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coraaI was recommended Angel Sanctuary by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija when she discovered that I loved the wild and unabashed crack that were Godchild and Cantarella. She hooked me by promising me flying zombie angel fetuses, and while I have not yet gotten to said flying zombie angel fetuses, I can easily believe that they are coming!
She also warned me that the first two volumes were kinda incoherent, even for everything-includng-the-kitchen-sink crack manga. (There's a distinct subgenre of manga -- well, of fiction in general, but it's particularly frequent and glorious in manga -- where it's clear that the author chucks in everything under the sun they think is cool.) And she was right. I spent a lot of the time going "...what just happened?" and "wait, who was that again?" (Not because I couldn't tell the characters apart, although since some characters are reincarnations/clones/echoes/copies of one another, that sometimes happened too, but because they were also often incognito, and/or one character possessing another, and/or they had several layers of secret identity.)
So it was kind of a mess. But I'm here to tell you that it was an absolutely glorious mess, and I am happily in the middle of volume 3.
The other two things to note:
a) Everyone is beautiful.
b) Everyone is bugfuck nuts.
So! The plot, such as it is. We start out with a vague and doomful bit of backstory about the war of the angels, and the beautiful and powerful Lady Alexiel, second in power only to God, who switched side to join the Evils. (Not evil. The Evils. They're sort of like demons, but cuter.) And in punishment, she was put in a block of crystal forever! While her soul was reincarnated endlessly on earth.
Then we switch to Our Hero, Setsuna, a high school student who loves his younger sister. No, I mean, like, really, really, really loves his younger sister. (After Godchild and Cantarella, I am pretty unfazed by the incest.) We are introduced to him while he's being beaten up by a bully, after which his friend basically asks why he never effectively fights back. Setsuna says, "Whenever I see blood, I lose control and feel like killing whoever I'm fighting. Then suddenly, I get sleepy... It's like crazy sleepy... And for some reason... nostalgic."
Then his sister Sara slaps him, because he was late for their date. (It's not that kind of date, except it kindasorta is.) A bit later, he tells her that she has childbearing hips, which I'm pretty sure I could not have made up. And that kind of sets the tone for what follows!
It goes from there to Sara's friend Ruki who sees auras, and who found a floppy disc with the mysterious program 'Angel Sanctuary' on it. It turns out 'Angel Sanctuary' is a magical program that can read her mind and grant her wishes! She's in love with Setsuna and asks Sara for help, which basically spells her doom. She gets crazy jealous of Sara, and tries to use the Angel Sanctuary program to get Setsuna and kill Sara! Because that plan totally has no flaws. Instead, she accidentally awakens Alexiel's brother Rosiel, who looks basically exactly like Alexiel, who, in turn, basically looks exactly like Setsuna, because as it turns out Setsuna is the reincarnation of Lady Alexiel's soul, reborn in a male human body. Ruki gets absorbed by Rosiel, for the crime of wanting to split up an incestuous love affair between a female angel reborn as a man and the sister of his human body.
Thereafter, Ruki's body swans around being sexy and dangerous, while hosting Rosiel's soul, and says a lot of very mean things to Sara, which makes Sara all sad. So basically we have a female angel, Alexiel, reincarnated as a boy, Setsuna, who's in love with his human sister Sara, and a male angel, Rosiel, who's sort of obsessed with and possibly in love with his angel-sister Alexiel, and he's wearing the possessed and gutted body of a human girl who was in love with Setsuna, who is picking on Sara, and who was possessed/absorbed at least in part because she was obsessed with Setsuna herself.
Confused yet?
There are also a pair of Evils running around -- one of them, Kurai, was a vassal of Alexiel when she was a she and an angel. Kurai looks like a thirteen-year-old boy but turns out to be a girl (I think -- I am not 100% clear on that point) and a Dragon Master Evil, and his sister Arachne, who is physically male but presents as female because she thinks she is too pretty to be a man. (I'm not sure if Arachne identifies as female per se or just thinks it's inappropriate to be a man and be so pretty. I honestly can't tell. Anyway, if Arachne thinks that, I need to introduce her to Rosiel.) At first I thought my manga gender sensing ability had broken, but then (I think?) it turned out that other people were confused as to whether Kurai was a boy or a tomboy, so it wasn't just me. Oh, and Kurai was in love with Lady Alexiel and is therefore kind of in love with Setsuna, or at least thinks she is. (Pretty much everyone seems to be in love/lust with Setsuna and/or Alexiel, including their siblings. It's kind of a Thing.)
Anyway, Setsuna spends a lot of time angsting about how he's in love with his sister, and also that his mother found out about this and was kind of understandably freaked out and tried to separate them. It's the ultimate of Forbidden Love. I guess if you're writing a modern-esque manga, there aren't that many other ways you can get genuinely forbidden love! So he angsts about being an evil lust beast, and he angsts about going to hell, and he angsts about damning his beloved sister Sara to hell in the process, and in the meantime we get lots of long, loving shots of Sara's hair. (In fairness, Sara really does have beautiful hair, even for this manga in which basically everyone has beautiful hair.)
There are also a cherubim and an archangel candidate (who is disguised as a schoolgirl) running around, but I am unclear on their purpose. They seem to be on the side of Rosiel, though, post his absorption of Ruki, which apparently was part of some long plot to awaken him. (For some reason I keep wanting to call Rosiel 'she.') And there are some other bad people hanging around trying to provoke Setsuna by saying bad things about his sister, which is of course even more effective than usual for Setsuna! I think some of them are being controlled by Rosiel. Possibly. At least one of them got absorbed like Ruki and turned into a demon monster. Like you do.
So basically everyone is trying to awaken the Lady Alexiel inside Setsuna, although they have some very interesting ways of doing it. Or sometimes they seem to be trying not to awaken the Lady Alexiel. Setsuna is confused by all this, somewhat understandably, although he seems far more preoccupied by how much he loves Sara and how baaaaaad he is for loving Sara. At one point there's a big flash of glowy light and a winged figure appears, and I think, ah, Lady Alexiel manifesting! Or possibly Rosiel! But no, it was Adam Kadamon. At this point I went, wait, who? Adam Kadamon is apparently on its (it's a hermaphrodite or possibly a neuter) own side, and is actually the second most powerful after God, only everyone says that that's Lady Alexiel because apparently Adam Kadamon just kind of wanders around doing... stuff, and doesn't count in the war between heaven and hell. And everyone goes, "Oh, Adam Kadamon, still running around being incomprehensible, eh?" and then goes back to business as usual.
At that point I think I stopped trying to keep the sides straight. It's totally unclear to me who I'm supposed to be rooting for anyway, except possibly Setsuna. Although he clearly thinks he's evil. (But not an Evil.) Well, and I find Kurai and Arachne kind of charming, mostly because I have a great deal of trouble taking Kurai seriously as a Dragon Master scion of the royal house of Evil after she jumped out of a tree onto Setsuna and announced that she'd found him with the power of love, complete with sparklies and little hearts.
There's a lot of other stuff I haven't even touched on, like the fact that Alexiel is called the "Organic Angel" (I guess she shopped at Whole Foods?) and her brother Rosiel was the "Inorganic Angel" (which I suppose explains the living-on-a-floppy-disc thing), and the fact that Rosiel possesses people by smooching them and slipping a little piece of something in their mouths (which gives us lots of excuses for Rosiel and/or Ruki makeout scenes), and the fact that Alexiel switched sides because the angels were kind of bastards, and the fact that Setsuna's BFF was some kind of supernatural creature who was his BFF because he suspected Setsuna was secretly an angel, and who had a magic talisman which... I kind of lost track of. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he could make a sword out of his own blood. The BFF, I mean.
There's also a bit at the end where Ruki basically comes back as a ghost to reassure Sara that she loves her and is sorry about the whole being-possessed-by-an-evil-angel-and-trying-to-kill-you thing. I guess that would kind of weigh on Sara!
Anyway, as I said -- kind of gloriously incomprehensible. If you need to be able to figure out what's going on, or even who's who, early on in a series, probably not for you! But if you love unabashed and unashamed over the topness, it's kind of awesome.
I'm hooked, and reading the third and fourth right now, and then I'll need to go acquire more.
rachelmanija when she discovered that I loved the wild and unabashed crack that were Godchild and Cantarella. She hooked me by promising me flying zombie angel fetuses, and while I have not yet gotten to said flying zombie angel fetuses, I can easily believe that they are coming!She also warned me that the first two volumes were kinda incoherent, even for everything-includng-the-kitchen-sink crack manga. (There's a distinct subgenre of manga -- well, of fiction in general, but it's particularly frequent and glorious in manga -- where it's clear that the author chucks in everything under the sun they think is cool.) And she was right. I spent a lot of the time going "...what just happened?" and "wait, who was that again?" (Not because I couldn't tell the characters apart, although since some characters are reincarnations/clones/echoes/copies of one another, that sometimes happened too, but because they were also often incognito, and/or one character possessing another, and/or they had several layers of secret identity.)
So it was kind of a mess. But I'm here to tell you that it was an absolutely glorious mess, and I am happily in the middle of volume 3.
The other two things to note:
a) Everyone is beautiful.
b) Everyone is bugfuck nuts.
So! The plot, such as it is. We start out with a vague and doomful bit of backstory about the war of the angels, and the beautiful and powerful Lady Alexiel, second in power only to God, who switched side to join the Evils. (Not evil. The Evils. They're sort of like demons, but cuter.) And in punishment, she was put in a block of crystal forever! While her soul was reincarnated endlessly on earth.
Then we switch to Our Hero, Setsuna, a high school student who loves his younger sister. No, I mean, like, really, really, really loves his younger sister. (After Godchild and Cantarella, I am pretty unfazed by the incest.) We are introduced to him while he's being beaten up by a bully, after which his friend basically asks why he never effectively fights back. Setsuna says, "Whenever I see blood, I lose control and feel like killing whoever I'm fighting. Then suddenly, I get sleepy... It's like crazy sleepy... And for some reason... nostalgic."
Then his sister Sara slaps him, because he was late for their date. (It's not that kind of date, except it kindasorta is.) A bit later, he tells her that she has childbearing hips, which I'm pretty sure I could not have made up. And that kind of sets the tone for what follows!
It goes from there to Sara's friend Ruki who sees auras, and who found a floppy disc with the mysterious program 'Angel Sanctuary' on it. It turns out 'Angel Sanctuary' is a magical program that can read her mind and grant her wishes! She's in love with Setsuna and asks Sara for help, which basically spells her doom. She gets crazy jealous of Sara, and tries to use the Angel Sanctuary program to get Setsuna and kill Sara! Because that plan totally has no flaws. Instead, she accidentally awakens Alexiel's brother Rosiel, who looks basically exactly like Alexiel, who, in turn, basically looks exactly like Setsuna, because as it turns out Setsuna is the reincarnation of Lady Alexiel's soul, reborn in a male human body. Ruki gets absorbed by Rosiel, for the crime of wanting to split up an incestuous love affair between a female angel reborn as a man and the sister of his human body.
Thereafter, Ruki's body swans around being sexy and dangerous, while hosting Rosiel's soul, and says a lot of very mean things to Sara, which makes Sara all sad. So basically we have a female angel, Alexiel, reincarnated as a boy, Setsuna, who's in love with his human sister Sara, and a male angel, Rosiel, who's sort of obsessed with and possibly in love with his angel-sister Alexiel, and he's wearing the possessed and gutted body of a human girl who was in love with Setsuna, who is picking on Sara, and who was possessed/absorbed at least in part because she was obsessed with Setsuna herself.
Confused yet?
There are also a pair of Evils running around -- one of them, Kurai, was a vassal of Alexiel when she was a she and an angel. Kurai looks like a thirteen-year-old boy but turns out to be a girl (I think -- I am not 100% clear on that point) and a Dragon Master Evil, and his sister Arachne, who is physically male but presents as female because she thinks she is too pretty to be a man. (I'm not sure if Arachne identifies as female per se or just thinks it's inappropriate to be a man and be so pretty. I honestly can't tell. Anyway, if Arachne thinks that, I need to introduce her to Rosiel.) At first I thought my manga gender sensing ability had broken, but then (I think?) it turned out that other people were confused as to whether Kurai was a boy or a tomboy, so it wasn't just me. Oh, and Kurai was in love with Lady Alexiel and is therefore kind of in love with Setsuna, or at least thinks she is. (Pretty much everyone seems to be in love/lust with Setsuna and/or Alexiel, including their siblings. It's kind of a Thing.)
Anyway, Setsuna spends a lot of time angsting about how he's in love with his sister, and also that his mother found out about this and was kind of understandably freaked out and tried to separate them. It's the ultimate of Forbidden Love. I guess if you're writing a modern-esque manga, there aren't that many other ways you can get genuinely forbidden love! So he angsts about being an evil lust beast, and he angsts about going to hell, and he angsts about damning his beloved sister Sara to hell in the process, and in the meantime we get lots of long, loving shots of Sara's hair. (In fairness, Sara really does have beautiful hair, even for this manga in which basically everyone has beautiful hair.)
There are also a cherubim and an archangel candidate (who is disguised as a schoolgirl) running around, but I am unclear on their purpose. They seem to be on the side of Rosiel, though, post his absorption of Ruki, which apparently was part of some long plot to awaken him. (For some reason I keep wanting to call Rosiel 'she.') And there are some other bad people hanging around trying to provoke Setsuna by saying bad things about his sister, which is of course even more effective than usual for Setsuna! I think some of them are being controlled by Rosiel. Possibly. At least one of them got absorbed like Ruki and turned into a demon monster. Like you do.
So basically everyone is trying to awaken the Lady Alexiel inside Setsuna, although they have some very interesting ways of doing it. Or sometimes they seem to be trying not to awaken the Lady Alexiel. Setsuna is confused by all this, somewhat understandably, although he seems far more preoccupied by how much he loves Sara and how baaaaaad he is for loving Sara. At one point there's a big flash of glowy light and a winged figure appears, and I think, ah, Lady Alexiel manifesting! Or possibly Rosiel! But no, it was Adam Kadamon. At this point I went, wait, who? Adam Kadamon is apparently on its (it's a hermaphrodite or possibly a neuter) own side, and is actually the second most powerful after God, only everyone says that that's Lady Alexiel because apparently Adam Kadamon just kind of wanders around doing... stuff, and doesn't count in the war between heaven and hell. And everyone goes, "Oh, Adam Kadamon, still running around being incomprehensible, eh?" and then goes back to business as usual.
At that point I think I stopped trying to keep the sides straight. It's totally unclear to me who I'm supposed to be rooting for anyway, except possibly Setsuna. Although he clearly thinks he's evil. (But not an Evil.) Well, and I find Kurai and Arachne kind of charming, mostly because I have a great deal of trouble taking Kurai seriously as a Dragon Master scion of the royal house of Evil after she jumped out of a tree onto Setsuna and announced that she'd found him with the power of love, complete with sparklies and little hearts.
There's a lot of other stuff I haven't even touched on, like the fact that Alexiel is called the "Organic Angel" (I guess she shopped at Whole Foods?) and her brother Rosiel was the "Inorganic Angel" (which I suppose explains the living-on-a-floppy-disc thing), and the fact that Rosiel possesses people by smooching them and slipping a little piece of something in their mouths (which gives us lots of excuses for Rosiel and/or Ruki makeout scenes), and the fact that Alexiel switched sides because the angels were kind of bastards, and the fact that Setsuna's BFF was some kind of supernatural creature who was his BFF because he suspected Setsuna was secretly an angel, and who had a magic talisman which... I kind of lost track of. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he could make a sword out of his own blood. The BFF, I mean.
There's also a bit at the end where Ruki basically comes back as a ghost to reassure Sara that she loves her and is sorry about the whole being-possessed-by-an-evil-angel-and-trying-to-kill-you thing. I guess that would kind of weigh on Sara!
Anyway, as I said -- kind of gloriously incomprehensible. If you need to be able to figure out what's going on, or even who's who, early on in a series, probably not for you! But if you love unabashed and unashamed over the topness, it's kind of awesome.
I'm hooked, and reading the third and fourth right now, and then I'll need to go acquire more.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 03:46 am (UTC)And this series would be the start of my seemingly neverending consumption of utterly insane manga.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 10:29 pm (UTC)...if you have any other recommendations for similarly insane manga, I would be all ears. :D
no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 11:12 pm (UTC)Anything else by Kaori Yuki
Tsubasa
X/1999
Cardcaptor Sakura (But suitable for minors! Almost!)
Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne
Gentleman's Alliance Cross (So insane you forget there are no supernatural elemtants!)
Cantarella
Seimaden
Planet Ladder
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 12:51 am (UTC)So, there's this race of hermaphroditic mermaids who live on the moon, one of whom is currently on Earth as a small boy named Jimmy who is adopted by an abusive Broadway dancer, and whose alter ego is a beautiful mute woman named... Benjamin. Twincest, The Little Mermaid, water pollution, Chernobyl, and backstage shenanigans are also involved.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 01:56 am (UTC)Setsuna's BFF in icon
Date: 2009-11-09 04:44 am (UTC)I had totally forgotten about most of what you describe, especially the cherubim and seraphim. I have no idea who they are either.
I also have no clue about Adam Kadamon, even after reading the entire series. I think he (she/it/huh?) is an actual figure from Judeo-Christian mythogy, and when I say Judeo-Christian I mean that I have no idea which.
I am ninety percent sure that Kurai is a girl. Does Setsuna hug her and feed her cookies, or did I just think that he ought to?
ETA: My posts on this series are all handily tagged and spoiler-cut, BTW. Though I occasionally leave stuff outside of spoiler cuts, like "I forgot to mention that Heaven and Hell collided in the previous volume," because at that point it didn't strike me as particularly spoilery.
Re: Setsuna's BFF in icon
Date: 2009-11-09 07:10 am (UTC)I keep wondering if it's connected to Adam-ondi-Ammon, which is a hell of an esoteric bit of LDS doctrine to find its way into crack manga. I mean, wow.
Re: Setsuna's BFF in icon
Date: 2009-11-09 10:37 pm (UTC)It's awesome.
I really liked Kurai, and I'm glad that my interpretation that she was a girl is (probably) (mostly) correct. There have been no cookies so far, but there very much should be. She's like a random, standard lovestruck shoujo tomboy who has been randomly inserted into the royal house of Evil. Which is magnificent in its randomness. I want to put her in my pocket and take her home with me.
I just looked up Adam Kadamon, and apparently it's the Kabbalistic name for the overarching spirit of humanity -- that is, the uncorruptable godlike part of God in Adam, not the actual clay-and-bones-and-fuckups mortal Adam. Or something like that. I'm not sure how that relates to a hermaphroditic black-and-white-magic power with wings, but I'm also not sure I want to examine the theology that closely! (My first moment of hysterical laughter was the author's note where Kaori Yuki explains that she loves the idea of Lucifer but thinks he'd be way more awesome if he was named Lucifiel. I love the Lego approach to theology.)
I am looking forward to reading your first post when I finish Vol 4, which I am currently in the middle of. :D
Re: Setsuna's BFF in icon
Date: 2009-11-09 11:17 pm (UTC)Re: Setsuna's BFF in icon
Date: 2009-11-10 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 11:11 pm (UTC)One of the things that makes Angel Sanctuary either a great deal more confusing or a great deal less, or possibly both at once, is that actually it isn't mix-and-match theology; it's based very firmly and quite completely on some obscure Renaissance alchemical and mystical texts, both Jewish and Christian. In some ways, it's the manga adaptation of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz. (With several other texts thrown in at random.)
The manga makes more sense and has more plot than the original, which is an allegory of the process of making the Philosopher's Stone.
At one point
no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 11:19 pm (UTC)I thought one of the artbooks actually had that?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-09 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 06:22 am (UTC)