With Gabriel being…well, lazy, it’s a rare treat to see her as she’s supposed to be: the former top angel. True, one story is technically a “what if” story, but it turns out, Vigne is just about as good as being a wannabe NEET as she is a demon.
…Which is, to say, not very good. Especially since even in this alternate universe, Vigne hates crushing people’s feelings.
And speaking of feelings, I imagine for many, the star chapter of Gabriel Dropout volume 12 is having the usually confident Raph experiencing very mixed emotions — about kissing Satanya!
It’s no secret that Satanya is my favorite character in the series. Her combination of confidence and idiocy has been a driving force for many of the gang’s misadventures. But even when mostly left to her own devices, she is a riot. In one chapter of volume 12, for instance, she goes shopping at HSN (the Hell Shopping Network) again for a brand new drone. Unfortunately, she picks the wrong spot for her flight, causing her to demand the police officer to change the law.
Satanya also ends up ordering a magic escape room from HSN, and she and Raphael end up inside it. Their mission, as you may have guessed, is to kiss to escape. Satanya is hilariously blasé about the situation; she’s basically like, “Whelp, I got a life to live, so pucker up!” Raphael, however, has a very different reaction, and between the situation and her panic, the yuri shipteasing is off the chart.
The ending is rather predictable, but like the two “Gabriel as a hardworker” chapters, it helps to temporarily shake things up. Yes, if you adore Gabriel Dropout, you don’t have to worry about Gabriel suddenly rediscovering her drive for being an angel or wanting to help others out of goodwill, as evidenced at several points in the book.
Still, despite being the titular character, her role in this volume isn’t as prominent as the title suggests. Gabriel may still be a part of the action (like witnessing her sister’s attempt to play a dating sim or Vigne trying to avoid being alone after watching a scary movie), but if you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t know she’s actually the protagonist. This reads less like Gabriel Dropout and more like Angel & Demon Dropouts. Even the core four (Gabriel, Raphael, Satanya, and Vigne) are very rarely all together here. For better or for worse, this isn’t a volume where any character hogs the pagetime.
But one of the downsides of that is, while I did praise the escape room and pure Gabriel chapters for changing things up for a bit, there’s also something to be said about going back to the classics. As much as I enjoyed mixing things up a bit, I also yearned for more of that volume 1 spirit with the two angels and two demons. Those role reversal/what if chapters I loved would have better played off if we had more of their usual selves to compare it to. Having Gabriel been the star of another chapter with the other three doing their usual antics probably would have pushed this into chef’s kiss territory for me.