Headscratchers / Angelic Layer

• The one thing I never could understand about Angelic Layer is that male Deuses are such a rare thing when in Real Life, if something like Angelic Layer actually existed, it would likely be overrun with male Deuses or at the very least 50:50 male/female members.
  • It's especially weird since the given reason for the game is to map out the human neural system for cybernetic design. Wouldn't they want male data too?
    • The explanation is given, indirectly, that girls [are more likely to] love their dolls, so presumably have a greater chance of forming the necessary relationship with the angels to allow them to become proficient players.
    • I've seen a fanfic once that addresses that question. Of course they want male data. Badly. But they're not getting it. So to help out Icchan, Oujirou sets out to make a name for himself in order to make it more fashionable for Deuses to be male.
    • Or perhaps it is simply that the main focus of the story is Misaki, whose friends tend to be female.
    • Nah, that wouldn't explain why nearly every deus in the tournament is female.
    • My personal take though is the advertising: The ads are feminine in nature, as is the packaging, so it is very likely that Angelic Layer is their version of "Moving Barbie".
    • Still and all, my friends and I always joke that the actual champion of Angelic Layer were it to exist in real life would more likely be a forty-five year old man who lives in his mother's basement.
    • Perhaps more likely, but the most likely winner would be a teenaged bishounen.
  • It may be that females are just better at integrating with the dolls. There's a bit of Real Life science to back this up; female brains are more efficient at distributed processing than male brains. Heinlein used this as the reason why starships had female pilots in Starship Troopers. Real life neural integration with humans is close (there have already been successful monkey trials), so we should know if this is true in 20-50 years.
    • I just want to emphasize this again: DARPA (the Pentagon's brain trust) has successfully developed monkey cyborgs. Really.
  • Possibly the people marketing it assumed males would be more likely to play it, so they marketed it heavily towards girls (because they wanted gender balance for research purposes) and overshot.
• Why were Misaki and Shuu expected to compete in the final match right after the second Semifinal match ended? Shouldn't it have been the next day or something? Don't the contestants need time to strategize once they know who their opponent is going to be? Wouldn't Angelic Layer want to build up the final match into its own bigtime main event and not bunch it in with the semis? In real time, after the match between Shuu and Sai ends, the crowd remains, expecting to see the final match and we are told by Icchan they were "inconveniently" kept waiting for over an hour. None of this makes sense to me.
  • It's a tournament. Moving on to the next event to fit constraints is always a priority in real life events like this, especially since time is important. Keep the audience waiting too long, they get bored. Force the finals another day, and you're asking the audience to come in and watch a single fight. Not nearly as impressive, inevitably, as the final fight happening directly after the semi-finals, when everyone is already pumped. Plus, from a competitive standpoint it makes sense. If the match is delayed, any number of things can happen to either contestant that could impair or impede their abilities to compete. As well, if you know who any of the other competitors are, you're expected to have had time to plan tactics for all of them well in advance. Bottom line, delaying the game is delaying the inevitable, so over an hour is ultimately "inconvenient."

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