Okay this might come off weird but I ask genuinely, how do you think your depiction of Gabriel would act with a female human? In your art (which is amazing) he is drawn with a male and is rougher with them, clawing at the skin and biting. I heard somewhere on here that in the bible, one of the reasons why the Earth was flooded was because the angels would fly down to sleep with women because they were tempted and it would cause them to fall, do you think the same would apply to Gabriel and that he would treat a female in the same rough manner? Sorry if this doesn't make sense or if it comes off as rude, I think female and males are equal ofc
Hello!I by no means find your question strange or meaningless. I really enjoy pondering various topics, and I am grateful for interesting questions that stimulate my brain to work.
(There is going to be a lot, A LOT of text right now and possibly some mistakes. Sorry. The direct answer to your question is in the last paragraph. You can scroll past all the arguments and read my opinion right away, and then come back to the informational part concerning the Holy Scripture.)
Let's take a closer look at angels and their fall.
In biblical history and theology, two completely different castings down of angels are described, which occurred at different times and involved different characters.
The events you mentioned relate to the second fall of angels (the time before the Flood) and are described in the Book of Enoch, which is not recognized by almost the entire Christian world, but that doesn't mean we cannot take it into consideration and analyze it.
I think it's important to note that, according to the book, the angels were driven by lust, passion, and enchantment with female beauty. That is, the women did not deliberately seduce them, but the angels (indirect quotation): saw the beautiful and lovely daughters of men and desired them, saying to one another: "Let us choose wives from among the children of men and beget children for ourselves."
The conscious rebellion against God arose from the desire to perpetuate themselves in the material world through reproduction, since until that moment they had only been disembodied spirits. 200 angels were aware of the gravity of the coming sin and bound themselves by an oath on Mount Hermon, so that no one would retreat from their plan. We conclude that they were guided not by scientific curiosity, but by love and desire.
Therefore, when I see people categorically state regarding angels (and Gabriel from TMC included) that they cannot be interested in carnal pleasures and have no sexual characteristics whatsoever, I inwardly smirk, because we literally have a whole book about how angels got close to humans and what it led to. And it all led to dire consequences, because from the angels, the women gave birth to giants—the Nephilim—who grew at an incredible speed and had an insatiable appetite. When humanity could no longer feed the giants, they began to devour humanity, birds, beasts, and each other.
God did not destroy them personally but applied a strategy of mutual annihilation. The Archangel Gabriel was commanded to pit them against each other. As a result, a tremendous war of the giants broke out, in which they completely wiped each other out before the eyes of their captive fathers (the fallen angels). Those few Nephilim (or their descendants) who survived the internecine war were finally physically destroyed during the Great Flood, which God sent to completely cleanse the defiled Earth.
According to the Book of Enoch, God sends the Flood to cleanse the earth of what resulted from the secret knowledge passed on by the angels to humans. They taught humanity weaponry, magical healing, incantations, astrology, astronomy, and other things that supposedly led to the total corruption of humanity, the growth of lawlessness, wars, sorcery, and other forms of vice. The Bible, compared to the Book of Enoch, does not blame women for anything, but merely speaks of the sinfulness of the era in general and the need to cleanse the earth. (But I will clarify that the Bible in general does not mention nothing of all that Enoch speaks of.)
As for the angels themselves, they were ultimately punished and forced to await Judgment Day underground, where after the judgment they will be finally cast into the abyss of hell. Their wives perished or, as various versions say, became succubus (Jewish legends) or sirens (Book of Enoch 19:2).
Heaven has its own laws of purity and morality, both among the heavenly hosts and in what they expect from people (especially in the Old Testament, and even more so in the unrecognized prophecies and the gospels canceled at papal councils).
Now let's talk about the first fall of angels, with the direct participation of Lucifer and his associates.
In the Book of Genesis, when Adam and Eve are just settling in Eden, Satan already exists in the form of the serpent-tempter, essentially a fallen and hostile being towards humans. Accordingly, the rebellion of the angels and Lucifer's transformation into Satan occurs long before the creation of the material world and its settlement by humans.
We know that he is hidden under the name Gabriel in TMC, so I will refer to the character by his lawful name.
The problem is that in theology, apocrypha, and religious philosophy, Lucifer's attitude toward humanity is described as absolute, fundamental hatred mixed with contempt and envy. He is not indifferent to people; quite the opposite—they are his main tool in opposing God.
We know that the original conflict was born from Lucifer's unwillingness to worship God's new creation, namely Adam, because he considered himself a more perfect being "made of fire and spirit," while man was created only from "earthly dust," even if in the image and likeness of God. (Indirect quotation from the Life of Adam and Eve.) Essentially, he envies humans for taking the place of the Creator's beloved creation, who also forgives them their sins through repentance, whereas toward angels and their sins, the attitude is exclusively harsh and entails absolute cruel punishment.
Since Lucifer cannot defeat God in direct combat or harm Him physically, he acts through people. And every seduced human soul that turns away from the Lord is a symbolic victory for the fallen angel over God and proof that the creation of man was a mistake.
Lucifer treats people with obvious contempt and arrogance, as he considers them inferior, weak, easily manipulated beings. He despises man for his carnal nature, vulnerability to temptations, and inability to maintain spiritual purity, and he pushes them toward sin in every way. For him, people are merely expendable material in the war against heaven, and in TMC we see exactly that picture.
Although in the Romantic era, the fallen angel treats people with bored arrogance or tragic loneliness. He sees in people small, fussy beings incapable of great deeds, but sometimes he feels pity for them or even a kind of intellectual sympathy. Therefore, if we start from this point of view, the chances of nonviolent communication will increase.
Contrast with the fallen angels of the Book of Enoch.
Here a clear difference is traced in the attitude toward people between Lucifer and the Guardians from the Book of Enoch. They felt attraction to people (more precisely, to women), wanted to live among people, start families, and share knowledge and skills with them, even if it led to disaster. Lucifer never sought alliance or love with humanity. His attitude toward people is cold calculation, manipulation, and a desire to drag them down into perdition with him.
The interaction of Lucifer with people in the Sacred Texts, his physiology, and impact on people.
In the biblical canon, you will not find descriptions of the devil with horns, hooves, or as a sinister winged creature. He operates covertly, through masks (serpent, angel of light, other people, inner thoughts). There are important reasons for this. Satan no longer has a "permanent" form of his own. Before the fall, Lucifer was the most beautiful cherub, but having rebelled against God, he lost his original beauty, harmony, and holiness. Sin is ugly, and the devil is a spirit devoid of flesh. No longer possessing a divine form of grace, he is forced to "parasitize" other forms. He simply has no true, objectively visible "fallen" form—only spiritual emptiness and darkness. That's why in a previous post I talked about how Lucifer can literally use another angel's skin to create a matching appearance.
Another reason is the psychology of temptation: evil must be attractive. If the devil appeared to Eve or Judas in a terrifying, frightening form, the person would immediately recoil and run to seek protection from God; therefore, as a great mystifier, in order to deceive a person's free will, he must appear either harmless, or beneficial, or righteous.
None of his interactions with people were positive, especially those that involved the use of his power (the Book of Job, where Lucifer does not speak with Job personally, but directly and cruelly affects his life after receiving permission from God to test Job's faithfulness). But we never hear that he ever got close to people, touched them physically, etc. He always acted through someone (e.g., he does not personally kill Job's servants, but the raiders do), influenced mentally, distorting a person from within, or resorted to the forces of nature (a hurricane destroys Job's house + the disease that strikes him).
But at the same time, it is precisely in the TMC canon that we see how in vol. 5 he personally kills a woman (Jane) and presumably a shepherd, not to mention Dave Lee in vol. 4.
Accordingly, in analog horror, Lucifer (Gabriel) is no stranger to physical contact with people, but it is also not positive, and even if the danger of communicating with him passes, you will still dread his return, which will inevitably bring pain and/or death.
I will condense this endless stream of information into one conclusion.
It seems to me that for him, there is no difference between men and women, and the degree of his mental or physical impact depends exactly on how much you provoke him, hurt his ego, are useful/useless in his machinations, perhaps interest him—if that is even possible given his conceit and hatred for people—or if you are susceptible to his influence and whether he will need to cross boundaries to break you (as in the case with my character).
I feel very pained about violence against people in general, but especially against women. If I can allow myself to subject a male character to violence for the sake of plot plausibility and exploring his psychological changes, I would never do that to a female character. It is hard and scary for me to think about it, and I would like to believe that when people develop a pairing with someone as amoral as TMC Gabriel, they empathetically understand what harm they do to female physiology and stop themselves from writing excessively traumatic actions. Perhaps I sound hypocritical right now, given the kind of content I create with my pairing in the Mandela Catalogue fandom, but I am aware of the inevitability of such developments for my character, and I do not encourage—but deeply experience—scenes involving intentional infliction of pain on him, even if I present it in an aesthetic format. In my narrative, I introduced cyclicality with almost complete physical destruction of the hero and his constant restoration afterwards through angelic forces (with subsequent self-reflection by both characters), which does not diminish the weight and impact of what happens.
And when I try to imagine a woman in my character's place, I simply cannot visualize any scene. Accordingly, for my perception, it would be more comfortable to develop a different kind of contact between the characters. Most likely, it would be a slow-burn combining intellectual battle and denial of attraction to each other (if we are heading toward a relationship), where every interaction is drawn taut like a string, but Gabriel does not break down and does not resort to causing physical harm, because even with all his indignation, rage, and denial, he is forced to reckon with the fact that the heroine impresses him with her insight and logic (this is all my conditional vision if I were writing about a woman). She would do everything to find a way to outmaneuver him, throw his plans into disarray, and he could not eliminate her and would try to confuse her as much as possible to divert her from his key intrigues. If with a male character I do not see restraint and feel their pairing as a clash of two elements, or as a struggle between a predator and a prey desperate to escape his tenacious clutches, then with a female character I feel the interaction building as if it were a dance of two people at a masquerade ball, where every gesture, every movement must be considered, because it is all part of one big game within the web of events.
I am also interested in your opinion on all this.And I hope you are not tired of reading and are not disappointed by the answer.
AiA master post found here. See additional info below—
AiA alternates typically aim to copy their selected human victim perfectly, but sometimes are prevented from doing so due to time constraints, missing information, or interruption. Rare instances involved alternates creating a disguise that only partially resembles the original human, with other features randomly selected from other humans. The more common abnormalities include spindly bones (especially exposed ribs), a knobby spine that juts out, and patches of darkened looking skin that may resemble a large birthmark or an old injury (like a healed burn).
The most damning of errors include alternates who did not complete their human disguise before allowing the “second skin” to “settle”, leaving dark shadowy parts of their unformed bodies exposed, which often takes great concentrated to force to look human. Despite having this trait, N is rather successful as a hunter, although is forced to cover up more than others due to these abnormalities.
I'm resuscitating some OCs from 2023, and today a redrew one of them. However, the drawing was so ass I gained 2 years of experience out of pure spite towards the myself of the prior hour, as you can see below.
By the way, this is Anmo, and they make me feel parental😭
Artfight profile will drop as soon as I finish uploading some other OCs!!
Shout out to myself, my non-binary friends, my canonical non-binary favourite characters, my favourite characters I've projected my gender onto and to half of my OCs👀
michael/baal/lucifer from angels before man by @nicosraf
short comic i made last year for this could be religion abm zine :] we're finally allowed to post them today.
this was made when i just finished abm and before i got contracted as a colourist for the graphic novel, so the designs of moobaalcifer are my own intrepretation. still very proud of my bird imageries 🕊
