Female Angel, Male Demon

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"Angel VS Demon"

In any work featuring both angels and demons, most of the time the angel will be female (or at least more feminine or androgynous) and the demon will be male (or at least more masculine).

The primary reason for this is that angels are supposedly beautiful, refined, merciful and noble creatures, while demons (even if they are being portrayed as Affably Evil) are ugly, rude, crude, callous and mean. Traditionally, the former traits are considered feminine while the latter traits are considered masculine. All of this ignores the androgynous and sexless nature of angels, and that demons and angels were originally the same.

Often, even when an angel is portrayed as being male, he will still be played by a woman. Aversions generally seem to occur when heaven is represented as some kind of bureaucracy. When Played for Laughs, the relationship between the angels and demons will be portrayed as a friendly rivalry that inevitably leads to se... um... romance.

In the rare cases where the genders are inverted, the angel will be indeed more masculine than the usual standard but he will mostly be here to highlight that Good Is Not Nice and will often be cold and unemotional. The demoness, on the other hand, will mostly be a Slut, at best a Manipulative Bitch if non-sexualized, but she will seldom be portrayed as physically dangerous as her male counterpart. And don't expect any romance between them if they ever happen to be on "friendly" terms because My Girl Is Not a Slut.

Naturally, this trope often carries the Unfortunate Implication that women are good and men are evil. Additionally, it could be said that Wish Fulfillment may come into play as well when there's romance involved ie the classical - read overused - plot of a caring and merciful woman who redeems an evil man with love. And since the reverse doesn't exist in fiction, the message is clearly that a good man would never bother with redeeming an evil woman, or give her any time of the day to begin with. Or arguably, this is where All Men Are Perverts meets with if she ain't broke, don't fix her.

Notice Evil Sounds Deep.

Couple this trope with the above All Men Are Perverts and you get Horny Devils. Applicable to gender inversions as well, as said above.

A subtrope of Our Angels Are Different, Our Demons Are Different.

Examples of Female Angel, Male Demon include:

Anime and Manga

• Played straight in Black Butler with the male demon Sebastian and the female angel, Angela. That is, until near the end of the first season of the anime, when Ash, the Queen's butler/bodyguard is revealed to be Angela in male form - so it's really Hermaphroditic Angel Male Demon. The angels in this series are Knight Templar and so very, very Light Is Not Good.
• Go Nagai's Devilman had naked, beautiful hermaphrodite angels. Meanwhile the demons (who absorb the bodies of their victims to "evolve" into stronger forms) look like Darwin on LSD.
• Not played completely straight, but kind of in Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne. The angel Finn Fish is aligned with the God and supporting protagonist Maron, while antagonistic demon Noin is male. This is less the case in the anime, where a second female (and full-race, rather than formerly-human) demon named Myst was added. Beyond Finn and Noin, the male dark angel Access Time is also introduced from the very beginning, albeit also as an antagonist in a manner that reinforces the major implication behind the trope — male supernatural agents, angels or devils, tend to be working for the Devil, while female supernatural agents are working for God. Even this implication, so toyed with, completely breaks down once it's revealed that Finn is the actual fallen angel working for the Devil, while Access is actually an agent of God.
• The cosmology of Mnemosyne is similar to this: although men infected by time spores are referred to as "angels", they are much closer to the mindless, savage demon image, while immortal women tend to be refined and benevolent. Moreover, when Rin becomes the Yggdrasil Guardian and sprouts wings of her own, hers are much closer in appearance to classical pure-white angelic wings than the blood-red stubbled ones of the "angels" (though they are still pinkish-white, not pure white).
• Inverted in My Balls, the demons (including Satan) are Horny Devils. There are only two angels shown and both are male, Michael is an old man, and Gabriel is a Bishonen.
  • Actually there was a female angel shown in an omake chapter and Satan becomes an angel again in the end.
• The Angel and Devil from Nowhere Boy.
• This is averted in Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. It's female angels and female demons in this show.
• The front cover of the English translation of Pretty Face.
• In Violinist of Hameln, Hamel is a demon, after their father's side, while Sizer is an angel, after their mother's side.
• In Wish, the angels are specifically androgynous, but since Tokyopop decided that would be too hard to do in English, angels were all referred to with feminine pronouns and demons male ones, except for the demon catgirls. (And yes, the romance does indeed occur.)

Comic Books

• The title force of The Darkness always has a male host, who can create hordes of goblin-like creatures. On the other hand, its opposite number The Angelus is always female, and she and her creations appear angelic. Though we also get at least one female demon, and the male Legion of the Cherub Hostile.
• Marvel Comics' cosmic deities include Mistress Love and Master Hate, the living embodiments of their namesake dispositions whose appearances and temperaments play directly into this image.
• Inverted in Preacher (Comic Book), where Genesis is the offspring of a male angel and a female demon.
  • Arguably inverted again almost back again, as the angel proves to be a bit of an asshole and the demon seems a nicer entity.
• PS238's Captain Ersatz of Genesis, Malphast, has the same set of parents, taken even further. The two are Happily Married and Friendly Enemies of each other. When other mortals come into contact with them, they are about equally manipulative (not to mention both are good sports about the certainty that their better half will undoubtedly manipulate them in the other direction).
• Angela and Gabrielle in Spawn.

Fan Works

• Played with in Angel of the Bat. Cassandra Cain's new costume is designed off the more gentle, modern design of angels. The Seraphim borrow from their more classical, monstrous appearances. For what it's worth, Satan is often depicted as a Seraph.
• Pleyed with in The Bridge with the Nexuses of Magic. Harmony, the Nexus of Light Magic, is female. Grogar, the Nexus of Dark Magic, is male. Bagan from Terra is their equivalent in status and power and is genderless, but has a masculine-sounding voice.

Films — Animated

• Played with in The Book of Life; La Muerte and Xibalba are both Gods of the Dead, but while Xibalba is dark and menacing with black wings and skulls for pupils, La Muerte is much lighter and more appealing, as fits the bright, positive realm she rules over.

Films — Live-Action

• Subverted in the remake of Bedazzled. Satan is played by Elizabeth Hurley. She plays chess with a man implied to be God. The man appeared earlier as Elliot's cellmate.
  • Extra nice because while Elizabeth Hurley is sexy and plays up sexy a lot, she's not really a Horny Devil, but just using another form of manipulation (and Fanservice).
  • And at one point, she appears as a masculine devil, possibly implying that gender is not a big part of what God or the Devil are.
• In the Made-for-TV Movie Child of Darkness, Child of Light, the titular children turn out to be, respectively, a boy and a girl.
• In Constantine, the Archangel Gabriel is specifically portrayed as androgynous, but is portrayed by Tilda Swinton.
  • Lucifer, on the other hand, is undoubtedly male.
  • There are other angels in the film that are definitely male as well, such as that one paramedic and in a cut scene Shia Lebouef's character became one post-mortem.
• Averted in the Richard Burton Doctor Faustus where the Devil is played by Elizabeth Taylor.
• Sort of subverted in Dogma in that the angels (and the demons) are all androgynes... but they're all played by men. (Serendipity, played by the very female Salma Hayek, is also sexless... but Hayek is neither an angel nor a demon, but a Muse.)
  • God appears as both a man and a woman, as well.
• In Don't Tempt Me (originally titled Bendito Infierno), the two main characters are both female. It's later revealed that the demon is actually male, as part of his punishment in Hell was having to be a waitress there for many years.
• In Little Nicky, the title character's father is Satan and his mother an angel. All devils are humanoid males, demons are mostly humanoid males but occasionally monsters of ambiguous gender, and angels are Valley Girls.

Literature

• One of Tom Holt's books has a female angel (who's frankly kind of a bitch) and Oscar the demon (who's a bit...off). They get together in the end; this is why you should always listen to someone whose day job involves a bestselling Love Potion.
• The Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy by Laini Taylor has the rare inversion; a boy angel (or seraph)meets a girl demon (or chimaera) and they fall in love. Things haven't gone well for them so far.
• Inverted in The Dresden Files. The only angel we see is Uriel, portrayed by a man, and the primary demon (actually a fallen angel) is the female Lasciel. Uriel is Heaven's wetworks guy, probably the least 'masculine' of the primary angels (also featuring Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, the usual suspects). Lasciel, along with a number of other Fallen (such as Tessa), is terrifying and badass. They often do play up the sex gig, but it doesn't define their character. It's more zig-zagged than actually inverted, as per usual with Butcher's fantasy-kitchen-sink approach.
  • However, an Angel of Death appears female, and there are many male demons.
  • The Fae (and their queens, all six of them) generally avert this, but they do occasionally play this straight by taking any chance (or technique) to get a certain Chicago wizard on their side. The male nobles? They disguise themselves and lead him into a trap, than later join up and lead a cavalry charge against Harry.
• In Golden Dawn, the angel trapped in the crystal is definitely female, whilst the demons in the surrounding valley are of either gender.
• Good Omens gives us Crowley (demon) and Aziraphale (angel)... both of whom have taken male forms. Aziraphale, however, is written as the more effeminate of the pair. Of course, they get paired together.
  • It's mentioned that "[m]any people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong: Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort."
• In "The Second Summoning" by Tanya Huff, the first sex between the Keeper and the Hero calls an angel down from Heaven. As a counterbalance, a young female demoness is brought up from Hell. Eventually each of them becomes a "neutral" terrestrial — the angel is a cat familiar to another Keeper, the demoness is a normally-rebellious female teenager. They drift apart. The cat is a character in the third novel, "The Long Hot Summoning", and the ex-demoness is nowhere to be seen.
• In Seven Days for an Eternity, by Marc Lévy, God and Satan send each an agent to decide who should rule the earth: God sends Zofia, and Lucifer sends Lucas. Problem is, they didn't count on the Angel and the Demon to meet and fall in love.
• Inverted by Shakespeare in Sonnet 114:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing his purity with her foul pride...

• Your Orisons May Be Recorded by Laurie Penny is about a female angel working in Heaven's call centre, whose cubicle mate — following the merger — is a male demon.

Live Action TV

• One Charmed episode has two guardians of The Hollow, a female angel representing Good and a male demon representing Evil. Of course in this case, it only appears to be symbolic and both guardians are neutral, having dedicated their lives to preventing The Hollow from being released by either side.
• The Mystery Science Theater 3000 short "Out of This World" follows the trope, although the theology is rather sketchy.
• Averted/Inverted in Supernatural: Most of the angels we've seen have taken male humans as their hosts, and demons' hosts are more-or-less split 50/50. Demons are damned human souls hopelessly corrupted from centuries in Hell, and the humans they once were are, again, split between men and women. We don't know if angels have genders the way we think of gender, and haven't seen angels' true forms, but they're suggested to be in Eldritch Abomination territory.)
  • Inverted in the episode "Caged Heat" where the male angel Castiel gets French-kissed by a female demon. To be sure, the two of them have displayed UST signals long before that episode.
  • Played straight with Anna, who is the first female angel we see, and is probably the nicest (at first). There are more female angels besides her, but they tend to be either villainous (Naomi) or not featured enough for us to know much about their personalities (Hester and Rachel). Hannah seems to be breaking that pattern, as she's on Castiel's side and has gotten a decent amount of screen time.
• Inverted in the Tales from the Darkside episode "Let the Games Begin." A male angel and a female demon have a contest over a man's soul. They get together at the end of the episode.

Music

• Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Beethoven's Last Night" features the male demon Mephistopheles and a much more "angel-like" female — albeit not an angel, but the incarnation of Fate. And her son Twist is the same sort of being.
• Extreme metal bands that use the Soprano and Gravel, with the female vocalists doing soft vocals while the male ones do harsh vocals invoke this trope in a symbolic manner.

Mythology

• Ma'at and Apep in Egyptian Mythology.

Pinball

• In Junkyard, an angel and demon advise you on what junk to collect next.

Religion

• Averted in Christian tradition, where the angels are often believed to be all male. As the demons are fallen angels, they would be all male as well by default. Though in Roman Catholicism, the angels do have a Queen, the Virgin Mary replacing Satan as God's new second-in-command.

Tabletop Games

• Anima: Beyond Fantasy: All but one of the seven Beryls — godly spirits of light, named after archangels in the setting — are female, and all but one of the seven Shajads — godly spirits of darkness, opposite to the former and usually named after demons or devils — are male.
• Averted in Demon: The Fallen, where both sides were both genders. Granted, the demons started as angels. This is an Abrahamic world... to an extent.
• Subverted in Infernum where angels can be genderless or of either gender, while all demons except Malcubi are genderless. Also, there is no artwork of female angels in any of the rulebooks, and many female demons (some of which are Fan Disservice — such as one 'she-demon' that is basically a four-breasted wolf-woman with tentacles instead of legs).
  • Inverted by Riethii and Purity, a fallen angel and a succubus who fell in what passes for love in Hell before Purity killed Riethii for screwing up..
• In Magic: The Gathering, all angels are female (and usually clad in some type of Stripperiffic outfit), although this was one of the first notable appearances of female angels as warriors. Demons are usually so twisted and monstrous that questions of sex hardly arise, but those that do have a human or semi-human appearance are almost all male.
  • Except in the alternate universes of Planar Chaos where they are male.
  • Well, technically there's one in the regular, non-alternate universe who was male. Which, it should be noted, was one of the first angel cards printed... although not an angel at the time.
  • The backstory of the plane of Innistrad prominently features the female archangel Avacyn versus the male archdemon Griselbrand.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Aither is the female emperor of heaven and Erebus the male emperor of the underworld. They are also named after two of the gods in Greek mythology. This comparison even gets highlighted in the artwork for Pandiety Monarchs.

Theatre/Drama

• In Auto da Barca do Inferno by Gil Vicente the demon is usually portrayed by a male actor and the angel by a female actor, even if neither are identified by sex in the original work. The most modern version can be seen as a subversion though, as the angel is just as evil as the devil.
• An amateur production of Doctor Faustus subverted this; the good angel was played by an old man, while the bad angel/demons were all played by young women.
• In Peter Ustinov's "The Love of Four COlonels", they appear as "The Good Fairy" and "The Wicked Fairy"... but they were also the supernatural actors in the Garden of Eden.

Video Games

• The two advisors in Afterlife. This Sim City clone goes a step farther too, portraying the Angel Aria as a Dopey Ditz and the Demon Jasper as a Deadpan Snarker.
• Averted, somewhat, in Darksiders, in which both the angels and the demons are mostly male, and the angels can be either masculine (Abaddon) or feminine (Azrael). There are also notable females on both sides, the angels having Uriel, and the demons having Silitha, Tiamat, and the unseen female who gives Abaddon the choice to become the Destroyer. It should be noted, though, that many Darksiders characters are based on figures from Babylonian/Greek/Roman/Judeo-Christian mythology.
• Diablo has a picture of a female angel and a male demon for the health and mana orbs respectively. Be that as it may, this doesn't apply to the characters, as both Angels and Demons are portrayed with both male and female, both sides mostly male. The backstory, on the other hand, inverts it with Star-Crossed Lovers Inarius and Lilith, the former being a male angel and the latter a female demon.
• In DmC: Devil May Cry Dante and Virgil are Nephilim, a.k.a. the sons of a demon (Sparda) and an angel (Eva), and thus have incredible Hybrid powers. Albeit the game has some female characters too.
• Chaos and Cosmos (technically a god and goddess) from Dissidia Final Fantasy.
• The recurring summons Shiva and Ifrit in the Final Fantasy series.
• Necro and Undine, Dizzy's Wings from Guilty Gear.
  • And, because every Guilty Gear example needs a follow-up example from Blaz Blue: consider Ragna and Nu. The former is a Boisterous Bruiser-type who uses his full power by releasing "restriction 666." The latter is a mecha-woman with bladed wings who wants nothing more than to impale Ragna with a giant sword in an act of creation. The end result of this will bring about The End of the World as We Know It, 1000 years ago.
• Heroes of Might and Magic V has female Angels and male Devils (though there are female demons). In previous games, they were both male. It's debatable whether angels are female or just Bishonen though.
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
  • It is revealed that the conflict over the possession of the Triforce that the series revolves around boils down to two God-like beings who wish to use it for their own purposes. The Goddess Hylia wished to protect it from evil forces while the Demon King, Demise, wished to obtain it for absolute domination. The true form of Hylia is not seen in the game, but depictions of her portray her as an angelic woman. Demise isn't seen until the very end of the game, but his true form is extremely masculine (people say he resembles Akuma).
  • This also extends to their Weapon of Choice. Fi is a stoic, almost computer-like feminine spirit that inhabits and transforms into the Goddess/Master Sword. Ghirahim is a flamboyant, overly-emotional masculine spirit that does the same for the Demon Tribe Swords of Despair.
  • In general, most powerful forces of good are female: Hylia, Zelda, the Golden Goddesses, the Oracles and the Great Fairies. In contrast all of the major villains are male: Demise, Ganondorf, Vaati, Yuuga. Intermediate forces, such as the sages and other animal and tree spirits, are either-or.
• Averted in Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2. When the outer planes appear, their denizens are usually demons or devils of both genders, and the only full-blooded angel to feature in either game was male.
• Subverted in Painkiller: Overdose in that the main character Belial is the son of a female demon and a male angel.
• Pokémon has the duo of Cresselia and Darkrai. The former is an angelic-looking bringer of good dreams and Always Female, the latter a shadowy creature of darkness who induces nightmares (and while Darkrai has No Biological Sex, most portrayals of it make it masculine). The "demon" aspect of Darkrai, however, is (usually) downplayed, if it's present at all.
• RuneScape has a dungeon where armies from the God Wars are still battling it out. The leaders of those two armies are an Icyene named Commander Zilyana and a demon named K'ril Tsutsaroth. The two appear to be rivals, and they're often seen together.
• The Secret World does this during the dream section of the opening cutscene. A "good" appearing angel (white clothing, whitish appearance, releases bees, which are associated with protecting the world) is female, while a more "evil" appearing (reddish wings, dressed in black, releases black flies) angel is male. They appear at the end of the game, after players decide whether to weaken or strengthen a prison for the main source of corruption in the game, and fill the expected roles.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Telenin (transformed into an Angel) and Jimenez (fused with a Demon). In general, however, the series averts the trope — angels for the most part are genderless, and demons come in all shades.
• Angel and Devil in Tekken. Due to the limitations of the Play Station, many people came away with the impression that Angel had epic sideburns, blurring the issue somewhat.

Web Comics

• Inverted in this El Goonish Shive filler strip.
• Seraphim and Asmodeus in Megatokyo.
• In The Order of the Stick, the Bureaucratic Devas and the celestial here are both female, and the IFCC Directors and Qarr are all male. Sabine gets a pass for being a Horny Devil.
• The Italy web-comic Sacro e Profano feature the sexy love-story of a beautiful angel Angelina and the horny male devil Damiano. They Can't Have Sex Ever until the marriage.
• Buwaro & Kieri in Slightly Damned. But Buwaro starts out completely naïve and un-demon-like, and eventually he and Kieri fall in love. Other angels and demons come in both genders.

Western Animation

• In Aagh It's the Mr. Hell Show the episode "From Here to Paternity" reveals that Mr. Hell (a male demon) has an illegitimate child with a female angel.
• Raf and Sulfus from Angel's Friends.
• Donald's Better Self showcases the struggle between Donald Duck's responsible and devious personalities; while they're both clearly male, what with looking exactly like Don, his good self is voiced by a woman. Oh, and both angel and devil's voices are easy to understand, unlike Don himself.
• Likewise, in The Legend of Korra, Vaatu, the spirit of darkness, is male. Raava, the spirit of light, is female. Exceptionally bizarre because they draw on Yin-Yang symbolism, which assigns darkness to women and light to men. A downplayed example, as both Raava and Vaatu are completely inhuman in appearance and identical in every way but their color scheme.
• In Star Wars: The Clone Wars the daughter is the embodiment of the Light side of the Force, while the son is the incarnation of the Dark Side.