ON MY FAVORITE CHARACTER

RAHM JETHANI - Second Year, English and Japanese

The fearless leader of the rebellio

SPOILERS FOR ANGEL BEATS!

Yuri Nakamura is my favorite character to exist in any anime. While I have watched many anime throughout my life, and have seen many characters who I can objectively point to and say have more complexity or better presentation, Yuri still remains my favorite. At a glance, she could reductively be described to just be a generic tsundere girl typical of 2010s anime, and while this is broadly true, looking any deeper reveals that there is a much greater nuance given to her character arc and personality. Furthermore, her role and the subsequent fulfillment of her journey viewed through Angel Beats!’s themes of acceptance provide a deeply satisfying and resonant philosophical resolution to the story.

Yuri’s once-happy and carefree life was turned upside down by a robbery, which resulted in the deaths of Yuri’s siblings and a trauma that haunted her into the afterlife even after her accidental death years later. When she awoke in the afterlife, Yuri became obsessed with the idea that God was the one responsible for the sufferings she had experienced in the living world. From this idea, she became hellbent on exacting revenge against that God for her unjust life. This much is revealed in the anime, with Yuri’s leadership and motivations acting as the throughline for the SSS’s operations (and therefore, their charmingly comedic hijinks as well). However, what is not well discussed in relation to Yuri’s character is how the SSS directly compliments it, and why this fact is important in understanding Yuri’s development.

The creation of the SSS was, in reality, extremely messy. As revealed in the prequel manga Heaven’s Door, due to Yuri’s stubbornness and forceful nature, it was extremely difficult to get anyone to join her cause. Only through luck, blackmail, spectacle, violence, and sheer stupidity was Yuri able to convince the first few members to join her. However, these miracles alone took over 80 years, and while people’s bodies and ways of thinking didn’t change in the afterlife, the continued effort that Yuri consistently put in was noted to be something most people wouldn’t be able to mentally or emotionally handle. But once the SSS gained a few more people, those more reasonable and approachable members were usually the ones to make Yuri’s ideology seem more appealing to newcomers. Because of this, Yuri’s group, which initially formed around her ideologically extreme views, gradually shifted to become more casual in practice, with Yuri ironically serving as more of an older sibling than a leader in social situations.

Although Yuri was slightly happy to have something akin to a family in the afterlife, it also immediately brought feelings of guilt, as though she had abandoned her family. This made her more prone to voicing her outspoken determination and to making outlandish leadership decisions as a means to hide this vulnerable state of mind (which does add to the humor of the anime at points, but I digress). This state of existence is almost the opposite of her enemy, deemed “Angel”. In comparison to Yuri, “Angel” is quiet and composed, but fights to restrain the SSS and keep them in line with school policy. In addition, “Angel” does not fight out of her own pain, but out of a feeling of love for the teenagers who felt anger at their own lives, wanting them to just live their new lives to the fullest. The fact that so much of Angel Beats!’s brand recognition comes from the clash between Yuri and Kanade is poetic in that way too. And it is through “Angel” and Otonashi that Yuri is able to overcome her cyclical resistance against peace.

The arcs of characters who serve as leaders always seem to attract my attention (hence why I am also a fan of how Natsume Kyousuke from Little Busters! and Reinhard von Lohengramm from Legend of the Galactic Heroes are written) because their stories always seem to deal with the idea of legacy, with those leaders representing an ideal that they usually have to come to terms with. But because Yuri is such a deeply hurt character, she clings to the idea that she represents rebellion and justness in order to distract herself from the pain she feels, and to justify the SSS’s mission despite her knowledge that the people there are already somewhat content with how their lives ended. In this way, the legacy of the SSS acts as a shackle constructed by and for Yuri, with no apparent escape available for her. Only through Otonashi’s assertive kindness are the chains finally broken, along with her idea of what the SSS was supposed to be. Just like Yuri in the afterlife, the SSS was supposed to be an embodiment of unjust human suffering. However, due to the group of silly, kind, and passionate teenagers that formed around them, both Yuri and the SSS became symbols of what it meant to actually find fulfillment through truly living happily. Once Yuri was able to let go of her previous ideas, she was ready to accept the new family she had and finally disappear.

I think the idea that Yuri represents, more so than any other character in Angel Beats!, is that it’s okay to find peace. Despite the brutal tragedy that befell her life early on, despite the accidental car crash resulting in her premature death, and despite the decades spent ruthlessly fighting against a silent and unseen God, Yuri found peace. Despite all of the hardship and unfairness of her life, she was able to make peace with it. She was able to make peace with the “Angel” Kanade, whom she had been fighting day after day. She made a promise with Kanade that if they were ever to meet again, that they would be good friends (and, 13 years later, in an albeit poorly written spinoff with questionable canonicity, Yuri and Kanade were able to honor that promise). And then, after seeing off her new and loving family into a better existence, Yuri Nakamura disappeared.