Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-68.224.146.139-20131101042722/@comment-4533448-20140225180009

There's a couple of theories for this but we can actually safely rule out the coma part because it's the afterlife, everybody there knew for sure that they died, be it a slow death (Iwasawa/Yui/Naoi) or a fast one (Hinata). If that theory were to be true somehow, then the whole Angel Beats! series is about Kanade's coma dream. Here are some explanations that I can think of at the moment:

1. Time obviously does not work normally in the afterlife as compared to the Alive's time. Shiina's presence is an evidence. Therefore, it may be true that Kanade may have died later than Otonashi but arrived earlier than him because of the time warp. And because of her later-than-her-donor's death, she was awake then and knew that the heart that was about to go to her belongs to Otonashi.

2. It may not be Otonashi's heart. He did circle the card to donate his organs, and as Kanade had stabbed him, it may be true that his heart had went somewhere to someone. But that does not prove that it had been sent to Kanade.

Actually, in fact, there should not be a lack of heart. They appear in the Afterlife as how they were at the moment of death, except with the addtion of uniforms. This is the only way I can think of why some of them had their own accessories when there are obviously no shops to buy them (Matsushita's shoes, Hinata's red t-shirt, Iwasawa's wristbands, Yui's hairbands, Yuri's bow, etc). Unless those only apply to the "outer self" and the "inner self" still reacts to what happened to their real bodies out in Alive world. ... That's pretty gross if you think about those who had stayed in the Afterlife for ages actually.

3. If you wanna point out to me about the part where Otonashi recalls his past because Kanade is beside him... What Kanade said was it is because Otonashi had heard his own heart beat, therefore he recalls. I can't remember the exact phrases they used but in the way of what Kanade said does not match to the scene we saw (something about lying on her chest to hear the heart beat when the view is that she is just seated beside him). I will think of the reason as to why Otonashi remembers is because he just lost his memory temporarily and as medical history had proven, such memories return at random times. It has nothing to do with who is beside him or what he heard. It could be explained like why Naoi got his powers to hypnotise people too—a random gift! Just that Otonashi's random gift is to lost his memory (he didn't damange his brain when he died, which opposed to what Yuri had suggested when they first met).

4. Kanade's regret that kept her there may be to thank any donor who may be her donor, and not a pin-point-confirmed her donor. It is not an every day thing that you meet an organ donor, and Otonashi being the first one she met, she jumped to a conclusion that it is him and just wanted to thank him to move on. For all we know, her donor may not even fit into the age group of entering the Afterlife they are in.

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That's for now, until I think of more reasons, I may be back. I'm open for discussions!