Manga-serials strongly based on fantasy-premises vary widely with respect to how assiduously their creators elaborate the rationales for those concepts. Some serials toss out a very basic premise and never develop beyond what is strictly necessary, as with Masakazu Katsura's SHADOW LADY. Another group of serials will explore their premises in a thorough and linear fashion until reaching a logical conclusion, as with Lynn Okamoto's ELFEN LIED. Still others articulate and follow a strong premise in one arc and then go on to develop the underpinnings of the fantasy-world in even greater detail, as fans saw when Nozomu Tamaki followed the first "super-arc" of DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND with the shorter arc of SCARLET ORDER.
Suu Minazuki takes a more roundabout path to his premise in his most famous work, HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY. His narrative approach somewhat resembles that of the American teleseries LOST, which teased its watchers to the very end with expectations of a great "here's-the-explanation-for-it-all" revelation. Readers of PROPERTY do get a better explanation of that manga's fantasy-world than did the audience of LOST. Still, detailed explication was not one of Minazuki's priorities, though the manga's final arc-- which I've titled "Atonement" after one of the installment-titles-- succeeds in achieving a high level of myth-concrescence anyway.
PROPERTY's setup resembles that of many Japanese fantasy-based harem comedies: a relatively ordinary young man, ranging in age from middle school to college, has a bevy of supernatural beauties converge on his place of residence, sometimes with one or two regular Earth-girls around for variety. All the babes are in love with the main guy but their competition for his favor brings about an enforced chastity, since none of them get anything more than basic canoodling.
In PROPERTY, middle schooler Tomoki Sakurai finds himself playing host to three young women who look like a cross between Judeo-Christian angels and Victoria's Secret models (even if one of them is closer to the measurements of Twiggy than of Heidi Klum). All three are beings called "Angeloids" and they come from a mysterious island in the sky called "Synapse," possibly derived from Swift's Laputa, but they can't talk about their place of origin-- which works out fine for Minazuki, since he wants to keep the nature of Synapse under wraps for most of his epic. The name "Angeloids" implies that the girls are androids, which is confirmed by the fact that all three have weapons-systems built into their bodies. However, they might also be cyborgs, since if you bonk them on their heads they get the usual mushroom-sized lumps. A few other Angeloids intrude on Tomoki's sanctum for shorter lengths of time, but the main three throughout the story are Ikaros (beautiful but bereft of expressive affect), Astraea (beautiful but stupid), and Nymph (beautiful, but was last in line when they were handing out funbags).
Prior to the Angeloids' advent, Tomoki lives by himself in the small Japanese town Sorami, his parents away on extended travels. His solitude may stem in part from his motto, "Peace above everything," meaning that he doesn't like to be stirred by anything. He has one friend, next-door neighbor-girl Sohara, who as I observed in my review of the TV show, often seems more like a discipline-minded mother than a potential girlfriend, often punishing Tomoki for offenses real or imagined. Sohara's plainly in love with Tomoki, but he just wants to go to school, laze around his house and read porn. He does have an odd recurring dream where a mysterious woman pleads with him to help her daughter, but this doesn't have any definite meaning for Tomoki.
Two of Tomoki's fellow students, Sugata and Misako, more or less con him into intercepting a predicted celestial event. Thus Tomoki is out in the wilds when an armor-garbed winged woman crashes to Earth. Tomoki's tempted to leave her to the authorities, but his basic decency asserts itself, and he takes the Angeloid Ikaros to his home.
Two traditional myth-narratives are conflated here. One, obviously, is the Christian myth in which former angel Lucifer/Satan is exiled from Heaven and flung down to Hell. The other is the Greek story of the great craftsman Daedalus and his son Icarus, who manage to escape the prison of King Minos by flying into the sky with artificial wings. Icarus, unlike his father, crashes when he flies too near the sun, so that his wings break apart and he falls to his death. Neither fate is meant to seem beneficial, but in the case of Ikaros, it turns out to be a "fortunate fall," since by staying with Tomoki she begins to learn about her own potential humanity. (Incidentally, the woman from Tomoki's dream, loosely responsible for sending Ikaros to Earth, sports the name "Daedalus.")
For most of the PROPERTY narrative-- both before and after the next two Angeloids are added to the cast-- most episodes seem like what I DREAM OF JEANNIE would have been if Major Nelson had been a sleazehound. Tomoki soon learns that Ikaros and her friends have vast super-scientific powers-- which gives the youth the chance to carry out the pursuits dearest to his heart: ogling pretty young girls and fondling pretty young girls. (For the most part, he seems uninterested in any girls but those in his own class, including Sohara.) In one episode, Tomoki has his body transformed into the water in a swimming pool, retaining just enough solidity to fondle the girls' nubile forms. All of these pursuits end with Tomoki reverting to his normal form at the wrong time and getting mercilessly pummeled by Sohara and the other girls, though none of the beatings dissuade him from trying the same thing again in some other form. Late in the series it's suggested he gets his extreme sleaziness from his mother's genes, but Minazuki is careful to show that when he's not overwhelmed by horniness, he's actually a decent enough fellow-- and the combination makes Ikaros, Nymph and Astraea all fall hard for him.
While all these hijinks are going on, Minasuki teases out little bits and pieces about the world that birthed the Angeloids. Hardly any non-android inhabitants of Synapse are seen, except for the winged (but implicitly organic) ruler of the floating city, whose name is finally revealed to be (naturally enough) Minos. Minos is the epitome of the bored autocrat, torturing his own flunkies-- particularly the naive Nymph-- just for entertainment, and he regards earthbound mortals as "bugs." He sends both Nymph and Astraea to recover Ikaros, but Tomoki's kindness converts them. Minos continues to send other Angeloids to kill his mortal foe, and most are killed or otherwise compromised by Tomoki's trinity of protectors. Only one Angeloid becomes a recurring menace: a child-like cyborg named Chaos, curiously dressed in the traditional outfit of a nun (though this doesn't seem to signify anything more than a little casual nunsploitation). Chaos is fascinated by the "love" that has changed the loyalties of the other Angeloids, but she thinks it has something to do with physical pain, which makes for lots of sadomasochistic schtick.
After a minor Angeloid character is slain by Chaos, "Tomoki's Angels" finally decide to make a frontal assault on Synapse, which is where "Atonement" begins, and where Minazuki finally decides to unveil the nature of the floating city. Chaos, temporarily allied with Sugata, takes him to Synapse and shows him "The Rule," an arcane column with many writings on the surface. Chaos explains that these were wishes inscribed by citizens of Synapse, but unlike the idle fantasies of Tomoki, these wishes had deep costs, both for the mortal world-- which gets remade by these wishes-- and for the Synapseans. It's revealed that the reason most Synapseans aren't around is because they've all entered cryosleep, deeply disillusioned with having too much control of the world, so that everything comes too easily. And now the world is about to be reset once again, eliminating everything in Tomoki's existence.
Tomoki and his Angeloids assault the floating city, but the cost is high. Astraea perishes fighting Chaos, Nymph expires while destroying Synapse's defenses, and Ikaros is erased by the act of venturing back to the place of her "exile."
In the end, though, they still participate in the defeat of Minos, for when Tomoki faces the corrupt ruler, he wields the core taken from Ikaros's dissolved form, which contains the spiritual force of their evolved humanity. After defeating Minos, Tomoki receives the guidance of Daedalus and is able to inscribe one last wish upon the Rule column. His lesser self tempts him to alter the world to reflect his own needs, but in the end he does the right thing and remolds the world to what is was before the attack. Despite all his desire for a "peaceful life," he's once more got a houseful of unruly Angeloids and a quasi-girlfriend who karate chops him all the time. A coda suggests that the bond between Tomoki and his first angel Ikaros is really the "true love" of the tale, but like most harem stories, the movement into adulthood will never take place.
Because this post is long, I'm glossing over two major subplots, one involving the backstory of Sugata, and the other an unexpected connection between disciplinarian Sohara and "mother of angels" Daedalus-- who in some ways seems like a "good mother" substitute for the "bad mother" who actually birthed Tomoki. Both of these subplots share the same concrescence as the Synapse revelation, and are brought to fruition in the "Atonement" arc.
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