Beginning in Japan in 1999, Angel Sanctuary focuses on Setsuna Mudo, a 16-year-old troubled high-school student in love with his 15-year-old sister Sara. While struggling with his incestuous feelings, he learns that he is the reincarnation of Organic Angel Alexiel, who led a rebellion against her fellow angels after witnessing their slaughter of the Evils, a group of demons, after God's disappearance. At the conclusion of the revolt, she sealed away her younger twin brother, Inorganic Angel Rosiel, within the Earth, emotionally unable to fulfill his request to be killed before he became insane and destructive. Captured and branded a fallen angel, Alexiel was punished by having her body frozen and her soul endlessly reincarnated as a human whose life is full of misery.
While Rosiel is freed by his subordinate Katan, Setsuna finds his life and Sara's endangered by various attempts to awaken Alexiel's dormant soul within him. Realizing they cannot bear to be separated, Setsuna and Sara run away together and consummate their love, hoping to start a new life together. Sara eventually dies protecting him from one of Rosiel's subordinates, and devastated, Setsuna awakens Alexiel's soul, causing widespread damage. Adam Kadamon, the angel closest to God, intervenes by turning back time to just after Alexiel's awakening and freezing time on Earth; she then tasks him with freeing her from her imprisonment. To search for Sara's soul, sent to Hell for incest, Setsuna's body enters a near-death state. While in Hell, his soul searches for hers, eventually learning that it has been taken to Heaven instead. Sara, meanwhile, awakens in the body of Jibriel, the archangel of water held prisoner by the angels; revealed to be Jibriel's reincarnation, Sara is eventually returned to her original body but finds herself impregnated by the malicious angel Sandolphon, who hopes that she will bear him a body. After Rosiel absorbs Sandolphon to gain his power, an act which speeds up Rosiel's physical and mental decay, Sandolphon's remnants possess her, causing her to see Setsuna as a monster.
Assisted by Lucifer, the ruler of the demons who is in love with Alexiel, Rosiel unseals the Tower of Etenamenki, where God rests, with Alexiel's body. Intent on restoring the Earth, Setsuna follows him, with Kurai and the archangels of fire and earth; along the way, he aids an injured Katan, who hopes to save Rosiel before he loses his free will to do so. At the tower, Rosiel kills Katan, only to realize that he had killed the one he loved and tried to protect from himself; he then goes into a state of destructive despair. Awakening in her own body with Setsuna's help, Alexiel reveals to him that she had always loved him: because he had been born the opposite of his healthy sister, she bargained with God to save his life in exchange for her imprisonment, from which she later escaped with Lucifer, and an agreement to never show him any compassion. She then kills him and absorbs him into her womb so that they will never be apart again. Before dying, Rosiel passes along his power to Setsuna.
Setsuna and his group find Adam Kadamon's head, used to nourish the unborn angels, and learn that she attempted to prevent God's plan of destroying humanity by hiding him and the tower from the angels and freezing time in hopes that Alexiel's reincarnation could save them. Because God draws power through Adam Kadamon, the archangels and Kurai seal her up, while Setsuna confronts God and encounters Sara and Lucifer there. Sara overcomes her possession to cast out Sandolphon, and Setsuna defeats God with Lucifer's help. Time returns to normal on Earth, where Setsuna and Sara joyfully reunite at last.
Other themes and social issues have been discussed. Active Anime's Holly Ellingwood wrote that the universe of Angel Sanctuary concerned itself with the concepts of good and evil, unconditional love, human nature, and the interpersonal struggle for "love, acceptance, and [...] survival."[18] The reviewer for Manga News wrote that the portrayal of angels and demons in the series challenged the binary of good and evil, with both sides given positive and negative traits; the Evils are additionally shown to be the victims of both the angels and human-caused environmental pollution.[19] In an interview, Yuki drew attention to the tension between science and nature in the series. She wondered if it was possible for the natural world to coexist with science, despite continual, considerable environmental damage as a result of human innovations, and reflected that in the titles of Rosiel and Alexiel, the Inorganic and Organic Angels.[20]
Why is Setsuna so mixed up? Despite his attempts to be noble, he'll fight anyone anytime; he ignores all authority; and he harbors feelings for his sister that can only be described as "incestuous." Why is he such a mess? The reason may be found with two demons from the underworld and their enemy, an insane angel who is distributing an insidious computer game called Angel Santuary.
1999 in Tokyo. Setsuna Mudo, a high school boy, finds his life interrupted by angels and demons. Both Heaven and Hell seek Alexiel's soul, housed within him, but Setsuna has his own life, with his own problems. Not the least of which is the internal conflict of being in love with his biological sister, Sara.
In the struggle to awaken Alexiel's soul, Setsuna's life is threatened and Sara dies protecting him. The bulk of this story follows Setsuna's journey to find and rescue his sister's soul; travelling through the afterlife, through Hell and Heaven, with the help and hindrance of angels, demons and other mythical beings. Through this journey, Setsuna learns important lessons that help him become the hero and saviour that Alexiel wished she could have been.
Angel Sanctuary (åäç猟区 Tenshi KinryÅku?) is a shÅjo manga series written and illustrated by Kaori Yuki. Originally serialized in Hana to Yume from February 1995 to February 2001, the chapters were collected and published in twenty tankÅbon volumes by Hakusensha; the first volume was released in 1997 and the final volume was published in 2001. It focuses on a reincarnated angel named Setsuna, proclaimed to be the "Messiah", and his struggle against the corrupted angels of Heaven.
In this series, Assiah (Earth) and the upper levels of Hell (Gehenna) are mirror images of each other. As mankind polluted and destroyed the Earth, the lands of Hell also began to weaken. Taking advantage of their creator's sleep and the weakening of their enemies, the angels of heaven wage war on the Evil race (a group of demons who have turned away from the Devil, Lucifer and God; they live in Gehenna and worship "Holy Dragon Gods"), wiping most of them out. In doing this the angels fighting the war are corrupted. They commit vile crimes and murders under the name of God and righteousness. This deeply sickened Organic Angel Alexiel. She feels that the Evils are more pure in their actions since they do not put up a charade of purity to cover their crimes. She joins the Evils' side of the war and declares an official revolt against God.
For her crimes, Alexiel is sentenced to the most severe punishment given to the fallen: Her body and soul are separated. The body is frozen in an angel crystal and locked away in the deepest depths of angel security on the fourth circle/layer of Heaven, Machonon. Her soul is sentenced to be incarnated into a human mortal. That mortal's life is sentenced to be filled with physical and emotional pain. Every time Alexiel is re-incarnated, the cycle begins anew. But in every incarnation, Alexiel's personality is still present under specific (e.g. dangerous) circumstances, which causes her incarnation to have strange spiritual patterns and powers at times; it is as if the incarnation has a multiple personality disorder. In the storyline, she is incarnated into a boy named Setsuna Mudo. Setsuna Mudo is a problematic delinquent high school student, who is in love with his sister (thus producing the emotional pain required by her punishment). To add to his problems, he gets caught up in the complex war between heaven and hell.
AimÃe Schafer of THEM Anime Reviews praised the artwork of the OVA, but criticized the English voice cast as well as Setsuna's incestuous love for his sister, calling the relationship "completely unnecessary and totally ruined what could otherwise have been a solid and, I dare say, good story".[49] Theron Martin of Anime News Network found that Angel Sanctuary OVA to be "remarkably graphically violent shÅjo fare" which "confronts the central incest issue head-on, handling it in a far less elegant or delicate manner than Koi Kaze but dealing with it and all its potential fallout nonetheless". Martin also noted that the OVA was meant to be more of an introduction to the manga, rather than a stand alone anime.[2] Mania Entertainment's Chris Beveridge liked the animation quality of the OVA, stating: "The look of Setsuna and the others when they sprout their angel wings and use their powers is very attractive, extremely fluid. This is a top notch batch of OVA quality animation from just about a year ago, and it really does show."[50] He described the story as having "its own beginning, middle and end, but an end that leads onto the larger story."[50] Dave Merrill described the OVA as a "pretentious, confusing claptrap; a Frankenstein's monster stitched together out of pop-culture religious iconography and girls' comics cliches, told in a deliberately confusing and obscurantist style designed to conceal the lack of coherent plot, animated by robots programmed to imitate CLAMP; in short, it's angel-winged junk."[51]
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