Overview

From OMGWiki

Note: This, for the most part, is the overview of the old site.

[edit] First Things First

Welcome to the Oh My Goddess! Wiki. I guess my main goal with this site is to offer some original content, while at the same time helping to familiarize people with the Oh My Goddess! manga and anime. Basically, this an OMG! encyclopedia, and hopefully, your one stop shop for all things Oh/Ah My Goddess! The idea is that even a novice can become quite knowledgeable after some exploration, given that the information is legit. So, don't you worry about having much previous experience, such as having seen the OAV series, but a basic knowledge of the main characters already is sort of necessary.

The images I have here are all my own scans (or, in a few cases, screen captures), so you won't find any of these exact pictures elsewhere on the net. Since there are a lot of images in the character gallery, expect some moderate load times. I've tried my best to optimize the images so they load up quickly, but the sheer volume of images on a page will doubtless add up. It's worth it, though. :)

I've also included an in-depth analysis on each of the characters--their differences from the OAV series, how they started, how they've grown, etc--along with some of my own speculation and opinions on the characters and the series in general.

Oh, and another thing... I don't claim any measure of completeness--my collection of OMG manga is respectable, but it's got some gaps in it, and does not yet include any material that hasn't been released in the United States (I do have some more recent manga on order from Japan though--I'll scan some pictures once I receive them). I will, however, try to be as extensive as I can, and continue updating as new manga arrives and new thoughts issue forth from my brain. :)

[edit] My Own Thoughts on the Manga vs the OAVs

It's a pretty standard thing for an OAV series to differ from its manga or vice-versa. It just makes good business sense. Put the characters in a slightly different setting, tweak their personalities a bit, change a few events here and there, and you've got a whole new series that will interest people who saw or read the original. Plus, anime and manga, as different media, each have their strong and weak points as to the types of scenes and stories they can convey.

Typical OAV series--and the Oh My Goddess! videos are no exception--tend to portray a compressed version of events, whereas mangas are typically more drawn out and go into a lot more detail. It's not often, though, that an OAV series will feel like it has gone back and corrected the manga beginning.

Allow me to explain. As someone who's written ongoing stories from time to time, I've discovered that characters tend to change a bit from your original concept of them as your story progresses. Often times, they'll take on lives of their own and develop in directions which you neither originally foresaw or intended. Belldandy and Keiichi both fall into this category.

When Keiichi first summoned Belldandy in the manga (by accident--much like in the OAV series), Belldandy was a pretty normal girl (minus the magical powers, of course). While she was generally a nice person, she was prone to the occasional selfish outburst, and had a tendency to fight with her sister. I won't go into this all that much here, as more in-depth info on Belldandy is in her own gallery section ... but the point that I'm trying to get at is that she didn't start out the way she is currently. The Belldandy from the first few manga volumes lacks that divine, innocent quality that she has in the OAVs and later mangas.

What I'm trying to convey with all of this rambling is that the OAV series seems like an attempt at retelling the beginning of the manga the way it should have been written. Events are, of course, highly compressed, but the characters all have their modern personalities, as opposed to the ones they started with at the beginning of the manga.

Another interesting thing to take note of is the drawing style used in the OAVs. The first Aa! Megami-sama! OAV released in Japan came out in early 1991. However, the comics coming out at the time were done in a drawing style that wasn't quite so "evolved" as the OAVs. The characters in the manga didn't look as they did in the OAVs until around Volume 8, which didn't come out until 1993. As close as I can figure, Fujishima most likely had the manga drawn a couple years ahead of schedule by the time he started on the OAV series. This is, of course, speculation on my part, so if anyone knows otherwise, drop me an email and let me know.

Finally, there are some differences in the type of humor between the OAV and manga. Anyone who's seen the OAVs knows that the sexual content, while occasionally present, is extremely mild. Apart from a couple instances where Keiichi nervously considers the possibility of sleeping with Belldandy (and one time when Urd manages to give Keiichi a nosebleed), there is almost no sexual content in the entire series.

The manga, on the other hand, tends to be a bit more risque. Fortunately, though, Fujishima never draws any graphic nudity, and the humor, while a bit racy at times, remains strangely innocent. The vast majority of the sexual humor is situational--the characters don't actively pursue sexual situations; they just sort of end up in them.

All in all, though, Oh My Goddess! is an excellent manga title, and is definitely worth checking out if you enjoyed the OAVs--or even if you've never seen them before.

This concludes the overview for now. Why not head back to the main page and check out some character galleries?