Collected Confusion

Punch me in the face [angels] (Tues#3)

Hello and welcome to: It's late, I'm late, someone physically harm me (lightly) so that I might move on with my life.

Irrelevant week feels... weird for only the second week doing this. I was all set to SKOOL ya on feminism or something, but here I am, completely unsure of what to say? I have no topic. Fantastic.

Going to talk about... angels... since that is obviously something you people can relate to and want to read about.

God do I love angels. We're not going to explore that today. Just different types of angels in fiction, and approaches to writing them as a species/entity.

There's a couple types we tend to see in media:

1. Magical beings with wings, often with some additional powers as well (healing, mind-reading, etc) that are enacting some will, often vague

2. Literal biblical angels literally enacting God's (confirmed real) will

3. Beings with wings that have some sort of weird, alternate society going on and no real connection to any real religion

4. Horrorterrors (balls of eyes and wings, traditional biblical angel style. monsters)

I'm torn between which is least common here: the horrifying balls of eyes or the actual bible guys. Seriously. I can name one work each (and one of them I wrote).

Most typically, you see a mix of 1 and 3. Few books, or any media (supernatural for example) go out of their way to confirm any God- it's too controversial, I guess, and has all sorts of connotations and implications they don't want to deal with.

I get why they do it, but it always feels a bit weak.

I've only read one book with biblical, right from God angels. I get it can be hard, and indeed not much fun if it turns preachy, but it's a viewpoint that is definitely needed. What would the world be like if you learned God was absolutely real, and an angel told you this? What does it say about other religions? Hell, what if an angel went ahead and confirmed some old other abramhamic sect to you instead of Christianity? 

(The book I read actually had God as a being without gender or form, and each of the major archangels were followers of a different religion (christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, I forget what Jibril was). Anyways, it was a very cool approach to religion, and spiritual beliefs.)

Angels at their core are cool things with wings. They're remarkably vague and yet very specific- we all know what an angel is supposed to be, despite most of them not being true to their source material. Vampires and werewolves have a lot of specific traits to them (weaknesses, abilities, traits) while angels are just... winged. Usually the good guys.

I love angel books, but god do I have trouble finding good ones. A lot of the published ones don't do excellently (you have a lot of trouble selling angel manuscripts to agents these days), and a lot of the ones on here are... similar to each other.

Here's some things I've noticed about angels in fiction, published and non:

1. BAD BOY FALLEN ANGEL WHO ACTS ABUSIVE BUT HAS A HEART OF ANGSTY GOLD AND A TRAGIC, WINGLESS BACKSTORY

2. The 'good' angels are all jerks, or else very anal about rules. Expect blond hair.

3. Cc to the above: all angels are white

4. Very few female angels, any female angels are boring, 'pure' characters unless they are the main character.

5. Main character lady angels are rare (usually MC is an outsider), but MC lady angels still tend to be boring and holy shining pure, often with special healing powers and the single trait of 'nice'.

(6. re to 3: many writers have a bit of a problem writing diversity...)

Most angel books are about a forbidden love, which is sort of ironic and quite frustrating. Almost every angel book is a romance! You know how weird that is, honestly? Having every book about a race that is canonically chaste be a romance?

I've seen a lot of people ask for scarier angels, or mean angels, or not-shining-beacons-of-lawful-good angels. People should probably get on writing that. Shake things up.

[ I know I have ;) ;) ;) ]

[someone please talk to me about angels and recommend good/hilariously awful angel books to me]