbers continue to dwindle. To combat this, they developed the ability to create Brave Saints: artificial angels made by reincarnating faithful humans, working to a playing card motif*
- Interspecies Reviewers gives us Crimvael, who goes by Crim, one of the main characters. He fell from heaven when the Goddess accidentally sneezed in his direction and broke his halo, causing him to be stuck on the surface and unable to use any angelic powers. He has most of the regular angelic attributes, though the story develops them differently than the norm. First of all, he's Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous, being a Hermaphrodite with a gender-neutral intersex appearance. His wings also float detached from his body just like his halo, with him not actually flapping them to fly. He's also fully capable of having sex with people, something he ends up doing a lot of over the course of the series, since it's about reviewing brothels, without there being any potential risk of becoming a fallen angel.
- In Koi Cupid, cupids exist to bring couples together so their baby can be born.
- Archangel/ cherubim Jophiel from Lucu Lucu is… somewhat different, as in: four faces, arms and wings. Plus he's essentially immaterial spirit who has to possess mortals to be able to stay in the mortal plane. Though, of course, this is how cherubim were described in the Bible.
- In Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, angels are called Ancients. They were the original inhabitants of the world and can take various shapes, from the typical Winged Humanoid (Michel) to the creature with a human head and halo who otherwise looks like a bird (Fuku). It's implied that the Winged Ones sometimes act as other mythological creatures (vampire, fairy, etc.), are also Ancients from a certain point of view, but the species as a whole is given the stereotypical characteristics of angels.
- The Angels of Mnemosyne appear to be a total aversion of the traditional angel archetype. They're former male humans who have had a time spore put into them, have flesh-like wings and monstrous features (including gold eyes with red sclerae), work for the Big Bad who considers himself to be a God, but are monstrous creatures that continually hunt the immortal women of the story in order to consume their time spores. However, right at the end of the series, Rin ingests Tajimamori's angel time spore and sprouts feathery wings when she takes over as the protector of Yggdrasil.
- The Neon Genesis Evangelion angels take this to an extreme. The first few are skyscraper-sized humanoids, but then they descend into multi-eyed beasts, abstract shapes, nanoviruses, formless... things, and, unbelievably enough, one that's easily mistaken for a human being. It's explained in the Classified Information, but basically the Angels were born from Adam, who is a Seed of Life, just like Lilith, the progenitor of all terrestrial life, including humans, hence why humanity as a whole, born from Lilith, are collectively the 18th Angel. However, aside from being called Angels and sharing some names, they're functionally just an Alien Invasion with no connection to religious angels. In Japanese, they are called the shito, the term used for the Apostles of Jesus by Japanese Christians, not that that makes any more sense.
- No Game No Life has the Flügel, ranked sixth among the Exceed races. The kanji for their name may be read as angels, but Sora notes their nature is rather contrary and more similar to demons since they hold powers of mass-destruction and massacred countless beings as the "god-killing weapons" of the Old Deus of war, Artosh, during the Great War 6,000 years ago. After the declaration of the Ten Pledges, the Flügel began collecting knowledge all over Disboard by robbing the other races of their books and were not interested in anything but searching for the unknown out there.
- Nyatenshi an angel cat
◊ from Nyanpire: The Animation, is not your typical angel. He is actually a Fallen Angel from Heaven and claims that he got kicked out by God because he was hanging out with another female cat that already has a husband. He is the second friend that Nyanpire befriends, and he would sometimes flirt with him which causes Masamunya to get very jealous of him. He would mostly make smug expressions around him friends and loves chasing a small cat with a stick. - One Piece has a few examples, the natives of Sky Island being the most obvious. Their wings are never seen or mentioned to be functional. In fact, the only person who seems to comment at all on their appearance is Sanji, and only with respect to the women. The fact that the Shandorians seem to have had wings even before they were, ahem, relocated just makes it more peculiar. Also, in the 10th movie, the villagers of the levitating islands suddenly sprout wings and fly to freedom when their island prison is destroyed. Prior to this, the slight feathering on their arms is only tentatively described as existing because they "Wish to become birds."
- In Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Panty and Stocking spend their time engaging in lust and gluttony, respectively, and in a rather human form. They remove undergarments to use as weapons and assume a slightly more angelic form via pole-dance. They did get banished from Heaven but did not become demons (unless one counts Stocking in the mind-screwy Gainax Ending), instead hunting down ghosts to redeem their actions — ghosts who in this series are also quite different.
- Phantom Thief Jeanne: Angels are the souls of strong people in Purgatory (sort of, since Heaven's actually a nice place). They can't consciously remember their human lives and are only allowed to be reborn in human form if they manage to gather enough sacred energy for God. Those who waste their sacred energy, though...
- Platinum End: Angels mostly fit the usual appearance of angels (young-looking and slender, with wings and a halo, bathed in light), but Nasse at least doesn't grok human moral standards or thought processes − doesn't seem to see anything wrong with stealing or even killing people if it's out of retribution, for example. It's unclear if this is just her, or a common thing among angels.
- In Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, it turns out that the Magical Girls who were saved from becoming witches, like Sayaka, become part of the Law of Cycles that Madoka created, and can be sent out to act independently of it when needed. Sayaka and Nagisa are the only ones shown, but this presumably applies to every magical girl that has ever been saved. Sayaka and Nagisa appear as they did in life, but can shift into or summon their witch forms. They also retain their memories from previous timelines, giving them a lot more experience than your average magical girl. They also appear to retain these powers even after being fully removed from the Law of Cycles, as Sayaka could still remember what happened and summon Oktavia after Homura rewrites the universe.
- 'Angels' in The Seven Deadly Sins setting are essentially an answer to the question, "What would Christianity be like if there was no New Testament?" This is why the vast majority of angels are jerks. Other differences include their designation as 'goddesses', not angels per se, and the Supreme Deity that they serve being female and very much not supreme (the Demon King being equal to her in power).
- In Shattered Angels, they come in the form of "Absolute Angels," a 4-girl strong race of genetically created superhumans capable of turning into a mecha style combat power armour or just transmorificating parts of their body into different parts of the mechas. Also, they feed by absorbing life force from normies through a kiss and are each a warrior-slave to a member of the douchebaggy Ayanokojo family, except Tarlotte who's more of a daughter to her Ayanokoji.
- In Trinity Blood, both Cain and Abel can transform into 4-winged angel-like beings when their Crusnik powers are activated, with Cain having white wings and Abel having black wings, respectively. Aside from the obvious Cain and Abel parallel, they also serve as analogies to other angels, for example, Cain is a fairly obvious stand-in for Lucifer, particularly with his "fell to Earth" backstory.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!,
- One of the rare times Honda duels he uses a very impressive female monster called Command Angel, a tall, blonde, stern young woman dressed like a Green Beret with a midriff-bearing shirt and angelic wings. (Not a real card, and it only appeared in that duel but many fans have often expressed a desire for an OCG version.)
- The Creator God of Light, Horakhty, is basically an angel design-wise, though it is said to be a god and comes from a fusion of two dragons and whatever Obelisk the Tormentor is.
