To ask what happens when we die is a fundamentally narcissistic question. It is this moment, often disguising itself as philosophical query, that we are engaging directly with our inherent existential dread, with the abject fear of ceasing to be and with the futility of interpreting an unintelligible universe. "What happens when we die?" is almost always "What happens when I die? Will the self that exists now persist, in some form?" and so on. It certainly doesn't help that the best medication to prescribe for death anxiety is just basic repression. It is, after all, the one most logical fear. So, try your best not to think about it (Try it out now! Try not to think about dying). And once we retreat from our questions of death, we inevitably switch over to its counterpart, asking "Well, what's the point of life then?", which, of course is always also "What's the point of my life?"
That the anime Angel Beats! leans so heavily into comedic territory makes this all a peculiar segue yet, in its 13 episode run, the series nevertheless sets about confronting these questions; arriving at answers that are, at first, comforting, that subsequently grow more unsettling as the story unfolds, before finally reaching its conclusion. Angel Beats! is an 'isekai' series; one which concerns the transport of characters from 'our' world into a secondary fantasy world. Here, the answer to "What happens when you die?" is that you are transported to the aforementioned secondary world: a world where this particular afterlife takes the form of a purgatorial high school. If your youth was an unhappy one, you may find yourself here. Attend classes, score well in tests and appropriately exhaust yourself with extracurricular activities and you will be able to find contentment in the quotidian nature of an idealised school life. Upon finding this satisfaction, you will then 'move on' from this barrier between worlds, completing the journey from primary world, to secondary world, to the abstract, unknowable next.
That is unless you happen to be a particular kind of student, a student unwilling to fade away, who instead seeks recompense from the cruel, malevolent higher being who foisted an unjust life upon you. Such a group of (un)dead students are the main characters of the series, the "Afterlife Battlefront", and are united by common purpose: to invoke the presence of God and seek their revenge. In doing so, they also desire not to be 'obliterated', as resolving their issues would mean a pass onto the next world and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Together they defy that which seems the very purpose of this school for the dead.
The setting is an absurd one, a world of no meaning or consequence, which often manifests itself with the invocation of features and terminology from video games: in this world, non-main characters are NPCs, hit counters tally acts of violence and people don't die, they just respawn. From here derives much of the humour, where undying teenagers wage war with increasingly sophisticated weaponry crafted from dirt. But the absurd ultraviolence is not the premier nihilism of such a setting. Rather the series' true villain, beyond angels, shadows and malevolent student body presidents is in fact the inherent lack of a higher purpose. The search for God is always a failure: the students cannot kill God, because he is already dead.
In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus retells the eponymous Sisyphean myth as a parable for human existence. In the original myth, Sisyphus is cursed to perennially rolling a rock up a hill. Once reaching the summit, the rock would always return to its starting point, and Sisyphus would have to take up his endeavour once again. It is Camus' existentialist declaration, that "One must imagine Sisyphus happy!", that hits at the core of our shared experience. Our lives are too often monotonous, at times they are capricious and cruel, and as such we look to higher authorities for the reassurance that there is some greater plan, or inherent meaning to the universe. And, of course, there is none. There is instead only the struggle to look for meaning.
Imagining Sisyphus happy.
There is much in common between Sisyphus and the cast of Angel Beats! as characters, particularly in their respective denials of death. Sisyphus, whose guile afforded him to cheat death twice over, in one story is said to have kidnapped the very personification of Death itself. So, for a while, humans lived as immortal. With their constant revivals, it would not be a far cry to believe that Angel Beats! took place in such a world where Sisyphus had done precisely that. However, there is one specific aspect of the myth that Angel Beats! places itself in. This purgatory setting is exactly Sisyphus atop the mountain, watching the rock tumble back down, and anticipating his descent. This is someone who, having finished living a life of abstract, unjust pain is being told to get back to the bottom of the hill and start pushing again.
The premier example of this is the case of Yui: the cat-girl singer who makes up for a life confined to bed, reliant on care, with effervescent energy in the afterlife. At four years old, this character was left paralysed after a car accident, the kind of random, injury that is so abstractly cruel we can only call it an "act of God". Yet, in the end, Yui doesn't resolve any lingering emotion by performing those things she couldn't do whilst alive (her post-life bucket list containing playing in a band, performing wrestling moves and sporting feats, alongside getting married). It is instead the fantasy, the capacity to imagine a meaningful life for herself, which allows her to find peace and the resolve to live out a new life. That new life may well consist of the exact same trauma as before, but she will face it regardless. The lesson is not that their lives secretly had meaning all along, nor was it that they were given a space wherein which meaning could be inscribed for them, instead each of these characters required to find meaning for themselves.
Yui resolves to push her rock up the hill once more.
What is important is that, the student-rebels against God did in fact succeed in their purpose: in the Nietzschean sense, God is dead and they killed him. There is no higher power with which they must live their lives genuflecting towards, there is no ethereal mandate to live in accordance to. But the anti-theist trend of Angel Beats!, and the student's mantra of "There is no God, Buddha or Angel", is only the first half of the equation: after the battle is won, and the shackles of a higher power cast off, we are then burdened with absolute, terrifying freedom. In a world where no sense or purpose is given to us, the onus is on us to find whatever sense we can in the abstract. In friendship, in art or in love. In the tiny facets of life that seems so petty in the face of total cosmic annihilation. It is a bloodcurdling prospect, but it needn't be. Because, is it not true that however scary the thought of succumbing to the void is, it is that much worse to have lived a life unfulfilled? It is only ever we, ourselves, who can delineate our own reason for being, and even though we may never quite figure it out, we can find meaning in the very struggle for it.
Camus, A. (2013). "The Myth of Sisyphus" in The Myth Of Sisyphus. New York: Random House.
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