Kanade Tachibana

Angel Beats! opens in an afterlife for teenagers who died badly, a school where nobody ages and nobody stays dead. A rebel group called the SSS fights the administration to avoid moving on. Kanade Tachibana is the administration, as far as they can tell: silver hair, flat voice, and a blade she grows out of her own hand. They nickname her Angel and treat her as the enemy for most of the first half.

She is a student, same as they are. Her powers come from a program she wrote herself, and the reason she keeps order is closer to duty than to malice. Jun Maeda wrote the series for P.A. Works in 2010, thirteen episodes, and he had already built a career on stories that hand you a comedy and charge for it later. Kanade eats mapo tofu at every meal, which the show plays entirely straight.

Her fights are short. Her explanations are shorter. Almost everything the audience learns about her early on arrives through other people arguing about what she must be plotting, which turns out to be a reliable way to be wrong. Angel Beats! ran as an anime, a manga and a set of Key visual novels at once, and she sits at the centre of all three versions of the same afterlife.