Angelic Abomination

"Be not afraid."

"The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands."

— Ezekiel 1:4-8, The Bible

Angels and other holy beings are often treated as human-like figures or beautiful. After all, they're usually forces of goodness and light. But not all angels are pretty; some look outright terrifying and not remotely human. They take the form of bizarre monsters, Sinister Geometry or even being so alien no man can understand or withstand them. Or maybe they still resemble humans, but their power and demeanor distinctly isn't.

This actually has a lot of basis to it. While this depiction wasn't universal in the original books and many angels in The Bible and related literature were depicted as close to human, there were quite a few Biblical angels described like this. Angels would often say "fear not" because their appearance and power were terrifying. The most notable example of this type of angel is in the Book of Ezekiel which portrays angels as Starfish Aliens, like flaming wheels with eyes and wings or as many faced humanoid but eldritch beings.

On the flip side, some like to claim that the common portrayal of angels as human-like is "inaccurate." This is actually false; there are plenty of depictions of angels in the Bible where they are described as looking like ordinary men. ^note Such as the angel the women encounter at Jesus' tomb: "a young man... clothed in a white robe." In fact, there are more passages describing them as looking like normal people than otherwise. What is inaccurate is the depiction of angels as "humans with wings." In the Bible, angels are either entirely human or entirely un-human; if it's got wings, it's also got multiple faces, is on fire, has animal hooves, etc. The popular image of angels as winged humans arose from classical artwork, where giving a character wings—white in Judaism and Christianity, multi-colored in Islam—was a very easy and immediate visual shorthand.

Often invokes Holy Is Not Safe, with the angels being dangerous due to their sheer power and being on a higher plane from us Puny Earthlings. Despite the appearance, these angels can still be good, especially if God Is Good. Though if they're evil or if God Is Evil expect this to be more common.

A sub-trope of Eldritch Abomination and Our Angels Are Different. Has a surprising amount of crossover with Angelic Beauty despite them theoretically being opposing tropes - including elements of classical beauty is how artists tend to indicate that this particular abomination is 'angelic' (usually also resulting in serious Fan Disservice). Not to be confused with One-Winged Angel, though many One Winged Angel forms can be these as well. See also Angels, Devils and Squid.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• After God: Ahu'az, the Rooster IPO, looks like a massive pillar of wings, and presents himself as a cult leader.
• A recurring motif in Angel Sanctuary:
  • Sandalphon's true form is that of a giant infant's head with six eye-studded wings. Even when he manifests through Metatron's body, he often suffers Glamour Failure and sprouts leech-like protrusion that end in fanged mouths with eyeballs inside.
  • After getting horrifically mangled in an explosion, Katan assumes the form of a shapeless lump of flesh and electric wires while he fights the effects of Rosiel's feather, which would restore him at the cost of his free will. He gives in to Rosiel and gets better.
  • Rosiel, the aptly-named Inorganic Angel himself was originally a lump of flesh and electric wires, and only got a humanoid form by slowly cannibalising his own twin sister Alexiel, the Organic Angel. His obsession with beauty and glamour is rooted in his insecurities about his monstrous true self.
• Berserk: While the Godhand functions as Demon Lords and Archdevils, they are also considered angels in-universe, and serve what amounts to God. They are vastly powerful and almost omniscient Humanoid Abominations with control over causality, and serve as the Big Bad Duumvirate of the setting. And like the lesser Apostles, they were humans who became demons through a Deal with the Devil.
• Bleach: Some of the Sternritter participating in the Thousand-Year Blood War possess the Vollständig, One-Winged Angel forms that give them an angelic motif. While most are rather tame, some end up looking quite alien.
  • Quilge Opie possesses the Vollständig Piskiel, with Alternate Character Reading of "Justice of God". Piskiel initially just gives Quilge a Holy Halo, wings, and gauntlets, but after using Sklaverei on Ayon, he assimilates some monstrous features, such as bulking up one of his arms to the point of being as thick as his torso and placing Supernatural Gold Eyes on his wings.
  • As Nodt's Vollständig Tatarforas (with kanji reading "Fear of God") starts out far into Body Horror territory, looking like a bloated corpse, stitched up and surrounded with barbed wire.
    • A further transformation tears apart As's already transformed body to reveal a giant iteration of his pre-transformation body... but with a mass of tentacles at the waist, and everything above that looks to be falling to bits.
  • Lille Barro, chief of Yhwach's royal guard, possesses Jilliel {kanji reading "Judgement of God"), which resembles a strange seraphim, with eight wings, no arms, and a long, narrow body with stubby legs. After being subject to Your Head Asplode by Kyoraku's Bankai, Lille regenerates, gaining a long neck with an owl's head where his human head once was, regaining his arms, and growing out a second pair of legs. It takes Nanao's Shinken Hakkyoken to end the fight, taking away his angelic power and splitting him into a bunch of strange flamingo-like remnants.
  • Gerard Valkyrie's Vollständig, Aschetonig (kanji reading "Authority of God"), initially just gives him wings, tattoos, and a new helmet. Being wailed on by Hitsugaya, Zaraki, and Byakuya causes his Adaptive Ability to kick in, and eventually the three come face-to-face with Gerard, newly transformed into a gargantuan form seemingly composed entirely of spiritual light.
• Angel in Chainsaw Man is an angelic demon who's the Anthropomorphic Personification of mankind's fear of angels. As such he resembles an androgynous human but evokes a sense of Uncanny Valley in people due to his genuine but muted capacity for empathy, Dissonant Serenity, and unsettlingly beautiful appearance alongside a Touch of Death ability he can't control.
• Asuka from Dorohedoro can summon a creature called Angel that looks like a green, decayed human corpse with a Holy Halo. When fed something, he'll produce several duplicates through a hole in his chest. The duplicate food will cause any man who eats it to fall in love with Asuna and she uses this to run a pie shop.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Angels that the main characters fight are Ultraterrestrials with various strange forms, including kaijus, animal-like monsters and Sinister Geometry. They have inscrutable motives, have a massive AT-field and are some kind of alien bio-mechanical product of Neglectful Precursors. Kaworu turns out to be an angel, as do humanity.
• UQ Holder!: It still isn't clear exactly what the Mage of the Beginning is, but the form she assumed when she abandons her dying host to take over the next is a building-sized, twisted, creepy and eldritch angel-like goddess, mixing divine imagery with Lovecraftian aspects.

Comic Books

• DC Universe: Justice League Odyssey has "Para-Angels," a new form of Parademons with some new tricks. However, unlike Parademons, they are seemingly even more horrifying-looking, with too many eyes and no other facial features, though they manage to speak anyway with their line of "For Darkseid."
• Doctor Strange: Afterlife is an angel who is turned into a downright Gigeresque monstrosity by the pain he endures in the Realm Between. It’s a temporary condition, but notable nonetheless.
• Irredeemable: The Eleos, whose name is similar to "Elohim," have a true form that is too much for mortal minds to comprehend. They are also reality warpers who can easily beat up the Plutonian.
• Runaways: The Gibborim are angels, but they are also Omnicidal Maniacs who have been trying to bring about the end of all life on Earth.
• Supergod: Malak Al-Maut was created to be an angel by Iran, and even named for the Angel of Death. The destructive aura of his Walking Wasteland powers shows that without any free will, his "connection to god" only leaves him more prone to lead to horrific destruction than without it.
• The Spectre: Aztar, aka the Spectre, is the agent of God's Wrath, a ghostly angel that bonds to a human host. He's portrayed as a Horrifying Hero resembling a pale white man, who uses his Reality Warper abilities to punish evil-doers in the worst way possible.
• The Invisibles has Quimper, an angel who fell on Earth and was tortured until he became a deformed goblin Mind Virus.

Fan Fiction

• The Shape of the Nightmare to Come: The Star Father's "Angyls," Anti-Chaos Daemons of order that force the human inhabitants of their golden worlds to march in perfect unison until they expire.
• Stray Dog Records: In general, Caecilia is based off traditional angel imagery. She plays a bit with the trope by looking like a Winged Humanoid, something angels are most often portrayed as. It being noted that she has another pair of wings reflects the biblical note of angels having three pairs of wings ^note One to hide their face, one to hide their feet and one to fly with. Her true appearance is far more monstrous, as her Doppel version shows. Made even more obvious as the way to 'let her out' in the sequel is closing eyes, folding hands in prayer and saying 'Fear not'.
• Light, Darkness and Paradox has Archangel Ranael, who has snakes for hair, a bundle of tentacles for a left arm, a Venus flytrap for a right arm and more tentacles in place of legs.

Films — Animation

• The Wood Sprite from Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio looks like a humanoid angel but has six sets of wings covered in eyes, similar to the biblical Seraphim. Adding to the Sprite's eldritch nature is the fact her sister is none other than Death itself, who also fits this archetype by resembling a lamassu.
• The Prince of Egypt: The Angel of Death. It appears from a vortex in the night sky as nothing more than a flowing mass of light, gliding silently through cities while killing all the firstborn of Egypt. The more it kills, the larger it seems to grow, as if feasting on their souls. When two Egyptian guards see it rise up before them, they abandon their post and flee in terror.
• The Angels in Time Masters superficially resemble winged humans, but that's only because the ones we see onscreen are assimilated humans. They are actually proxies for a shapeless, blobby mass of light, God, and behave essentially like zombies, either converting or killing planetary populations.

Films — Live-Action

• Hellboy II: The Golden Army: The Angel of Death. Or possibly AN Angel of Death, as she specifically states that she's "Hellboy's Death." To say that this angel is very weird is a massive understatement. Guillermo del Toro apparently based "her" on Mexican angel paintings which depict them as having eyes on the wings. Also doubles as a Dark Is Not Evil example as being at worst neutral and by having the wings colored black.
• In Krampus, the title character has a number of Living Toys as henchmen, and one of them is a Creepy Doll version of the kind of angel that might go on top of a Christmas tree. The design of all the toy monsters suggests they could all have organic components as well, making it unclear whether they are Mechanical Abomination, cyborgs, or fully organic creatures in gruesome, toy-themed armour.
• In Noah, they all start out as glowy wispy beings literally made of light, but the ones we see were encased in stone as punishment for helping humanity by teaching them technology and other things they were not ready to know yet and were supposed to discover on their own. They pretty much became six armed rock people that look nothing like commonly known portrayals of angels.
• Nope: After being wounded by the barbed wire it was tricked into swallowing up, Jean Jacket unfolds itself into its true form, which is reminiscent of a biblical angel.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: At the end, something that might be this trope emerges from the Ark of the Covenant when the Nazis open it. At first, they are awestruck by the beauty of the wisp-like entities and their feminine faces, but then the main angel's face warps into a Ghostly Gape, the Nazis scream in terror, and everything gets very scary, very fast.
  Indy: Don't look at it!

Literature

• Accel World: Metatron has ten legs, four "wings" that look like rows of unconnected fins, a body made out of layered rings, a long tail ending in a beak-like structure, a spherical head that spits lasers and drills, and a horn that transforms into a different creature if the body is destroyed. And is usually transparent. When Haru tries to get his allies to aim for the forehead, Niko first has to ask where that even is. She also has a bizarre morality to her.
• The Boy with the Chainsaw Heart: The angels are massive mechanical creatures bristling with wings and armaments.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Archangels can destroy the entire Earth, manipulate all the stars in the universe with Astro in Hand and cause reality-warping disasters merely by trying to go back to Heaven. They are also physically incapable of not trying to return to Heaven, meaning that if someone doesn't find a way to get them back easily, they will nuke a country in their re-ascension.
  • The unspeakably powerful, dangerous, and nigh-unknowable Archangels are the proper, stable angels. The Science side is trying to make artificial angels for a variety of purposes, and the results are... messy. They tend to look like overgrown, cancerous monsters, and they're usually screaming in pain from whatever terrible thing created them. For the humans (and human-like entities) who can become angels, almost all will lose their human minds forever at roughly the halfway point, and once they reach their full power their ascension will nuke a country, just as a natural angel's would.
• Empress Theresa: Hal is a ball of pure white light that is for all intents a stand in for the Holy Spirit... that also happens to be an alien and "not made of matter or energy".
• The Fallen:
  • End of Days has Wormwood, the Angel of Destruction, also known as the Abomination of Desolation. Essentially an angelic Beast of the Apocalypse, it is described as a giant of an angel hanging in place similar to a "fetus suspended in the womb" with its enormous wings furled upon its back, clad in armor covered in sigils of ending. If its sword strikes the earth, the world will be cut off from Heaven so as to prevent an invasion of evil upon the Pearly Gates.
  • End of Days and Armageddon also introduce the Architects and their leader the Overseer, both ostensibly angelic beings that came before angels as God's first creations, dedicated to absolute order and perfection. Architects look like "globes of golden fire covered in multiple sets of staring, all-seeing eyes." In terms of the Overseer, it has developed a pretty potent A God Am I mentality, and toward the conclusion takes a new form of an enormous humanoid figure with multiple sets of wings covered in a rainbow of eyes, along with a single orb glowing from beneath a hooded scarlet robe.
  • As shown in Armageddon, cherubim that guard the gates of Heaven have the Biblical chimerical appearance.
• His Dark Materials: Angels aren't really divine higher powers (though they like to tell you they are)! They're actually self-aware incarnations of the Applied Phlebotinum. They can either just spring into existence or, a ghost, with the help of another angel, can rise to angelic status. They die, have immeasurably long lifespans, and envy humans for our bodies — angels have no real bodies, so they cannot experience real sensations. They have a power hierarchy. In the books, the lower-ranked ones are nearly invisible (in daylight), with the higher-ranks appearing like winged humans, but this is simply because human minds have trouble processing their true appearance. One character takes a while to scrutinize their appearance, and with effort, is able to get a better look at them. Their real forms are described as being somewhat like architecture.
• I, Lucifer: Angels are not winged humanoids but rather celestial beings of metaphysical energy. Angels suffer from pain if they commit evil acts (Angelic Pain), as well as corrupt their essence. This means demons are technically still Angels but are constantly consumed with unimaginable pain and their visage is a horrific reflection of their nature.
• Overlord (2012):
  • Victim looks like a meter-long fetus with a halo and featherless wings.
  • Downplayed with Archangel Flame, Principality Observation and Dominion Authority, the angels summoned by the Slane Theocracy. None are terrifying per se, and all have a shiny and pristine look to them, but none of them have any recognizable human features nonetheless. Principality Observation◊ could conceivably pass for a human in armor, but Archangel Flame◊ looks like some kind of mech suit, and Dominion Authority◊, probably the most eldritch of the lot, is an only vaguely humanoid mess of white wings that has only the vaguest resemblance of a head at all, and nothing resembling a face whatsoever.
• Pact: Angels are adherents of order, not necessarily benevolence, and, if Faysal Anwar is any indication, they tend to take on more comprehensible forms when dealing with mortals, but can possess them if needed. When Blake Thorbum sees Faysal Anwar's true form he describes it as impossible to look at it due to space distorting around it.
• A Practical Guide to Evil: Angels look almost as horrific as demons, and those who meet angels are warped to reflect the angel's nature.
• The Space Trilogy: The eldila (of which angels are a sub-caste) from Perelandra are portrayed as Eldritch Abomination Energy Beings akin to angels in the Book of Ezekiel. It's pointed out that meeting a good eldil is even worse than meeting a bad one. When faced with evil, one can still hope for the good to save you, but what do you do when a good eldil is still terrifying?
• Most angels in Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet;
  • The Mrs W's from A Wrinkle in Time are ancient Humanoid Abominations that can take a different shape depending what planet they're on.
  • Proginoskes from A Wind in the Door is a cherubim with hundreds of constantly moving wings, several different eyes and jets of smoke.
• In the Hellboy novel On Earth As It Is In Hell by Brian Hodge, Seraphim (angels) can be summoned by anyone for any purpose, as long as it involves destruction. Hellboy says they are described in scripture as "Heaven's stormtroopers." One of the renegade priests who has seen them describes them as beautiful, but "incomplete" — no more and no less than the purest manifestation of God's wrath.

Live-Action TV

• Dominion: The weak "Eight Ball" angels are indistinguishable from demons, having no physical form and requiring human hosts to manifest.
• Doctor Who: The Weeping Angels are alien beings that resemble angel statues, who send people back in time to feed off the time energy of the life they could've had. They can reproduce through ideas, are quantum-locked into statues if observed, and are so ancient and alien that not even the Time Lords know what exactly they are, calling them "the Weeping Angels of old" (when the Time Lords call something old, it's significant). It's unclear however if they're anything like traditional angels, or if they're just taking the form of a generic angel for some reason.
• Supernatural: While angels in Supernatural look like normal people, that's only because they are inhabiting human hosts. The true form of angels will cripple or straight up kill anyone who witnesses it except for their true vessel. Dean once mocked the Jerkass angel Zachariah for resembling his unattractive human host when they tried to sneak into the Garden of Heaven.
  Zachariah: In Heaven I have six wings and four faces, one of which is a lion. You see this because you're... limited.
• Played with in Midnight Mass (2021): The impetus of the plot is a monsignor taking a winged vampire as an angel. Many parallels are made between Catholic ritual and vampire lore.
• In The X-Files fifth season episode "All Souls" Scully sees a horrifying vision of a seraph which has been depicted as a dark, ominous figure throughout the episode; its head rotates, alternately revealing faces of a man, eagle, lion, and ox. This is drawn from original angelic depictions in the bible.

Myths

• Gnosticism: The Demiurge's Archons have You Cannot Grasp the True Form, with said true forms being mind-numbingly horrifying (and one of them being a solar deity). They also eat human souls and may be aspects of the Demiurge.

Religion

• The Bible: While most angels are depicted as looking like men, they can occasionally be this trope as well (as pointed out in the trope description, their standard greeting is some variation of "do not be afraid" for a reason):
  • Book of Isaiah: The seraphim (translates to either "Serpent" or "Burning", sources vary) are six-winged beings of fire, who use four of those wings to cover themselves up. The reason? Their light and heat is so brilliant it would kill anyone close to them. Fortunately they spend their time praising God. Though some say the reason they cover their eyes is so they don't look directly at God which would kill them. (Isaiah only survives seeing God because a Seraph purifies him with a coal from the altar).
  • Book of Ezekiel: Two types of angel, the cherubim and ophanim, are introduced here. Despite their portrayal as winged babies in common depictions (which was taken off the Greek putti), cherubs have four faces (an ox, lion, eagle and man) with two pairs of wings. Ophanim are interlocking winged wheels, and always on fire. Both of them have eyes all across their bodies.
  • Even the angels that do look like men typically fall under the Humanoid Abomination category—those who witnessed them in a human guise tended to notice that there was something off about them, but didn't figure out what exactly until the angels revealed their true identities. Even humanoid angels often glow brightly if they aren't flat out made of fire.
• During the trial of Joan of Arc, one of her interrogators remarked that the angels depicted on Joan's banner were painted with arms, feet, legs, and clothing. He asked whether she had the angels depicted in the same manner in which they appeared to her. Joan responded, "No, I had them painted in the way they are painted in the churches." Upon being asked whether she had ever seen her angels in such a form (i.e. in human form), Joan simply responded, "I will tell you nothing more."
• Islam:
  • Islam mostly shares the other Abrahamic faiths' description of eldritch and alien angels in their true form. According to one description of his true form, Azrael, the angel of death in Judeo-Islamic angelology, is described as a four-faced, four thousand winged, enormous angel covered in eyeballs and tongues corresponding to the number of humans alive at the moment. And yes, they appear and disappear when humans die or are born. It's a good thing that angels usually appear as handsome men. Speaking of which, there's an Islamic tradition that tells of Abraham asking Azrael to see how he appears when taking a human soul at the time of death. Though he warned Abraham that he would be disturbed, Azrael proceeds to show him the form he takes when taking a good or bad soul. A good soul sees a handsome young man while a bad soul sees a horrific pitch-black giant covered in flames, but whichever the case, the sight was so terrifying it made Abraham faint.
  • Archangel Gabriel, who first revealed The Qur'an to Prophet Muhammad, also has shades of this. While Gabriel's physical appearance is not elaborated on, the text makes it clear that he was quite forceful with the Prophet. One can even interpret the Prophet's reaction to the initial sight of Gabriel as a Heroic BSoD.

Roleplay

• Embers in the Dusk: A good number of Tjapa's daemons. The flaming wheel with eyes all over the place is brought up as an example of what an angel might look like.
• Shadows over the South: Sigurðr "Sig" Thorrirson, a.k.a. Malakh ha-Mavet, is one of the Fallen who has an Apocalyptic Form that is a six-winged, chain-bound, blood-dripping horror with Extra Eyes.
• World War X: Samyaza is a horrendous abomination with five faces and wings covered with dozens of eyes.

Tabletop Games

• Chronicles of Darkness:
  • Demon: The Descent: Angels of the God-Machine are more programs brought up by it than traditional nice looking angels, and can appear in a multitude of different forms, from humanoid to animalistic or anything in between. Coming into contact with them can render humans Stigmatics.
  • Mage: The Awakening: Angels of the Supernal Realm of Aether are close to the Biblical version of angels. Their manifestations are uniformly striking, beautiful, and alien. Whirlwinds of fire or peacock fans of burning eyes are as common as winged humanoids, androgynous and unearthly.
  • Promethean: The Created: The qashmallim. Despite the fact that the books make it very clear that they are not angels, they can take any number of forms (including Biblical-style renditions such as a man with four faces or a flaming chariot), they have powers that are Biblical in scope (such as calling down a rain of fire or turning a human into a pillar of salt), and they're made of the "Divine Fire" that powers the universe and act in service of a guiding force known as "the Principle." Just to be confusing, the books also make it very clear in some points that they are angels. Sometimes in the same sentence.
• In Nomine:
  • The Seraphim (serpents with six eyes and six feathered wings), Ofanim (constantly spinning wheels of flame), and Kyriotates (a whirling cloud of limbs and body parts) all fit the bill.
  • Malakim do not fall. Which means that they can take so much Discord that they become "Dark Malakim", warped things that distort the Symphony around themselves on account of being something that is neither angel nor demon and thereby so utterly abhorrent that they warp the Symphony (reality) by their mere existence. They also steal the Essence of others. (This is only presented in blog post speculation by the creator, and is not an official part of the game line's sourcebooks.)
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Brisela, Voice Of Nightmares, the mutated combination of Bruna and Gisela of Innistrad, keeps an angelic typing despite being transformed into a servant of the Eldrazi.
  • This is what the completed Angels of New Phyrexia have become. These once beautiful metal-winged Angels (no, the metal isn't the abominable part since on all life on the plane has metal parts with one exception) are now as monstrous as any Phyrexian. While still keeping the angelic typing.
  • Kyodai from Kamigawa (based on Japanese Mythology) is not technically an angel, but fills a similar role, being the benevolent Top God. She also looks like a dragon made entirely of human arms and creepy porcelain masks.
• Pathfinder: Iophanite angels are miniature versions of the biblical ophanim, resembling flying burning wheels. They are, however, Lawful Good and generally pretty friendly.

Video Games

• Astral Chain: Jena Anderson takes up this kind of form in her two One-Winged Angel examples after drinking a vial of Blue Evolve. The first has white armor, a metallic halo, a pair of metallic wings with six Feather Flechettes each that can fire purple lasers, and a helmet that is also white, covering her eyes. The second form has her original body (minus the wings) chained up (unwillingly) by its arms within a new, larger one that otherwise looks very similar, albeit minus a new head and with four instead of six blades on the wings, along with two enormous arms, the entire thing seemingly having its own gravitational pull.
• Bayonetta: The angels of Paradiso are anything but friendly-looking. Angels are depicted in all manner of shapes and sizes; human-sized winged soldiers, giant hulking baby-faced brutes, angelic automobiles, horrific abominations with writhing tentacles with multiple heads and upside down faces. Almost all of them are depicted with angelic white wings and a Gold and White Are Divine motif, but as they take damage the facade chips away and exposes bloody musculature and glistening organs. The developers actually used the depictions of angels from the Bible as inspiration for how they should look.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: Twisted Alice is a human who was merged with an angelic cartoon character after being exposed to the ink from the titular Ink Machine. Half her face has melted, exposing her teeth and an empty eye socket. Her halo has melted into her head and sticks up at an angle.
• The Binding of Isaac: Repentance gives us Dogma. Like all major bosses faced in the game, it is a symbolic representation of something within Isaac's traumatized mind, in this case, the deranged televangelical sermons that turned his mother into an abusive monster. It goes through numerous forms as Isaac struggles against it, among them almost-Biblically accurate angels. Almost, except for the part where they are made of television static and rant horrifying fire-and-brimstone sermons.
• Dark Souls II features the Darklurker, a mysterious, angelic being that appears out of nowhere in the middle of a mostly-empty realm of darkness who the game actively refuses to explain anything about, with a soul description that only reads "Perhaps it's better that some mysteries remain unilluminated." The only hints as to what it may become from next game in the backstory of the in-game religion related to the below-mentioned angels.
• In Dark Souls III: The Ringed City, angels are parasitic entities tied to larvae attached to the bodies of certain Londor pilgrims. They may use light magic, but they are in no way good.
• Digimon: Lucemon is an angel Digimon resembling a young child with six white wings, and his evolved form trades in half the wings for demon wings — fairly standard. His further evolved forms, however, are much more horrific — Lucemon Satan Mode is a titanic draconic monster with a metal plate bolted over its face and the glowing emblems of the Seven Deadly Sins hovering around its body, while Lucemon Larva — supposedly Lucemon's truest form — is an alien, semi-transparent embryo-like creature with multiple thin wings attached to its back.
• Doom Eternal: Fitting for the series, the Makyrs of Urdak, represented by their leader the Khan Maykr, look quite disturbing, and not too far removed in appearance from the Legions of Hell. They function as a Hive Mind with the Khan Maykr as their Hive Queen, lacking the will to act against her with the exception of extraordinary circumstances, and have become just as much a threat to Earth as the demons due to the Khan Maykr's deal with the Dark Lord, which allows the Maykrs to draw upon the energy of Hell's victims to stave off Transfiguration in exchange for handing over worlds and entire peoples for Hell to ravage when the Maykrs deem that it is "their time to give penance".
• Dungeon Crawl has Cherubim, described as having heads with four faces, and Ophanim, wheels within wheels that are both covered with eyes. Both are among the extensive list of holy creatures.
• Dwarf Fortress: Even outside of "Assistant" angels, the angels can be associated with various spheres, with their appearance ranging from utterly vile to outright bizarre accordingly. Much like nearly anything else, they aren't friendly.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Angels are even more otherworldly than demons, since while the latter usually have comprehensible bestiary descriptions and skill names, the former often have glitchy descriptions and skill names. Additionally, they often appear in grotesque forms because they are almost never summoned properly. Of note is Virgo, who swapped her demonhood with Asterisk's angelhood, yet retains the properties of both angels and demons.
• Elden Ring: The Elden Beast is the physical avatar of the Elden Ring itself, vaguely resembling a translucent dragon with multiple tree branch-like wings and a Celestial Body with a visible glowing gold nervous system similar to the Laniakea Supercluster, lacking a discernible head. Despite its alien form, there is definitely an ethereal, almost divine aura from this creature made of stars. As a servant of the Greater Will, it also plays out that angelic part as being a servant and messenger to a higher being.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series' Dragons are Aedric entities (the "Angels" to the Daedric "Devils" and Sithis "Squid"), with divine immortal souls, who are said to be the children of Akatosh, the draconic god of Time and Top God of the Nine Divines pantheon. Like a classic western dragon, they are massive reptilian beasts with bat-like wings and slender extremities, tipped by razor sharp talons. Dragons are highly intelligent and possess an inherent affinity for magic, best evidenced by their mastery over the "Thu'um", the ability to channel magical energy through words and warp reality. Their physical forms are Ageless, and while any being of sufficient ability can slay them, Dragons possess Resurrective Immortality and can only be truly killed by another "Dov" (a fellow dragon or Dragonborn) who can absorb their soul. According to some theories, they aren't so much the "children" of Akatosh as fragments of his very being.
  • Morihaus, the legendary "Man-Bull" who aided St. Alessia in her slave revolt against the Ayleid Empire, was said to be the Aedric demi-god son of Kyne (aka Kynareth), one of the Nine Divines. He is described as a "winged man-bull", and had a nose hoop to go with the moniker. It is said that he was able to shake the entirety of the massive White-Gold Tower in Cyrodiil with his Horn Attack. He became Alessia's consort and their progeny become the first Minotaur.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • At the Nibel Reactor, Jenova's container is covered by a metal effigy which resembles the torso of an angel, with "wings" (industrial tubing) obscuring the rest of the container. Connected to the ceiling are cables bearing the appearance of golden hair. When Sephiroth arrives to free her, he poses like Christ and says he's taking her to the Promised Land. Jenova is actually an extraterrestrial virus capable of mutating and controlling the minds of infectees, and she's described as having already destroyed countless other worlds this way before arriving on Gaia 2,000 years ago.
    • For the Final Boss fight, Sephiroth himself uses both Jenova's mutagenic cells and the power of the planet to transform into two angelic forms. Both have weird misshapen wings among other freaky deformities, and the second is the Trope Namer for One-Winged Angel.
  • Necron from Final Fantasy IX has two stone structures resembling twisted angelic wings on its back along with halo-like structures surrounding its Sculpted Physique. It is also the living embodiment of death and despair that resides in a realm at the center of creation, making it the setting's equivalent of an "Angel of Death."
  • Zodiark's adult form in Final Fantasy XII, which can be seen during his Limit Break, Final Eclipse. It's basically serpent connected to big inverted ornamental U-shape from which it grows 12 even bigger wings. It keeps this form in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings.
  • The fal'Cie from Final Fantasy XIII are divine beings created by the gods that also created mankind and Cocoon with the express purpose of keeping the world on its axis (literally and figuratively). They have various machine-like characteristics and come in a variety of unusual forms, ranging from humanoid to incomprehensible.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: In the Shadowbringers expansion, the sin eaters of the First, a world nearly consumed in a flood of heavenly light, are very similar to Bayonetta's angels. They're gold and white, many have multiple feathered wings, and come in all shapes and sizes, from humanoid to animalistic. They're also near-mindless monsters who exist only to kill and convert living beings into new sin eaters, infecting them with an imbalance of light-aspected aether that slowly renders them mute and emotionless, their skin becoming hard and white like plaster, until they're overcome by a final, horrifically painful transformation.
• Heroes of the Storm has an "angelic" skin for Diablo. This "Archangel Diablo," as the tooltip says, brings a whole new meaning to "holy terror".
• Fate/Grand Order: Charlotte Corday, the "Angel of Assassination," is accompanied by a small, golden bell-like being that is referred to as an angel, but looks in no way humanoid. In its third ascension, it gains a big-lipped, grinning mouth and tongue.
• Kingdom Hearts: End of the World introduces Angel Star Heartless. That's right, Heartless with big, white wings and halos, using the light-based spell "Holy." They are still evil and trying to devour your hearts though. True to the trope, they don't look remotely humanoid.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards: The True Final Boss of the game is 0², an upgraded and even more terrifying version of Zero from Kirby's Dream Land 3, with a golden halo and red-and-white crystal wings. Its battle theme uses an Ethereal Choir and, as heavily implied in Kirby Star Allies, it is only a small but unholy offshoot of a far more powerful entity.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land: The Big Bad's ultimate form, Fecto Elfilis, is a brightly colored, winged alien wielding a spear. They're fought at sunrise atop the futuristic city near the abandoned Lab Discovera, and their battle theme includes such "holy" instruments as a pipe organ and an ethereal One-Woman Wail.
  • Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe: The Final Boss of "Magolor Epilogue" is the Master Crown manifested as a giant tree after absorbing the giant Gem Apple Magolor collected. The angelic connections come from its leafy wings, branches in the shape of a large halo, and referencing the Book of Genesis by being an apple tree powered by an evil force that corrupts any who seek it.
• Monolith: The eponymous Hard difficulty True Final Boss has flaming wings and a white chassis that allow it to give off this image.
• Ōkami: The "Fire Eye," a mook that consists of a flaming wheel with multiple eyes on its rim and one big eye in the center, heavily resemble descriptions of Ophanim, the bizarre flaming wheel angels connected to Cherubim. This is probably completely unintentional, as it takes inspiration from a Japanese Youkai like most enemies.
• Persona 5: Yaldabaoth's true form is a towering angelic robot with multiple limbs, four of which are equipped with a sword, a book, a bell, and a gun instead of hands. His halo is a ring of smaller golden angelic wings which covers his head when disguised as the Holy Grail.
• The Secret World: members of the Host normally look completely human, with perhaps the odd Red Right Hand here and there. Eblis, on the other hand, sports perfectly-smooth white skin, an Eyeless Face, no genitals, and a body that's several feet taller than the player characters and covered in dozens of glowing tattoos; for good measure, he can manifest six wings of pure energy, and his first appearance features him bringing a colossal sandstorm with him. It's not established if this is some kind of mutilation caused by his exile from the Host, or if this is due to Glamor Failure — and this is what all members of the Host secretly look like.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: Archangels have received a significant redesign from their usual Winged Humanoid look, resembling large heads in the middle of mechanized bodies with coral-shaped limbs. Michael and especially the second form of Merkabah are even worse than that.
• Silent Hill 3: Valtiel appears to be the closest thing to a physical angel in Silent Hill, on account of the association with the God and Metatron, but remains a Humanoid Abomination regardless. His head vibrates and twitches rapidly, obscuring his facial features; although there are not many features to behold, as his face is The Blank and leathery, with a series of crude stitches where his mouth should be.
• Stella Glow: As revealed much later in the game, Mother Qualia turns out to be the true Big Bad of the story, not Hilda who is actually Good All Along, and the angels that appear in early chapters to help Alto and his friends during battle turn out to be evil. They also have a surreal, eerily abstract appearance, and their voice is also foreboding.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: The Big Bad of the game is Galeem, an angelic entity made of wings with a glowing orb in the center. It introduces itself by destroying the entire universe (bar Kirby) to recreate it and impose its perfect order. Its rival, Dharkon, isn't any better.
• In Water Womb World, the protagonist encounters what he believes to be an angel at the bottom of the ocean outside his submersible after his lights suddenly go out. The "angel" looks like some combination of a robed bishop and a giant squid, makes whale-like sounds, and beseeches the protagonist to either turn back, let Eden's secrets lie and "die as a man", or travel deeper and "join God in full-flesh."
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Naaru are creatures described as the Holy Light given form, consisting of symmetrically arranged weird-shaped crystals floating around a central "heart". They communicate telepathically, causing pleasant chime sounds to echo in the minds of those they relay messages to. They have a mission to recruit the "Army of the Light" that is to fight against the Burning Legion. While most Naaru are generally benevolent, their leader, the Prime Naaru Xe'ra, is a Scary Dogmatic Alien who would convert beings to the light even against their will.
  • Nathrezim are demons, a cross between your typical Looks Like Orlok vampire and a Big Red Devil. Then there's Lothraxion, who is a Nathrezim infused with the Light as sort of an Ascended Demon. He is benevolent, if somewhat fanatical, but doesn't look any less monstrous than his demonic brethren.

Visual Novels

• We Know the Devil: Venus' devil form has an eldritch angelic appearance, with feathered wings covered in eyes and giving off a suffocating light.
  She has eyes to fly with and wings to see. As terrible as an angel, be afraid. That wing to see the truth and that eye to lay it bare.

Web Animation

• Hazbin Hotel: The angels we see dealing with hell's Overpopulation Crisis are known as Exorcists, they are silvery-skinned humanoids with white wings, notched halos, horns and glitching holographic faces with Slasher Smiles. They also have weapons that are capable of killing the otherwise immortal demons.
  • Word of God (heh) has it that the rest of the angels (besides the cherubs, who resemble their pop culture counterparts and look like they came from a Disney movie) will look as alien and eldritch as they appear in the Bible.

Webcomics

• In Gunnerkrigg Court, Kat is referred to as an angel by the Court's robots, and her form within the ether appears to be either influenced by the way they think of her, or what they see when they look at her. Either way, humans find it terrifying. This is how she looks, and regardless of the view distance it's always too big for the whole thing to fit on panel.
• Homestuck:
  • Angels are large, limbless dragon-like beings with avian wings. They appear to have had Eridan Driven to Madness, and seem to be counterparts to Horrorterrors.
  • There's also the Cherubs, aliens that resemble (and are named after a type of ) angels - they are powerful creature capable of independent interstellar flight through their white wings, and have a strict Black-and-White Morality - as in, Cherubs can only be totally good protectors of planets OR completely evil world destroyers - and that's not even getting into their mating process, in which two Cherubs of opposing moralities will inevitably encounter, transform into serpentine forms millions of kilometers long and duel within black holes untill one of them is defeated, at which point the defeated is fertilized while the victor claims the loser's territory.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Angels are immortal beings of divine Law and cold white flame. Some, like White Chain, spend enough time around mortals that their spiritual forms come to look humanoid; those that spend their time in the Void look like tangles of wings and eyes, flaming headless sphynxes, abstract geometric figures, and weirder.
• Sarilho: Miguel, the Foreigner, is called angel by different people as he is seen as some sort of non-human entity that crashed from the heavens... And makes itself perceived like this.

Web Original

• The Fear Mythos: The Archangel, fear of religion and religious dogma among other things such as being a bastardized form of the afterlife itself, has no physical form of its own that people can comprehend, and so reduces itself to human forms for convenience. It isn't benevolent in any way.
• SCP Foundation: A lot of the SCPs that resemble or are angels are treated as this, unsurprisingly for the setting:
  • Dr Clef's proposal for SCP-001, the Gate Guardian, is Archangel Jophiel, a colossal being with a Flaming Sword hotter than the sun and can completely remove something from existence with it. It's so powerful even Able doesn't want to go near it. Fortunately the Gate Guardian is passive and spends most of the time guarding the Garden of Eden...until it moves.
  • SCP-469 (Many-Winged Angel) resembles the common depiction of angels, just with a lot more wings. It absorbs sound by causing people to scream in pain through a potent neurotoxin and has stinger-like wings. It does something truly horrifying if it hears a bell ring.

Web Video

• Economy Watch: The overarching antagonist of Season 2 is revealed in the finale, "It's An Economic Snowfall" - the Econiangel. The Econiangel takes inspiration from biblically accurate angels.

Western Animation

• Raava in The Legend of Korra may be the light spirit, but she looks like a giant flatworm. Moreover, she is almost indistinguishable from the dark spirit Vaatu.
• Most angels in Dead End: Paranormal Park may look pretty simple but then there’s Fingers who is literally a talking hand on an endless arm. Turns out he’s only part of a larger entity called Pael which can only be described as some sort of blank humanoid.

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