@fidelesir replied to your post āIf i tag this Aziraphale is anyone going to fight meā no youāre right...ā
Would you say he gets better, morally speaking, over the course of his story?
YEAH
as always, iām 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 aziraphaleās morality nudges a little closer to good and away from Good over the course of the story (and yeah, these are separate)
Thereās 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. Heās 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 thatās a comfortable thing to be. Aziraphale is all about being comfortable, itās 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 itās 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. (itās 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, doesnāt use a scapegoat. When lying to Shadwell, in the book, you get this line from Aziraphaleās 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 heās going to be in shit, but heās acting anyway because he can, heās sacrificing his comfort for the good of others. Heās gone from that relative who tells you to dismiss your bigoted great-uncle because they were āraised in a different timeā to the one who says āshut the fuck up, i think youāre a giant bag of open blisters and your opinions are worth shit-all," because everyone else knows theyāll be immediately shot down for speaking up. He knows, at this point, that saving the world wonāt 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 arenāt 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 donāt end up with the same stew anyone else makes. So, no, Aziraphale isnāt good and Aziraphale isnāt bad, heās just a person with a lot of choices to make, and by the end of the story, he understands this.
Aziraphaleās character development is him going from being kind to those in front of him when convenient, to placing himself in harmās way for those that canāt 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.










