info for sirenspull
Character Information
General
Canon Source: Angel: the Series
Canon Format: TV Show
Character's Name: Angel
Character's Age: Roughly 250 years old
What form will your character's NV take? Some sort of Android or Motorola Tablet look-alike. Basically something technologically advanced, that he'll completely and utterly suck at using.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities:
↪ Immortality
↪ Quick healing
↪ Fluent in a large number of languages, demon and otherwise.
↪ Physic links to his progeny -- he's able to track down his sired progeny's whereabouts, but only using dreams. He can't do this through sheer intuition.
↪ Some experience with witchcraft/sorcery
↪ Skilled in combat/CQC (close quarters combat), tai-chi, sword fighting, as well as combat with practically all forms of weapons
↪ Super strength
↪ Photographic memory
↪ "Vamping Out"
⤿ The face he makes when he goes all "grr" or vampirey. It's when his fangs come out to play.
⤿ Drinking blood always brings this face out.
Conditional: If your character has no superhuman canon abilities, what dormant ability will you give them? N/A
Weapons: His sword.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History:
↪ Wikipedia's Angel
↪ Wikia's Angel
↪ Spike & Angel's Timeline
Point in Canon: Post-canon
Character Personality:
Angel is, in every sense of the word, his own personal contradiction. The person he is as a vampire with a soul seems to be practically the complete opposite to who he is as a vampire without one altogether. Even so, Angel and Angelus are indeed the same person; Angelus is simply without moral, a vampire fueled by evil and with no cares given.
Before Angel, came Angelus. And become Angelus, came Liam. Liam was Angelus before he ever became a vampire and he was known for doing whatever he pleased; he was a hedonist to be exact. He enjoyed drinking, and he especially enjoyed the ladies. After he became a vampire, he enjoyed the ladies even more so, he just didn’t always look for their consent on the matter. Angelus didn’t look for consent when it came to a lot of things, and taking became an expertise of his. Angelus is, by all forms of the definition, about as monstrous as you can get.
Angelus enjoyed torturing people, both physically and mentally; he’s a sadist to a T, garnering pleasure from every single act of evil he imparted onto others. Torture was a game to him, with the end never being the part he looked forward to the most -- torture is about the thrill of just that, causing pain, and watch the bearer of it slowly fall apart. Angelus loved hurting others, hunting them, and the thought of ever stopping, or ever having to stop, was nonexistent. He enjoyed the art of the kill, and he enjoyed the evil that went along with killing -- he killed because it was evil, and because it made him even more. He never had any qualms about who he took down in his path of destruction, and the fact that he started with his family first should only give further clues as to how much exactly he cared about anyone else. Angelus didn’t have a soul, he had no reason for morals or conscience, and he went wild with that fact.
He enjoyed every second he spent torturing, killing, destroying the world around him, and it all made him continue to want it even more. Angelus never spends one second brooding about the vampire life he was given, using it to only add fuel to the fire that is his life. And he enjoys it purely for himself.
While some vampires, even without a soul, are drawn to each are, Angelus never had that problem. That isn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy the company of others, he just wasn’t keen on doing anything within his power to keep it. While some vampires, such as Spike, are practically co-dependent even without a soul, Angelus is quick to give up his connections with other people to keep himself alive and to continue to do whatever he pleases. Angelus had no qualms about betraying Darla, even though she was his sire, and even though they stayed together for 150 some years. Because when he gets right down to it, he is his own number one asset, and he enjoys his own life too much to care about others.
It was completely possible for Angelus to be charming, even charismatic, though that never only ever went to serve his own evils, allowing him easier access to things that he wanted. But that never gave him any more humanity, and he was perfectly fine with that; Angelus never wanted to be anything but a complete and utter monster. A charming monster perhaps, but a monster nonetheless. Angelus couldn’t stand who he became as Angel, and believed his soul-filled counterpart to be ridiculous, worthless at best, and undeserving of taking away the life that he had so loved.
One thing that can be said for the both of them, however, is that Angelus and Angel are both inherent leaders. They both seem to have other people quick to follow their lead, and they’re just as quick to take charge. Even more so, they enjoy being the one in control, using it to their advantage at every given opportunity. Angelus is immensely arrogant and believes himself to be the best at everything, which makes this even easier to understand. When Angelus returns in present day, this is even more true: he’s disgustingly cocky, flaunting the fact that he can get away with whatever he wants, and enjoys watching everyone fall down around him while he even goes so far as to bait dangerous people closer to him. While he might have attempted to play things safer in his “youth” as a vampire, growing older only makes Angel became that more more self-serving, infatuated with his own powers and loving all the chaos he can wreak.
Angelus is a superb manipulator, getting exactly what he wants from people almost every single time. A number of times, he pretends to be Angel and manages to get away with it until he himself cracks from just how ridiculous he finds Angel to be. But he knows how to get what he wants from people, and enjoys taking everything he can. It’s only one more form of sadistic torture for him, gaining pleasure from all the ways he can watch people fall prey to the power that he possesses and only continues to take away from others.
But when it comes to Angel, everything that Angelus was, Angel tries not to be. Angel is constantly trying to atone for the sins of Angelus, even though he believes wholly that no matter what he does, he will never truly be capable of making up for it. Angel’s primary, almost singular motivation in life is for atonement. But no matter how hard he works, he’s damned either way, and he’s not stupid enough to think otherwise. While this might make someone else throw in the towel, to Angel it seemingly gives him all the more reason to keep fighting, because who else is going to be the person that protects those that wander in the night? He understands how monsters work because he was one, and he constantly uses that to his advantage when it comes to saving peoples lives from the kind of monster that he used to be.
At first glance, it would be easy to label Angel as brooding and be done with it. And granted, he broods. The man broods more than darkness itself, but in all truth, the man has a lot to answer for, and he knows it. He prefers to spend his time alone, hating himself, riding the wave of a constant and futile guilty conscience. But he uses that to garner his strength and his reason from, using his hatred of himself to hate the rest of the monsters that harm others, and to protect all the people that he can.
Angel might want to save people, but that won’t stop him from using violent force against the bad guys to do it. Even if he can’t stand the person he used to be, he doesn’t deny the fact that there are brutal means that he has to use from time to time to be able to help others. You can’t save people without dusting a few vampires and bashing in a few peoples head. Or, you know, throwing people out of windows. It comes with the territory of fighting monsters who were just as bad as him. Angel might not be Angelus anymore, but that doesn’t make him any less powerful, or terrifying when it comes right down to it. He might not jump on the chance to beat up just anyone, he usually has a reason for it, but there’s no hesitation to the fights that he throws himself into.
Angel, like Angelus, is capable of manipulation though he does it for other reasons than his un-souled half. He’s incredibly good at reading people and knowing what they see in him and others, whether or not they’re good people, as well as understanding their motivations. This is why he’s able to make it to the top of Wolfram and Hart: because he knows how these people think, what they want, and exactly how far they’ll go to get it. While Angelus uses this to gain power and control, Angel uses it to know who he can trust and who he can’t. Angelus is at constant odds with other monsters of the night to know who may or may not be on his side and he wouldn’t have survived this long if that wasn’t something he was immensely good at doing. While Angel can, at times, be a complete idiot, the man is incredibly intelligent when it comes to some things, and relies heavily on his ability to judge other people at a moment’s notice. He’s street smart: he knows his way around back alleys with his eyes closed, and knows how to talk his way into bad-guy bars and inner circles better than almost anyone.
Even though Angel is wary of people who seem to have changed their alliances, Angel can’t help but be even more willing to help them on the road away from the dark side. He understands the difficult road it is, how hard it is to leave behind a dark past that’s constantly following, and if he’s been adequately convinced of someone’s change from bad to good, he’ll do almost anything to help them on their continued path towards it. Angel is more likely to try to see the good in people and to do whatever he can to bring it out, whereas Angelus is constantly trying to seek out the bad and abuse it until there’s nothing left.
Also like Angelus, Angel can be painfully arrogant, and also selfish. If he feels like it’s the necessary action to take, and at one point he does, he is more than capable of removing himself completely from others lives, as well as removing the other people in his life so that he can get the job done. Angel believes himself to be the most experienced at times, as well as intelligent, and comes up with his own plans without alerting others to them. He even leaves other people out of the loop to do what he believes is the best pursuit of action, and doesn’t exactly see this to be a problem if he thinks he’s doing what’s right for everyone involved even if it hurts them that he’s trying to go it alone. Even so, this is just one more way that Angel does everything he can to keep people at an arms length away and to simultaneously keep them safe.
Which is to say that another one of Angel’s prime motivations in life, apart from not being Angelus, is to care for other people. Granted, at the same time, he tries to keep them far away from the actual process of connection, even though he desperately wants to keep everyone safe. Part of this is because he wants to keep them safe from himself. He believes that he’s still a constant danger to others, no matter how much he wants to help, and this can be seen by how he constantly pushes Buffy away. Angel has an abysmally difficult time showing just how much he cares, and has an even harder time accepting it from others. It doesn’t help that he more often than not, prefers to be alone. However, he does appreciate the people he does have in his life and his love for them is at times, his undoing. His curse is only a continued manifestation of this: that if he ever experiences true joy, he’ll once again lose his soul and return back to Angelus. This is the main reason he tries to keep himself from getting into any kind of physical relationship, let alone even ones that don’t even go past hugs. His curse is the literal translation of the fact that he’s as undeserving as he believes himself to be, that he’s still a danger to others, no matter how much he loves them, and even more so because he loves them.
Angel’s time spent as a father is even more proof of that. He hardly lets Connor out of his grasp when he is his primary caretaker and he does everything for his son, to the point where he gives him a new life, taking away Connor’s memories of him so that he has a chance to be happy. While this destroys part of Angel, it also makes him far happier to know that Connor has a chance to live a life that he never had, far away from the monsters of the night. Once again, he removes another person from his life to keep them safe from the life he leads, to keep them safe from himself.
Angel and Angelus alike are both driven by the memory of their disapproving father, a man who believed that Liam would never be anything more than a drunkard with a propensity towards women. While Angelus used this to fuel his drive to be as heinously bad as he possibly could, Angel simply tries to make sure he’s worth something. Because at times, Angel is just a man who is completely and truly disappointed in himself, lost to guilt and unsure if he’ll ever be capable of being a worthwhile person.
Brushing aside all the darker, angstier sides of life, Angel is a closet dork, and tends to be awkward when it comes to people he doesn’t know how to react towards. He deals far better with people he cares about, but even then, he says it himself, he isn’t a people person. Nor is he much of a dancer, or singer, but he likes Barry Manilow, and even more so, he likes making the woman in his life smile when he can get away with it, through simple means.
He’s terrible with all things technology, and he also doesn’t really enjoy “eating” in public, preferring to keep his drinking of animal blood to himself, just like practically every other thing in his life. Being a loner comes naturally to him, and even though he is more used to refined society, and even though he deals incredibly well with high-stress situations -- even able to talk his way out of torture -- he's about as uncomfortable as it comes when he has to deal with women and relationships and things that don't have to do with hunting and killing monsters. He's basically a thirteen year old boy: take away his sword and his shining armor, and he doesn't always know what to do.