Mandate of Heaven

*For the story arc, see Mandate of Heaven Arc.*

****Mandate of Heaven**** (天 (てん) 命 (めい) , *Tenmei*?) or also known as **"Heaven's Will"**, is a manga written by Tokio Shiba. It features the Archangel Haniel who first appears on the back cover of Volume 13 of the manga, which made the volume stand out. The angel is cosplayed by Marin Kitagawa.

The manga is described as bloody and graphic, where makes the readers feel like its main characters can be killed off. Akira describes it as something that one cannot read in one sitting; the characters, both angels and humans, are being depicted as despicable, so it leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.

Despite being successful with over 60 million copies sold, it was never adapted into an anime or a movie due to the author, Tokio Shiba's aversion to having any of his works adapted.

The plot of the manga is not fully detailed, and only bits and pieces are revealed in the course of the Mandate of Heaven Arc.

## Background

In **Mandate of Heaven**, God grows to hate humans, so he orders angels to kill all of them. However, the protagonist angels do not agree with God's orders and started fighting against other angels when they sided with the humans.

At some point, the archangel Haniel becomes one with a demon and is exiled from heaven. When Haniel's mind became that of the demon's, she ripped out her white wings and tore off her white nails. Her obedience to God had vanished and God's anger was unrelenting. After the fall, Haniel interacts with humans, who are lured in by her otherwordly beauty. She whispers love with her red lips before she rids the humans, whom she refers to as insects, of their pain by killing them. In an excerpt, Haniel is featured to have enchanted some humans. As she turns them into disgusting blobs of flesh and blood, she sits atop their corpses with an eerie smile on her face, which was ominously beautiful.

### Angels and the Protagonist

As the story progresses, more and more angels appear. They are divided into ranks. While they usually take on the appearance of humans to communicate with them, as they climb up the ranks, however, they gradually lose their human appearances. These higher ranked angels can no longer distinguish between humans and other creatures. The main protagonist is made to face such angels, giving the reader the feeling that they might not make it to the end of the story, a narrative which is intentional on the part of the author.

Despite the seemingly hopeless situation, the protagonist still views these Messengers of God merely as "monsters with a name as a shield." Although they know that they are no match for such a monster, the protagonist believes that they have no choice but to follow that same path and become a monster themselves. They make this declaration as their own "Mandate of Heaven."

## Characters

* Haniel
* Unnamed Protagonist

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 *My Dress-Up Darling* Manga — Vol. 11 Chapter 86.
2. ↑ *My Dress-Up Darling* Manga — Vol. 11 Chapter 87.
3. ↑ *My Dress-Up Darling* Manga — Vol. 12 Chapter 95.
4. ↑ *My Dress-Up Darling* Manga — Vol. 12 Chapter 90.
5. ↑ *My Dress-Up Darling* Manga — Vol. 12 Chapter 92.