YMMV / Angel Beats!

• Adorkable: Kanade's social awkwardness crossed with her soft-spoken voice and lack of perceptiveness often makes her this in comedic moments.
• Better on DVD: Part of why the series was Vindicated by History. When watching the anime with a focus on how the narrative develops from episode to episode, without any expectations for it to be anything more than a story that can be delivered through a 13 episode anime, and catching various clues for reveals made later on or moments with underlining thematic resonance that build to how things ultimately end up, the experience is more satisfying than it would have been for people who had to wait for all 13 episodes to be aired.
• Broken Base:
  • There exists a faction of the Key fanbase that considers Angel Beats! inferior to other works by the company, mostly due to it being more action-oriented than its previous visual novels.
  • Is Yuri cruel or kind? It's unambiguous that she's the actual Villain Protagonist while Angel was a Designated Villain in the earliest episodes, but how much of her actions come from justifiable reasons and how many of them are just completely petty and mean-spirited (especially those directed at her own followers and supposed friends, which are often Played for Laughs) is always up for debate among fans.
  • Is Otonashi an All-Loving Hero or a fool rushing into things?
• Die for Our Ship: There's some degree of Angel/Kanade hatred from people who want Otonashi with others, specially Hinata. Her and Otonashi's last scenes made them go all nuts, especially about the credibility of the hookup (see Strangled by the Red String below).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • TK is remarkably popular among viewers. In a recent popularity poll Angel and TK dominated... Of course, that they had such a huge amount and proportion of the votes reeks of internet vote rigging, however...
  • On this very wiki, Naoi's section is huge compared to other character's.
  • Iwasawa, despite not sticking around long in the series, is incredibly popular with the fanbase. Girl's Dead Monster on the whole are this, with the individual members and the band's songs getting a ton of expanded focus in other parts of the franchise.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • There've been a few here and there, but it wasn't until the appearance of the red-eyed Angel that they started spreading like wildfire.
    Anonymous: I see what's going on. You are really TK, who is God, but Yurippe beats you and takes you memories, and then she becomes God, but she knew Otonashi in her past life, who was her childhood friend, but she fell in love with him, and when as God she realized he was going to die, so she made his sister who is really Angel who is waiting for Otonashi into the enemy and with her God powers made this world so that when Otonashi got there he would think Angel was the enemy and now she made a new Angel after Otonashi befriended the old one who is really his sister and she wants to tear them apart.
  • One popular fan theory fueled on by the alternate ending to the series is that Otonashi is the programmer of the school. This fits into and addresses the Continuity Snarl of how he seemingly ends up in Limbo despite dying without regrets, and how he ended up there at a time where Kanade was already there despite him having died before her, with his heart having been used to prolong her life afterwards. Apparently this theory was Jossed, as Maeda stated that Otonashi vanishing at the end of the final end credits sequence was meant to signify that he passed on shortly after Kanade had, choosing to make the opposite choice of what the Programmer did. An alternate epilogue, however, shows him having chosen to stay behind to be the new Student Council President for a last a good while to help other students before he's ready to accept moving on.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The series ends with the characters choosing to leave behind the Afterlife limbo they've spent the series in. It's meant to be a Bittersweet Ending, where it's sad that they'll all be separated, but happy that they've gotten over the personal issues keeping them from moving on. Except ... within Afterlife they were effectively just as alive as they were on Earth, so by "moving on" and going wherever most people go after death, they're all essentially killing themselves, and for no good reason.
• Evil Is Cool: Yurippe isn't exactly evil, but she is a Villain Protagonist for the bulk of the series. Many of the show's coolest moments are provided by her and her tendencies of acting like a Diabolical Mastermind or Evil Overlord as she initiates and oversees her group's operations makes her incredibly entertaining to watch.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The SSS Battlefront's initials are referred to as the "Soul Society of Suzumiya Haruhi".
  • There's also Red Angel and Gold Angel, based on their eye colors, to differentiate between the two.
  • The SSS Brigade!
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: One of Key's best known works in the West outside of CLANNAD.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In regards to Hinata and Yui. Originally their abuse of each other is fairly equal, albeit Hinata is prone to attacking Yui more than the other way around and for no apparent reason, either. Yui only attacks him out of revenge and even then it doesn't last since he's quick to deal out Disproportionate Retribution on her. It becomes this when we find out that the reason why Yui acts hyper and sort of annoying all the time is because she was paralyzed in an accident at a young age from a car slamming into her back and was bedridden and cared for by her single mother until she died. This revelation made Yui just an unacceptable target. However, it's softened with the fact that Hinata still willing to marry her despite all that.
  • In a more meta-example, the whole deal with Otonashi becoming a organ donor after dying is this when Jun Maeda, the scriptwriter, recently announced he will need a heart transplant.
  • Yui prevents Hinata from winning his team's baseball game in episode 4, just as Otonashi realized that if Hinata were to make the catch that's exactly the same as the one he failed to make in life, he'd move on. Six episodes later, back on the baseball field no less, Hinata helps her move on by promising to marry her in her next life even if she's paralyzed in that life too, meaning if it weren't for him she'd be stuck in Purgatory for a long time!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Some of Otonashi's wild imagination regarding SSS operations became this, especially the giant monster fish and SSS fighting multiple Angels. Both of which turn out to actually happen, albeit slightly differently from what he imagined.
• Magnificent Bitch: Yuri "Yurippe" Nakamura is the leader of the SSS Afterlife Battlefront, a group of dead students rebelling against God, whom Yurippe blames for the unfairness of her life. Fighting opposition from Kanade Tachibana, Yurippe fully acknowledges how inept her subordinates are and thinks up plans around this, being able to fight Kanade to a standstill while ensuring important followers and resources aren't claimed by Kanade, lead a stealth mission to hack Kanade's computer and uncover crucial information from it, and sabotage Kanade's performance on an exam so that she loses her status. Ever Crazy-Prepared, Yurippe also knows how to make good use of her lackeys through intimidating them with twisted penalties for failure, keeping them in the dark about things she knows until an ideal time, and using their own idiocy as convenient distractions in operations. When threats emerge and endanger Battlefront, Yurippe uses her quick wit, decisiveness and skill with weapons to counter them, even breaking a shadow's illusion over her with a heartfelt speech. As perceptive and caring as she is strong-willed and ruthless, Yurippe earns and keeps the loyalty of her troops through raw charisma and being a fair and inspirational leader in spite of her frequent cruelties towards them.
• Memetic Badass: TK. Stops a frigging ceiling falling down, makes the most awesome Heroic Sacrifice speech, goes guns ablazing against shadows with a friggin' "[Verb] This!" line: I kiss you. * bang*
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Anything that comes out of TK's mouth.
  • The scene in Episode 6 where several of the characters jump out of a window in a unique way, particularly for TK's style where it goes out back-first like he's scuba diving.
  • Angel is the cutest Protoss Zealot you'll ever lay eyes on, especially in the finale where she smiles, sings a song about mapo doufu, and does this◊. And with the revelation of her Harmonics skill, there's a possibility that she can become Agent Smith. Zealot Smith, even.
  • Clothespins are quickly becoming objects that are praised to be fragments of God.
  • Itsumo hitori-- is well on its way to be one.
  • That face Yuri makes when the NPC controlling the Shadows offers her godhood.
  • Expect Yuri's Evil Laugh from the first special episode to come up a lot in discussions and content involving her as well.
  • CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
• Moe: At least 90% of the cast can count as a Key series, but Kanade and Yui are the major examples of it.
• Narm:
  • The first episode has a scene where Yurippe jokingly tells Otonashi to, as the official subtitles put it, "give a girl an enema," which is funny for entirely the wrong reasons. "Enema" refers to the Japanese schoolyard prank of "kancho", poking your fingers up someone's (clothed) butt, not the extremely squicky medical procedure. The dub replaces this with "slap a girl on her ass," averting the narminess.
  • Even the super emotional final scene has a moment that, if watched completely out of context, kills the mood: Otonashi asks how Kanade knew that he was the heart donor who'd saved her life, and Kanade replies that she noticed "when I stabbed you" that he didn't have a heart inside of it. The casual admittance to having stabbed someone in such a dramatic moment could easily come off as unintentionally hilarious.
  • Yurippe's psychotic laughing fit in Episode 12 when an NPC informs her she can become God. Seeing such a hammy reaction from the normally composed Yuri is already pretty goofy, but what cements it is that she quietly rejects his offer less than a minute later. Quite the anti-climax for all that cackling.
• The Scrappy: In the original anime, many fans do not much care for Takeyama due to his much colder and disdainful personality compared to the other Battlefront members, his grating voice, his genius hacking and analytical skills ultimately not serving much purpose after his first appearance, and his single defining character trait being the Running Gag of wanting to be called "Christ", which is beaten into the ground because he simply refuses to accept that no one wants to call him by his code name.
• Signature Scene:
  • For many people, the Imagine Spot of what Hinata and Yui's life together could've been in Episode 10 is this, due to being quite possibly the series most emotionally devastating Tear Jerker.
  • Other contenders would be Iwasawa's last concert in Episode 3 that ends in her vanishing from the underworld, Yuri in Computer Room #2 in Episode 12, and the final scene of the series in Episode 13, where Otonashi learns that his donated heart is inside of Kanade and then has to say a tearful goodbye to her, completely breaking down when she disappears.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Many fans felt that the Otonashi and Kanade's Last-Minute Hookup at the finale came a bit too unexpectedly, as up to that point it is never made evident that his feelings for her are romantic in nature or more intense that a tepid friendship (or even a surrogate fraternal relationship, as the anime suggests sometimes). This is one of the most divisive points of the series, and a good part of detractors of the finale would have liked it better without them hooking up or at least having more development previously. Then again, given the short run of the anime, the latter would have been difficult to pull without falling in a probably not better received Romantic Plot Tumor. Some might not even interpret the love between the two characters as being romantic, though Otonashi telling Kanade he wants to "be with her forever" has obvious romantic connotations for many viewers, so this could fall under Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading either way.
  • The same thing occurs with Yui and Hinata in Episode 10. Considering the only sort of expression either has expressed at each other are various levels of annoyance, it comes as quite a surprise when not only does Hinata say he loves Yui but wants to marry her. Even if it was to help her pass on, it's still really sudden and doesn't come with a lot of buildup.This becomes more apparent when compared to the development of Hinata and Yuri's relationship in the prequel manga, which seems much more romantic in nature. In comparison, Yui and Hinata's rushed relationship seems more sibling-like.
  • The visual novel attempts to fix both these problems by exploring more of Otonashi and Hinata's thoughts on their relationships with the girls.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Since the anime is only 13 episodes long, there isn't a lot of time to focus on any of the interesting side characters, so they come and go without us knowing anything about their pasts, nor do they get a decent sendoff onscreen. This is somewhat alleviated by the manga, light novel, visual novel adaptations, which go more in-depth into the characters and where they came from prior to dying and joining the Battlefront.
  • The events that transpire between Kanade leaving her Student Council President position which is taken over by Naoi and the Shadows appearing feel like they were meant to span more episodes than they actually lasted, and this is due to the series's story having been planned for 26 episodes but the episode number was cut by half, leaving only 13 episodes in which to tell the story. The manga adaptation, The Last Operation, has set it up so that Kanade and Otonashi looking to help the Battlefront members move on and the appearance of the Shadows are two factors of the same story arc, referred to as the "true arc" of the series when the manga was launched and as the "next half/next season" at the start of the current hiatus. This suggests that the second half of the series as envisioned was meant to focus most heavily on the material that the anime ended up only giving focus to for the three episodes prior to the final one.
• Tough Act to Follow: It's hard not to see some of the criticism the series got as this, since it followed the hugely successful anime adaption of CLANNAD.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Yui believes that having been a quadriplegic in life made her unmarriageable, which seems to at least be partly derived from Japanese attitudes toward disabilities. That said, Hinata seems to disagree, and Yui may not have lived long enough to be able to legally marry.
  • Yui's insistence that marriage is the ultimate happiness for a girl can raise some eyebrows among modern American audiences, particularly those critical of 'a woman's place is in the home' ideology, and those who have viewed or experienced an abusive or dysfunctional marriage.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Otonashi is often cited as one of the blander and more mundane members of the cast, with the enjoyment of his role in events mainly coming from how that more grounded personality bounces off the more colorful members of the cast who drag him along with their antics. Not helping is just how passive he regularly is except in episode 6 and in the episodes after he recovers his memory.
• Vindicated by History: When it first aired, the series was divisive to say the least (much of this very page dates to that initial period). Ten years on, it's seen as one of the swan songs of that particular era in anime. It's also still surprisingly popular for a series of its vintage, and spinoffs and other related media continue to trickle out to this day.
• The Woobie:
  • Noda, who is forever doomed to be a plaything.
  • Kanade Tachibana/"Angel".
  • Most of the cast also qualify but varies from character to character. Yuri, Iwasawa, Naoi, Yui, Matsushita and even Hinata have significantly worse pasts consisting of murder of loved ones, guilt and death, parental abuse and death, death of loved ones, blindness, long term paralysis and depression-fueled fatal drug addiction. Other characters don't even have that much development.
  • Yui's reaction to Hinata's "death◊" in episode 8.
  • Poor, poor Otonashi. It's pretty difficult to find fans who didn't feel horribly sorry for him in the last scene before the credits in the last episode.

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