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[jermastrat]

OOC

↬ Back-Tagging

Yes

↬ Thread-Hopping

Ask first, but usually yes!

↬ Comments in the Subject Line

My personal addiction

↬ Fourth Wall Breakage

Ask first, but usually yes!

↬ Offensive Topics

Warn for self harm, suicide and CSA please.

↬ Anything Else?

Gabriel can have a very short temper, and while he tends to be much easier around mortals that's not always a guarantee that he won't get real cranky about things real fast. I will never have Gabriel initiate combat without first asking if that's where you would like the thread to go. Gabriel will not use lethal force unless actively threatened.

IC

↬ Hugging

Depending on who you are, this is either a great idea or the last thing you'll ever do. I wholly encourage it.

↬ Kissing

See hugging then multiply times ten.

↬ Flirting

Flip a coin, he'll either get it or he'll take everything you say as literally as you could possibly imagine.

↬ Fighting

If you're interested in writing a fight scene with Gabriel, please feel free to send me a PM! I just want to be able to figure out who will win/what will happen. I'm afraid otherwise I'll just assume that whatever disagreement is happening will remain purely verbal, I'd rather not assume that anyone is okay with Gabriel throwing hands lol

↬ Injuring

If you're gonna fight him, you better make it count. You better make it hurt.

↬ Killing

Contact me first to talk about this.

↬ Telepathy

It's really weird in there, feel free to contact me about how weird!

↬ Magic

He's an angel of the Lord who can summon weapons of light, he can fly, he can teleport, he can drive the corpse of King Minos like a fucking mazda, magic is fine.

↬ Triggers

MACHINE. Gabriel isn't terrifically fond of robots. He's better than he might have been just after Gluttony, but he's still not great. Expect him to not trust anything that could be considered an automaton. Also daddy issues: anything he perceives as disrespect towards God will probably get him going. Degrading or mocking his combat skills has a fifty fifty shot of rankling him as well, and indeed any kind of mockery aimed at an ability he prides himself at won't end well. He's been Heaven's Golden Boy for his entire life and he's only just started getting used to the idea of losing. Another big one is any perceived attempt to usurp or override his autonomy. He just discovered free will, and while outside of destroying V1 he might not know what he's doing with it, he's very adamant about figuring it out on his own.

↬ Anything Else?

Not that I can think of!

Cliffnotes

-Gabriel was made for a single purpose, and has spent the entirety of his life being seen and utilized as an object. He self-objectifies, and connects all of his worth to his status as the Sword of God. After Act 2, his entire purpose and self worth has been called into question and he's having a super hard time about that.

-He struggles to connect with others, and with seeing himself as an actual person. Discovering his own autonomy is really fucking scary and he tries not to think about that too much.

-Gabriel is actually quite intelligent, but specifically in a task-oriented way: he's a talented organist, an unmatched swordsman (until recently), an accomplished strategist and powerful magic user. Socially he's a big fucking idiot who has no idea what he's doing and covers that up with a short temper and his overblown ego. Pair this with what seems to be poor emotional regulation (man's got two modes: chill and Not) and a penchant for the dramatic and you get an extremely messy individual.

-Gabriel is despite all his faults, a good person with extremely strong morals that he does not exempt himself from. He's honest to a fault with most things, though stumbles with that honesty when it comes to his own emotions, often rejecting his own feelings out of a desire for efficiency or a deep seated discomfort of acknowledging he even has them. Weapons aren't supposed to have that shit.

-Heaven has heavily distanced itself from humanity, viewing it as God's failed experiment. Gabriel has only ever personally dealt with the souls of dead mortals, and while some still retain their humanity, the majority of them are no longer capable of higher thought or speech. Needless to say, Gabriel knows next to nothing about human culture save for whatever he might have been able to glean from people like the Ancient King Minos, and The Ferrymen.

-Good luck getting him to accept that it's bad to see himself as a thing and not a person, or that this is even the case to begin with. For obvious reasons this is excessively uncomfortable for him and homeboy is just going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards self actualization (he's trying, he really is).

Gabriel, Righteous Hand of the Father, Will of God, Judge of Hell, is a little full of himself. Or at least, he was, up until he had the hubris kicked out of him twice in a row by a robot.

It's important to remember that Gabriel, the Will of God and Gabriel, the actual guy seem to be two entirely different and separate entities for him. While in his position as the Council of Heaven's weapon, there was almost no obvious sign of anything even approaching kindness. Gabriel is arrogant and self important, convinced that he is righteous and good and that therefore, all of his actions are righteous and good. He is proud and boastful, stopping multiple times during his fights with V1 to taunt the machine and tout his own profuse power.

Outside of these battles, the kiosks spaced out throughout hell's interior detail the atrocities that Gabriel as committed, such as the execution of King Minos, the former Judge of Hell. When it was found that the sinner had reformed the Lust layer into a sprawling utopia, ending the eternity of suffering that hell had been specifically constructed to met out, Gabriel was sent to deal with the rogue soul. Despite the fact that Minos made no effort to attack the angel, and instead tried to reason with him, Gabriel struck him down and left his soulless corpse to wander Lust, killing the very people Minos once tried so hard to protect. So too did he strike down Sisyphus, the King having built an army of insurrectionists in an attempt to break the shackles of their eternal punishment. Without hesitation or mercy, Gabriel descended from on high and beheaded Sisyphus, displaying his severed head before his now defeated army and breaking their spirit. Gabriel committed war crime after war crime, atrocity on top of atrocity, convinced that he was just and right to do so, all at the behest of the Council of Heaven, who fed his arrogance and encouraged his violence, up until the machine's invasion of Hell after the total destruction of humanity.

It's been stated by the developer that up until the point Gabriel faced V1, he'd already battled multiple machines and triumphed, so there was no reason for him to believe that he'd have any trouble with V1 specifically. Unfortunately for him, that wasn't the case, and his defeat was what began to cause the cracks to show in the Weapon of Heaven, and the actual angel beneath began to peek through. It was devastating, world shaking, for him to return to heaven and suddenly have his loyalty to the Father questioned due to his failure. His first, and up until that point, only failure, no less. Despite the fact that he'd given himself entirely to the cause of the Council, done everything he'd been asked and brought them victory after victory, a single loss was all it took to give his brothers and commanders cause to strip away the life sustaining light of the Father from him, giving Gabriel twenty four hours to live. If he could not manage to kill the machine within that amount of time, he would die, and would most assuredly be replaced with someone else. Just as they had done to King Minos, with the same cold and uncaring cruelty that had been shown to King Sisyphus.

Gabriel the person is at present, underdeveloped. He doesn't know how to exist outside of his position as The Will of God and Papa's Special Boy. Realizing that God has left them all behind to fend for themselves and finding out that he was never anything more than a useful tool to be discarded after failure broke some integral part of him, and it soon becomes clear that Gabriel the person is quite different from the living war machine he was groomed to be. You do get hints here and there about Gabriel the person, the most notable one being in Wrath with the Ferryman. It's discovered that Gabriel saved the Ferryman, a sinner tasked by heaven to take the souls of the living across the Ocean Styx, from certain death by drowning after he fell off the side of his ferry. It is also revealed that Gabriel has advocated for the Ferrymen, one after the other, in an attempt to raise these devout and repentant sinners from Hell to join the ranks of the angels, to no avail. There is no self serving reason for this, Gabriel receives nothing from uplifting the damned, no matter how pious, and it can be safely assumed that it is through his own sense of morality that he tried to redeem the Ferrymen. The same can be said of his decision to save the drowning Ferryman met within Wrath. Gabriel isn't rewarded for acts of kindness within Hell, after all. It's also safe to assume that Gabriel in Heaven is yet again far removed from Gabriel in Hell in terms of the persona he displays, as it's stated that he's quite popular with the denizens of Heaven itself.

He also kills the Council, in the name of protecting the people of heaven.

Upon his second defeat by V1, Gabriel appears to hit a breaking point, and the rage boils over to genuine, wild, reckless glee as the angel seems to experience true joy for the first time in his life. Locked in combat against a worthy opponent, his eventual defeat left him confused, but lighter. Departing from Hell to think, his mind finally clear from the council's propaganda, he was forced to come to grips with the unforgivable acts he committed against those trapped in Hell, finally coming to understand why God had abandoned them all, and what exactly the Council had been doing, using him as their tool of intimidation and fear. Gabriel, most importantly, is a man of conviction and powerful morals, and he is also not really capable of things like 'middle ground' and 'diplomacy'. Also he had twenty four hours to live, not a lot of time to sit around pondering what his next move was going to be, and when you are a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Despite knowing that it would mean his inevitable death, Gabriel returned to heaven and slaughtered the corrupt council down to the very last, brandishing his fallen brother's head much as he did Sisyphus's before a full amphitheater. The message was clear, though now far different than the symbol of defeat and demoralization that it had been for the insurrectionists. A bloody and violent symbol of hope, and safety, an image he'd leave with his people before he'd descend back into Hell to spend the final hours of his life battling the machine invasion.



Gabriel the person doesn't really know how to be one, and at present, he's not really concerned about that anyway. While a brilliant strategist, talented swordsman and well versed in angelic magics, Gabriel is a Big Stupid Idiot socially, and he's even worse about it now that he's going through a bit of a crisis of faith, and frankly a crisis of everything else. He's an extremely honest person, often to the point of brutality, but he's also extremely opinionated so whatever he says should still be taken with a grain of salt. Gabriel is also not the greatest at emotional regulation, and seems to have precisely two modes: distant and aloof angel of the lord, and giant angry super big mad rage factory. That's not to say that nothing else exists, but rather that he struggles to display that due to his life of constant combat and being rewarded for behaving as a weapon ought to.

Gabriel is very used to being fawned over and adored, and this can be very clear at times, as his ire can be earned if he perceives he is being disrespected in some form or another and it doesn't really take a lot to get him from zero to one hundred. There is an underlying desire to also embody kinder aspects, as seen with his interactions with the ferryman, but these moments involve a lot of emotional work that Gabriel isn't accustomed to, and often attempts to display these kinder aspects are either short or clumsy, but no less earnest.

While being a stubborn, sometimes even spiteful piece of shit, growth and learning are not beyond Gabriel, and he's proven he is more than capable of self reflection and change. While he might not want to dig any deeper into his own actions and the impact they have had, it seems he isn't quite capable of totally ignoring it either, and perhaps the only thing keeping him from fully reckoning with the weight of his crimes is the fact that he's dying.

Which is fair, but considering the direction the game appears to be heading in, something that's not going to protect him from the consequences of his actions forever.

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