Why Angel Beats! fails at the most basic narrative principle

I've been wondering how I was going to approach the big topic of narrative construction in these random blog posts because frankly, I don't think I'm especially good at it. What I am good at, I think, is seeing where established media succeed and fail and why that’s the case. In this post, I'll analyze my most hated anime of all time and how its major, basic failure can tell us how to construct a good story and respect the characters you create.

And what the hell all that has to do with guns. Lots of guns.

A quick introduction to Angel Beats!

Angel Beats! (yes, it has an exclamation point, which I'll insist on using throughout this entire post because of pure spite) is a pretty well-known anime from 2010, arguably coming out at the sweet spot of the end of the digital revolution of the early 2000s, but before the explosion of isekai anime that came around with SAO's release in 2012. And looking back at it through our modern lens, it is a sort of isekai itself in a way, so I guess it's sort of modern in its own way.

Written and scored by Jun Maeda, who's well-known for writing some of the best visual novels (and anime adaptations of said VNs) out there, like Kanon, Air, and especially Clannad, and animated by P.A.Works, Angel Beats! had a star-studded cast; you could say it was poised for success from the get-go. And in a sense, it definitely was a success. It had multiple spin-off manga and light novel projects and, with a rating of 8.06 on MAL as of the time of writing, there are few people out there that would call Angel Beats! a bad show. Its director, Seiji Kishi, previously directed or went on to direct quite a few famous shows like Danganronpa 1 and 3, Assassination Classroom, Classroom of the Elite (this guy has a thing for classrooms, apparently), among others, and two shows I actually have hanging on my wall as posters: Yuuki Yuuna is a Hero and My Bride is a Mermaid.

You might be surprised to learn I'm not one of those people who think Angel Beats! is totally irredeemable; I don't think it is a “bad” show in the sense I would recommend people not to watch it at all. It is best described, in my opinion, as extremely uneven: it's very fun (the comedy can be downright hilarious at times), the music is superb, it has memorable characters, and the visuals still hold up to this day. Where it fails at is, ironically, its comically bad writing and botched character development. I find it hard to believe it came from the same mind as the person who wrote Clannad. I give it a 5.5/9 (or “Fine”) in my patented scoring system that only goes up to 9, by the way.

In case you haven't watched the show (I highly recommend you do though because I'll be spoiling some things here) or don't remember much about it, here's the plot synopsis from Wikipedia:

The story takes place in the afterlife and focuses on Otonashi, a boy who lost his memories of his life after dying. He is enrolled into the afterlife school and meets a girl named Yuri who invites him to join the Afterlife Battlefront, an organization she leads which fights against the student council president Kanade Tachibana, a girl also known as Angel with supernatural powers.

There is, however, something else you need to know about this setting that is crucial to this discussion: as the plot progresses, we find out that every single named character in the show (especially the members of the Afterlife Battlefront) has some sort of "regret" that's keeping them in this high school purgatory, unable to move on into the true afterlife. Most of the B-plots of the show focus on the MC trying to help other characters with their regrets, and when they are finally able to come to terms with it, they literally disappear from this purgatory world. I'd argue that this element of the show is much more important than the A-plot of trying to kill Angel, and is actually the core "visual novel-esque" essence of the entire story.

Now about those guns

If you remember anything about Angel Beats!, you probably remember there are a lot of guns in the show that the Afterlife Battlefront uses in their fight against Angel. But those are not the guns I want to talk about in this section. I'm talking about the most important adage about writing I know: Chekhov's gun.

Anton Chekhov is a very famous playwright / short-story writer that expressed this basic principle in various forms:

"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep."

"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Basically, what Chekhov was saying with his gun metaphor was that any plot element you draw attention to in your narrative must be relevant to the plot in the end somehow. That's the titular “gun”: if you have something like a gun in your story, the audience is going to expect it to be relevant to the plot i.e it "must fire”.

You can think of a narrative as a series of promises followed by a series of payoffs. If your protagonist becomes a hero at the beginning, you are promising there must be a great evil he must defeat. If you describe someone with negative adjectives when you first introduce them, you are promising that character must be a villain (or maybe you subvert the audience’s expectations and make them an ally). If you have a gun hung on the wall, you are promising it is going to fire. This principle doesn’t apply only to plot elements or set pieces. Anything in a story can be a promise for the audience, even if you don’t intend it to be. You can generalize Chekhov’s gun as “all elements must eventually come into play at some point in the story.” That includes plot, characters, and worldbuilding.

I'm not as strict as Chekhov was with this principle, especially because he was mostly referring to plays (where there are literal set pieces) and not prose; in prose, you can (and should) add "superfluous" details to create richer worlds and characters. Another adage I subscribe to, which somewhat contradicts Chekhov’s gun, was shared by Natsume Akatsuki, the author of Konosuba: adding “superfluous” elements to characters, even if you never share them with the public, makes them more believable. Did you know Aqua likes to collect weird rocks? It’s true, look it up. This means nothing to the plot of Konosuba, but makes Aqua a richer character. It's a purely decorative “gun”.

However, it’s fundamental to know what you are doing when adding a specific detail to a story. How call you tell if you are making a promise or just writing a superfluous detail? That is something that’s incredibly hard to do and it’s where people like beta readers and your editors can help you. It’s very easy to miss a “gun” you accidentally left in the story without realizing it; some of your readers might find it and give it more meaning than what you ascribed to it when writing. On the other hand, you might need to add a “gun“ to a story to create an extra “promise“ and entice the reader with a more satisfying payoff.

For example, in the first volume of my novel series, A World Without God, I added an obvious “gun” in Chapter 1 right before I sent the manuscript to the publisher in one of the final revisions I made to it; I felt it was a necessary extra “promise” to make the beginning of the story more enticing. On the other hand, in volume 2, one of my beta readers found a “gun” I wasn’t intending to have there, so I rewrote that part before I finished the manuscript.

So that’s Chekhov’s gun in a nutshell. Hopefully, you’re now aware of how important it is. But how does something a 19th-century playwright said has to do with a 2010 Japanese anime?

Chekhov’s arsenal

Before, I said that Chekhov’s gun doesn’t apply only to set pieces and plot elements, but also to characters and worldbuilding. Fundamentally, in Angel Beats!’ case, if you introduce a character, you must have a good reason for doing so. It’s okay to have background characters without a lot of personality, whose role is merely to aid in the plot. What’s not okay is to make a major, fundamental promise with your characters and not fulfill that promise.

By my count, there are 22 named characters in this show, which is already a lot for a 13-episode show.

…Oh, did I forget to mention Angel Beats has only 13 episodes? Yeah. That’s where the problems begin.

But anyway, with a normal show, those 22 characters might not be a problem. However, remember when I was describing the plot of the show? It is heavily implied by the worldbuilding that every single character is in this afterlife because of some sort of regret they need to fulfill to “move on”. That’s Angel Beats!’ “gun”: the single fundamental promise the entire show is built upon.

Here’s where Angel Beats! fails spectacularly. By my count (and I might be mistaken on the actual number here), only 7 of these characters ever get their backstory explained at all. 7 out of 22. That’s a third.

You could argue that Angel Beats! doesn’t have a Chekhov’s gun. It has 22. The entire show is a goddamn Chekhov’s arsenal.

And 15 of those guns never fire.

Now, you might be thinking a few things after this dramatic information.

First, if these characters never get their backstories explained, then how do they escape the afterlife at the end? Well, due to some shenanigans with the A-plot, they all kinda… poof out of existence during the “climax” (ironic quotation marks here) of the show. Yes, there is literally a montage sequence of these characters disappearing because of reasons.

Second, why does this even matter? These aren’t all major characters, so why do you care so much about this? Most of them are kinda just around the show and don’t do much other than being comedic set pieces. Well, for once, there are minor characters that get whole episodes dedicated to them for some reason, while others get totally ignored. And these aren’t even the most interesting characters in the show (remember T.K.? Yeah, he poofs out too). This unbalance is frustrating at best and pure bad writing/planning at worse.

But the real reason I care is that Angel Beats! made a promise at the beginning it didn’t fulfill. A promise of a great story that it didn’t end up becoming. I hate Angel Beats! not because of what it did, but because of what it could have been. In a sense, I hate Angel Beats! because it’s the most disappointing show I have ever watched. The worse part, perhaps, is that by simply cutting the number of characters in half (or more) and/or doubling the runtime of the show to a 2-cour, most of these issues could be resolved, because they’d have enough time to fire all those metaphorical guns. I have no idea what they were thinking.

Third, you might be thinking, then what about the A-plot? Surely that’s better, no? Well, it’s not as blatantly offensive to basic narrative principles, I’ll admit, but once again it’s filled with more unfired Chekhov’s guns, unexplained events, broken promises, and a major plot hole that even after all these years of people explaining to me how it works, I still haven’t figured out how it could logically work unless you resort to more ass pulls. But that’s a discussion for another day.

In the end, Angel Beats! is for me a perfect case study of what not to do when writing a story. So I’m glad it exists in the form it does now because it taught me a lot about how to write a story (also I can’t deny the influence of the “Angel” concept in AWWG, or how I stole the name "Shiina" from one of the characters). And the more frustrating thing is that I can’t even take the brilliant concept for myself and give it the care it deserves, because I’d be accused of plagiarizing it.

At least, the comedy and music are quite good. And for the average weeb, that’s enough to give Angel Beats! an 8/10.