Angel. The Fall

[moscow_watcher]

The main complaints against Angel's arc I saw online boil down to two claims: a) Angel is out of character and b) to service Buffy's journey, Angel is destroyed.

Judging by Jeanty's Q&As, Angel's arc in season 8 is over. He won't be in #40. It's time to sum up his story. What the hell has happened to him?

Comments

[shipperx]

Angel thought he was saving the world (and building a better one). His followers thought they were defending humanity against evil magical and demonic powers. I don't see what's so hinky about that...

Nah. Nothing hinky in saying that Angel was doing what he thought would replace the world with a different world but that he didn't actually expect there to be harm to the world being replaced. Maybe. Meanwhile in Q&As say that he didn't know what he had to do to cause it to happen, that he didn't know what would happen if Twilight came about, and of course he wasn't particularly moved to do much when he did see it happening until Buffy said she'd leave him there. That's on top of their also saying that Angel was actually covertly working at helping the slayers, though we aren't shown these covert attempts, despite the fact that such actions would be in direct opposition to his stated goal of 'bringing Buffy low' so as to create the Twilight... that he apparently didn't know what it was exactly. But he made it less bad from the alternative we didn't see by his actions... that we didn't see.

All of which distills into: he didn't know what he was doing, but in order to make 'something' happen (he was kind of vague on what that might be, only that it was better than the unprovable alternative) he had to do something (but he was a bit vague on what that might be also). But that's okay. He wasn't acting on his own free will any way. Well he was. Some. We think. But we're not sure exactly how much. Only that it wasn't enough to cause consent issues. But we're really extra doubly sure he wasn't when he did the really, really bad stuff. And probably some of the other stuff. And he was helping when we couldn't see him.

And of course, this also involved having a whole slew of followers helping him out even though they didn't know who he was, what his plan was, and despite that it would result in "Twilight" that would destroy these followers world, and presumably the followers in it. Except he didn't know that. And neither did they.

Nothing hinky there.

[stormwreath]

Angel knew that under the right circumstances, Buffy would acquire the same superpowers he himself already had. That to achieve this, she would first have to "feel powerless". And that once she had the powers, the two of them would use them to "win the war". That's all canon; the other details we have to extrapolate. He also knew something about a "Twilight realm" that he and Buffy might create together, but seemed very vague on the details and before it happened, seemed to have dismissed it as only a legend.

Angel was actually covertly working at helping the slayers, though we aren't shown these covert attempts

Well, we are; but it's subtle because they were going for the deliberate mislead. But the most obvious example is this one from 'A Beautiful Sunset':

MINION: You didn't kill her.
ANGEL: That's been done. To little effect. The trick is to strip her of her greatest armour... her moral certainty.

Remember, General Voll wanted to nuke her castle in the very first arc of the season. Angel talking about elaborate long-term plans to "undermine Buffy's moral certainty" instead of just killing her was how he was helping. "I put on a mask, talk about 'master plans'...distract them."