@fidelesir replied to your post “If i tag this Aziraphale is anyone going to fight me” no you’re right...”
Would you say he gets better, morally speaking, over the course of his story?
YEAH
as always, i’m heavily influenced by reading the book first, and i know a lot of people disagree with me on issues of morality, which is fine, they have their metric that works for them and i have mine for me, but i absolutely would say that aziraphale’s morality nudges a little closer to good and away from Good over the course of the story (and yeah, these are separate)
There’s Good, the faction, the Ones In The Right, and belonging to this group, following their orders, furthering their goals regardless of the chaos and suffering it causes around you, automatically places you in the good (lowercase), category, because the ones leading the Good group know best, and have to protect you from your own shortsightedness.
Or so the logic goes.
Aziraphale falls back on this a lot. He’s convinced that things will turn out the best for everyone if they just follow their assigned roles and do things in the prescribed way. (Crowley is well aware of this and can twist it around)
He likes to think of himself as good, because that’s a comfortable thing to be. Aziraphale is all about being comfortable, it’s right up there with his stubbornness in being both a huge strength and a huge weakness. He cares about harm and will take action when it’s 1: directly in front of his face and 2: he can do something about it immediately. But set things on a larger scale or out of sight and he sits down and shuts up. He becomes passive, avoids consequence for things that are effectively caused by his actions and/or inaction. (it’s not bad to be passive for your own safety, before anyone gets uncomfortable here, but if everyone closed their eyes at injustice 100% of the time, where would we be?)
in the end, when he does bad things, he does it himself, does it knowingly, doesn’t use a scapegoat. When lying to Shadwell, in the book, you get this line from Aziraphale’s point of view that I feel showcases this ongoing change perfectly: The end justifies the means, thought Aziraphale. And the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. He knows he’s going to be in shit, but he’s acting anyway because he can, he’s sacrificing his comfort for the good of others. He’s gone from that relative who tells you to dismiss your bigoted great-uncle because they were “raised in a different time” to the one who says “shut the fuck up, i think you’re a giant bag of open blisters and your opinions are worth shit-all," because everyone else knows they’ll be immediately shot down for speaking up. He knows, at this point, that saving the world won’t be easy or pretty or commendable, and is prepared to do it anyway, and by the end of both book and show, is holding a weapon himself in order to prevent everything from going to hell (metaphorically speaking)
my view of morality is that good and evil aren’t inherent qualities, and even then, not often useful terms to apply to people. Morality is a weird painful stew made up of an infinite number of ingredients. You throw in actions, intents, potentials, and outcomes, and you don’t end up with the same stew anyone else makes. So, no, Aziraphale isn’t good and Aziraphale isn’t bad, he’s just a person with a lot of choices to make, and by the end of the story, he understands this.
Aziraphale’s character development is him going from being kind to those in front of him when convenient, to placing himself in harm’s way for those that can’t afford the same luxuries of safety that he has, and his moral stew gets a few more ingredients on the side of not sitting by unaffected while the world ends.
