#important analysis

NUMBER 1 SACHIEL

The first, the best, the cutest, the standard of pure delight to which no others could reach. Sachiel's comfortingly bipedal with grabby looking fingers that are not unreasonably long and that like to hold the Dick and Jane red bouncing ball close to its chest. It has a little face with a plague mask vibe to it that also looks like it belongs in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Later, Sachiel turns out to have TWO adorable little faces which enhances the feeling of a nest of little barn owls peering at you from the dark comfort of a giant mechanical alien monster torso.

PROS: Adorable little face, times two! CONS: Self-destructs and does a lot of damage to civic infrastructure and humanity, I guess.

NUMBER 2 GAGHIEL

How can you not love Gaghiel? It's an underwater buddy that looks like someone smashed a manta ray into a plesiosaur and borrowed the mouth design of a cartoon Venus flytrap. Like a lot of oceanic creatures, you know it's not nearly as cute as its big toothy smile would lead you to believe but it looks so happy and frolicsome that you permit aesthetics to overwrite common sense. Just leave Gaghiel in the ocean having fun and fighting sharks or whatever Gaghiel wants to do. There's a lot of ocean and there's definitely room for Gaghiel!

PROS: Mouth can fit so many hotdogs! CONS: Did eat those two entire submarines like they were hotdogs.

NUMBER 3 MATARAEL

Matarel's a sneaky little black UFO covered in illuminati eyes with comically long spider legs that go high above its funny little eye-spangled head/body. There's something incredibly charming about a big supposed to be scary thing with great long legs that look like they have the thickness of spaghetti. You find yourself asking "Buddy, how can you skip leg day when you have so many legs?" but also finding that disregard for bodily care endearing.

PROS: Reminds me of an eyeball spider from space in an old episode of Johnny Quest. Love thinking about the non-racist parts of Johnny Quest! CONS: Matarel does ooze orange acid from its true eye. That's not something I love seeing or thinking about.

NUMBER 4 LELIEL

Leliel! Get a feeling so complicated about Leliel! Leliel is a delightful sphere of black and white geometric patterns evoking Escher drawings. You could put Leliel on display in a classy home, maybe as a centrepiece in your beautiful dining room table and it wouldn't look out of place aside from it being a towering giant alien thing that would crush you and your table and your house and your neighbourhood. Leliel is the black-tie evening wear of Angels. Unfortunately, classy giant alien monster isn't as delightful as adorable giant alien monster. Also, it turns out Leliel is actually the shadow cast by the tasteful Escherphere, not the Escherphere itself. Be your true self next time, Leliel!

PROS: Goes with everything. CONS: A poseur.

NUMBER 5 SAHAQUIEL

Sahaquiel is the most '90s of the Angels. Sahaquiel looks like a toy advertised on Saturday morning television to compete with bop-it and the latest attempts to get devil sticks and hula hoops to catch on with a new, impressionable, plastic-garbage loving age group. It's orange with a giant eye and is all long and flat with hands that look like those sticky grabby hands you'd get out of a capsule toy machine in the grocery store and then lose behind the couch by the end of the day. Sahaquiel isn't cute the way the top three are and definitely isn't classy the way Leliel is, but you have to respect the hustle and how Sahaquiel is trying its own thing. Be your quirky but endearing self, Sahaquiel!

PROS: You could easily make your own Sahaquiel out of playdough. CONS: Actual Sahaquiel is made up of bombs and drops pieces of itself onto the ground below and that's a lot to deal with and maybe you'd rather buy a bop-it after all.

NUMBER 6 SHAMSHEL

Shamshel has a lot going on. There's an eggplant vibe to Shamshel but also a vaginal look to its head that is a bit disconcerting. I've never seen it, does the Vagina Monologues take into account a vagina that's 80m tall and has laser whips for arms? Does the Vagina Monologues take Neon Genesis Evangelion into account at all? Folks, I'm going to be honest: Shamshel is a bit upsetting to look at but then I think about how its name is Shamshel and I find that so delightful to murmur in my mind that it supersedes how I don't really like looking at the eggplant vagina.

PROS: Shamshel. Sham-shel. Shaaaaamshel. CONS: Its physical existence.

NUMBER 7 TABRIS

Have you ever encountered something where you don't really have a problem with something as it is but you have a problem with how it complicates everything around it? Like maybe you're very proud of a collection of physical media but circumstances have caused you to have one entry in the middle of the series that doesn't match up with the things that come before and after, so you're putting them on a shelf and you want to be able to appreciate them from a display perspective but also this is about storing your stuff and whenever you look at it that one book or DVD or game sticks out like a sore thumb from its fellows and you resent it for how it has disrupted the peaceful and aesthetically pleasing ordering of your library. It hasn't done anything, maybe you even quite like it, but damn does it make organizing complicated. That's Tabris.

PROS: Akira Ishida. CONS: It's an Angel that's just a teenage boy. Mr. Anno why did you not consider how difficult this would make my ranking?

NUMBER 8 SANDALPHON

Oh Sandalphon. What am I going to do with you Sandalphon? You're trying so hard with this flatworm-frog hybrid thing. I feel like you should rank higher! Sandalphon's got a muppety vibe to it, like Kermit the Frog goes body horror. Or maybe H.R. Giger got to design a Pokémon. There's a lot of cilia going on with Sandalphon's extremities? Also, a cilia-surrounded underneath sucking mouth hole? Those are the sort of things that really cancel out googly eyes. Sorry Sandalphon. You're a baby. It's not your fault.

PROS: More Angels need googly eyes. CONS: Cilia. All the cilia. Keep that shit in your ears and around the edges of prokaryotes or wherever that shit goes.

NUMBER 9 RAMIEL

Ramiel's just a prism. Ramiel's just a floating prism. If Ramiel was some kind of spaceship or satellite, you'd say cool, that's a pretty distinctive design you have going on there Ramiel, a little alien but with a simplicity that makes it uncanny. But as an Angel, Ramiel feels like it was the Angel made when ... God? had a hangover after designing a more complicated Angel and just couldn't be fucked when it was time to make Ramiel.

PROS: No upsetting qualities. CONS: No interesting qualities.

NUMBER 10 ISRAFEL

I know this is going to sound harsh, but: Israfel is just bootleg Sachiel. A little bit of a pallet shift. Not quite as detailed. A little face but not as cute as Sachiel's little face. There's two of it, sort of, but two of a knockoff doesn't make it less of a knockoff. Instead, it really underscores how mass-produced and unoriginal Israfel is.

PROS: Makes me think of Sachiel. CONS: Very much not Sachiel.

NUMBER 11 IREUL

Ireul is the microscopic nanotech hacker Angel. Small is cute but after a certain point, small becomes more upsetting than big. You don't really see Ireul, you just see what Ireul does which is using rust nanolasers on computers? The most neutral of Angels.

PROS: None. CONS: None.

NUMBER 12 ZERUEL

Zeruel is the big boy Angel. Not cute but very cool in an '80s boys' toys kind of way, Zeruel looks like you could unfold chunks of its limbs and turn Zeruel into a blocky spaceship or truck. Again, that's cool, but that's not so much my thing. I liked the Transformers that were dinosaurs and the zords in Power Rangers (which could be dinosaurs). Basically, Zeruel would rank higher if it looked more like a dinosaur.

PROS: It does look like some of those blocky cute bug Pokémon. CONS: Not a dinosaur.

NUMBER 13 BARDIEL

Bardiel is the Angel that is the Eva built in America, so Bardiel looks like the other Evas, but with an evil colour palette (purple, but really dark purple). As this important document is ranking the Angels and not the Evas, some might be reading this without the knowledge that I find the design of the Evas deeply upsetting. I do not like them. I do not like looking at them. I do not like looking at Bardiel.

PROS: Is not the worst or more upsetting Angel to look at. CONS: Bardiel? More like BADiel. Because all of its qualities are bad and if you remove the 'r' from Bardiel the first syllable is 'bad' which is what Bardiel is. Bad. Badiel.

NUMBER 14 ARAEL

I keep looking at images for Arael and double-checking that they are, in fact, the Angel from the show and not some shitty MS Paint knock-off. Arael is a collection of white scribbles with what might be an eye at the centre or might just be an orb that two of the small scribbles are carrying around. Arael's a spray paint stencil someone got bored with halfway through their first can.

PROS: I can see ways Arael could have been cool. CONS: I'm not angry, just disappointed.

NUMBER 15 ARMISAEL

This motherfucker is literally just a giant ring of floating Xs. Ohhhhhh noooooo a fourth grader's drawn on finger tattoo is coming for us, helllllllllp. Fucking Claire's looking threat to humanity.

PROS: Easy to draw. CONS: There are too many non-threatening things to compare it to and choosing which to use is irritating. Do kids today even draw shit on their hands and arms and pretend they're tattoos? Would alien hula-hoop have been a better choice? Does Claire's still exist and do they still sell NeoPets merch?

NUMBER 16 LILITH

This is the real unlovable freak level. Lilith is only saved from the bottom by virtue of the extremely over-the-top Christian imagery. An awful, giant, bloated top half of a corpse nailed to a giant red cross, Lilith oozes orange goo. You look at Lilith and know Lilith has skin and that skin has elasticity and it pulls and undulates with the horrors Lilith contains. Lilith is constantly trying to regenerate, I think, via spawning a bunch of teeny tiny human legs, making the end of its torso look like Dr. Moreau's second place science fair project. Lilith has a cratered purple mask-like disc for a face with one giant triangle and seven eyes. The purple triangle can horrify conservative Christian reactionaries who want to go beyond Teletubbies, the eyes on the triangle can get Illuminati lovers horny, and the asymmetry of the eyes exists to piss me off.

PROS: It's important for the baby goth weebs to have something to latch onto. CONS: It's an undulating mass of flesh with horrible little human legs and it oozes orange goo and I hate it and do not want to look at it anymore.

NUMBER 17 ADAM

So there's two forms of Adam and one's just a light energy giant robot shaped thing that's boring and we're not going to talk about it because I forgot the fucking thing existed until just now. I'm basing this ranking on the embryonic Adam. Some might say this is unfair, would I judge a beauty pageant based on ultrasound images? Consider, instead: wouldn't that be rad? Maybe I'm the visionary the pageant industry needs.

Adam is a disgusting handful of veiny purple jizz with a single red eyeball and lives in Gendo Ikari's palm. The preceding sentence is like a MadLibs where every blank was qualified with 'terrible'. Choose which part of that description you hate the most!