Light Is Not Good/Theatre

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  • In the version of The Phantom of the Opera which has emerged, Erik seems to fit this to some extent, being called the "Angel of Music" for his beautiful singing voice and rather than the hideous character of the novel is a handsome man whose partially scarred face is more of a Red Right Hand.
    • Ironically, Erik also lampshades this trope with the lyric line, "Turn your face away from the garish light of day./ Turn your thoughts away from cold, unfeeling light."
  • This is a very common trope in late 18th/early 19th-century Romanticism. As Friedrich Nietzsche explored in The Birth of Tragedy, 18th century Classicism, which stressed order, civilization, and reason, was associated with the Greek sun god, Apollo. Whereas Romanticism, in defiance, stressed chaos, nature (or savagery), and emotions, and was associated with Dionysus, god of wine. Nietzsche's former mentor, Richard Wagner, used this in Tristan und Isolde: Isolde's husband, King Mark, is associated with civilization, sings harmonic lines, and is always well-lit on stage. The two lovers, meanwhile, are always seeking the darkness and the deep forest to hide their affair, sing chromatic lines and are motivated by emotion.
  • In the original version of the play Auto da Barca do Inferno written by Portuguese playwright Gil Vicente the angel (that was in charge of the boat that lead people to Heaven) was good (albeit a complete asshole), but in the most recent version of the play she is just as bad if not worse than the Devil.
  • In Angels in America, the angels are fantastic beings (and the main one is played by Emma Thompson in the HBO mini-series), but they all lack the ability to imagine, which means that they are all extremely bureaucratic and rather useless, unable to figure out how to cure the "plague" (HIV). Their idea to bring back the missing God is to order humanity to stop moving forward and progressing.
  • The Word of Blake from BattleTech use angelic names and motifs for most of their mechs and battle armor yet use weapons of mass destruction indiscriminately, run reeducation camps and have basically declared war on the rest of humanity.

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