TV Series - Angel/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
ENTP
Spoiler Warning
“If we could live without passion, maybe we’d truly know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and Dank. Without passion, we’d truly be dead.”
Who is Angelus?
Angelus is best described simply by clarifying the context of the quote above. He's talking about murder. And how much he enjoys it; sees it as an artform. He is known as the most sadistic and brutal vampire in history and relishes the slow-building torment of his victims perhaps even more than the kill itself.
Why do I love Angelus as a character?
There are few characters who are so unapologetically evil without coming off as hammy or moustache-twirling 'evil for the sake of evil'. Angelus is evil just as a byproduct of what he enjoys. His 'passion'. He's a predator and people are his prey. Our collective moral values merely clash with his performances. Just look at the sheer theatricality on display when he finally kills Giles' girlfriend Jenny after making such a meal of terrorising her for a while beforehand.
He is charismatic and fun to watch... sometimes. There are also times he's so cruel it cuts a little too close to the bone because he's just so adept at psychological torture. Like when he temporarily convinces Buffy that 'Angel' was a lie, rather than his alter-ego, and that was just a role he was playing to get her into bed.
Typing Angelus
It's funny, you'd expect that Angelus would be Angel's shadow, but he actually isn't. Instead he's Angel's 'False Self'. Or perhaps more accurately, Liam's False Self. Liam was Angel's pre-vampirism personality. An ordinary Irish lad under the thumb of his domineering, holier-than-thou religious father.
To fully explain, I need to briefly go over an idea called the 4 Sides of the Mind. As simply as possible, the Inferior, the Nemesis, and the Demon functions act as 'gateways' into approximating other personality types. These also happen to be the same functions as my Counter-balance points. For example, I as an INFJ have - in a metaphorical sense - an ESTP, an ENFP and an ISTJ within me.
The ESTP would be my False Self because it is the aspirational aspect of the Inferior function. That is to say, the Inferior aspires to be more like an Se Hero, in my case, to counteract the certain insecurities that stem from Se inferior. But specifically the ESTP, not ESFP, even though both are Se Hero, because INFJ and ESTP share the same ego functions, but reversed, so: [Ni-Fe-Ti-Se] becomes [Se-Ti-Fe-Ni]. The False Self is who we wish we were because we haven't accepted who we are. Thus it is very rarely a healthy representation of the type it is imitating. Angelus is this idea taken to the extreme.
In Angel/Liam's case, ISFJ [Si-Fe-Ti-Ne] aspires to ENTP [Ne-Ti-Fe-Si]. Angelus is Liam - who was already something of a hedonist to escape his home life - without inhibition, and without a soul. This is made further evident by the way newly-souled Angelus/Liam still wanted to be as brutal and malevolent and stay with Darla/Drusilla/Spike but was suddenly encumbered by remorse. He was still a far cry from Angel at that point.
I'm only going to cover Angelus' ego functions and none of the dynamics because he isn't even technically a character in his own right.
Extraverted Intuition (Hero)
Angelus is creatively evil, as we see from the way he leads Giles to believe Jenny is still alive and is about to find a romantic scene to make the realisation even more knife-twisting. He is also keenly interested in creating the possibility of other sources of malicious pain and destruction, evidenced by his 'cultivation' of Drusilla, another nightmare in her own right. And his siring of Spike and attempts to take him under his wing as a protoge in the art of evil before their conflicting personalities get in the way (which, by the way, is completely accurate to type compatibility - ENTP and ISFP will clash all the damn time, and I have experienced this first-hand since my sister and mother respectively are this exact dynamic). He did so again much more successfully with Penn, who truly adopted his murderous artistry.
It is also through Ne that his theatricality is channeled. Almost all Ne doms present an exaggerated persona of some sort, it's there that the ENTP stereotype of the sardonic, debate-master 'troll' originates from. In real cases, it's often to divert attention away from their real selves beneath. In the case of Angelus, however, there is nothing beneath since he has no soul; he is the performance. He embodies his own artistry, it's one of the things that make him such a compelling villain.
Introverted Thinking (Parent)
Most evident in the way Angelus lies using the truth, often honing in on other characters hidden secrets or insecurities and manipulating them into terrifyingly effective weapons of psychological warfare. For example, when he returns in Angel season 4, ostensibly as part of the gang's plan to defeat an even greater threat, Angelus displays that even while caged he's not to be messed with.
As each of the team take turns with watching the caged monster, Angelus takes care in planting the seeds of conflict and discord amongst them, targeting Wesley with his insecurities, which are true, his infatuation with Fred, which is true. He paints vulgar pictures of Fred and Gunn's relationship, which is exaggerated truth. Then strikes with another truth bomb on the whole team by revealing Cordelia slept with Connor. Speaking of Connor, Angelus hits him with a secret truth he didn't know: that his mother staked herself in order for him to be born. Then he picks at the scab of Connor's adopted father's suicide.
Ti Parent often has a blunt 'truth or nothing' mentality to it. It will call out lies and half-truths and vague/implied truths regardless of the emotional consequences and will even find satisfation in doing so if it decides the situation calls for it. And Angelus uses this aspect to it's fullest.
Extraverted Feeling (Child)
In addition to the 'passion' of the performance for its own sake, there is something else that Angelus is driven by: emotional reactions. One of the key elements of Fe child is that it acts in order to get external emotional feedback of some kind, and that's Angelus' bread and butter. It's one of the reasons he puts in so much effort and thought into his 'art'.
In tandem with the points made in Ti, I want to look again at the way he toyed with Buffy's vulnerable 'school-girl' feelings for Angel. It wasn't a personal truth that he used to lie this time, but a societal one. He uses the truth that there are guys who will lie to girls to get sex and discard them afterwards in order to prey on Buffy's vulnerability with an almost meta-level awareness of a societal archetype and theme. Buffy potentially fit the role of the naive girl who would, in countless other replications of the theme (Ne), truthfully have encountered a painful and cynical reality (Ti), so Angelus simply had to play the corresponding societal archetype to cause a lot of pain (Fe).
Introverted Sensing (Inferior)
Angelus is never comfortable unless he orchestrating some new means of causing pain and misery. He's anarchistic, chaotic, and relishes in taking apart other people's comfort, often by attacking them through it. Like a sleepy town blissfully unaware it's about to be struck by a hurricane. He's the hurricane. And he loves it. Again, this is well showcased in the way he toys with Buffy and Giles respectively. He represents the antagonistic Ne-Si dynamic thematically, rather than in the psychology of his character, because Angelus isn't so much a character as he is a terrifying force of nature.
I want to emphasise that the writers were very unlikely to be consciously aware of any of this, and yet, by virtue of them being good writers, it happened to all fit this well anyway. Because art reflects reality. |
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