I guess I forgot about this for a few months.

Ideally, the plot of a story is some function that resembles a parabola, where we have exposition and rising action leading up to a climax and then the following slope back down. Presumably, given multiple arcs, you’d see multiple parabolas, together forming some sort of sine wave of action against time. So we can take say n of these points on this function of a typical plot diagram and call these events at some time t.

My problem with Angel Beats is that its plot diagram does not look like this. Instead, take those n events we just chose from our typical plot diagram and randomly permute them so we have a new sequence of n events. It feels like Key just took the best moments from their previous stories, cut out everything that happened between those moments, and randomly permuted those events into whatever sequence of events the show has. As a result, Angel Beats bugs the hell out of me because it feels so jarring from episode to episode.

Incidentally, it’s this series that made me realize that I am not exactly a Key fan. The only thing I’d say that I’m really a fan of is Clannad. I thought Planetarian was pretty good and Kanon was okay, but Air and Angel Beats don’t really do it for me. Of course, we’ll have to see whether I’ll have to take that back when some form of Little Busters is available for consumption.