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Your analogy with Order of the Stick's Vaarsuvius is an apt one, because both Angel and Vaarsuvius graphically carry the gender-ambiguous look with excellence, but it is flawed if you look at how the characters came about. Vaarsuvius's gender issue was totally unintentional, a happy accident, since Rich Burlew has admitted of having no intention of causing said ambiguity in the first place (and had a specific gender in mind upon creating the character), but when the first viewers were split on which gender V was he decided to take that theme and ran with it to the end (which include him almost certainly never revealing V's gender). On the other hand, Angel's gender was never an issue before that bathroom scene (and even now the majority of viewers didn't catch the subtle visual clue there), so if Angel's gender is never revealed it will only affect the hard-core forum readers, while an "omg, he's female!" reveal will be a great twist meant for the majority of the comic's viewers. And I feel that the character was specifically created for that particular scene (again unlike Vaarsuvius), and then the rest of Angel's personality was crafted around that concept.

Of course, my other assumption, that the reveal is coming soon, could be totally wrong. But the issue won't linger for ever, Vaarsuvius-style, either, I'm certain of it.

Oh, Angel and Vaarsuvius are completely different characters in every way. But it strikes me as entirely possible that the joke with Angel will continue indefinitely, as it does with Vaarsuvius; whether it was planned from the first or not is irrelevant. (It probably was.) By now, revealing the truth with Angel would just feel anticlimactic, whatever that truth is, whereas keeping the tease going, with new characters jumping to conclusions while Angel's old acquaintances continue brilliantly to avoid pronouns, would spin the humour out for as long as the comic lasts.

Though if we do get a reveal, I'm betting on female. And Ruby will be around, so she can be embarrassed by having guessed wrong.

Spidrift wrote:Angel is creepy and obsessive. Therefore Angel calling Dillon creepy and obsessive is hypocritical, even if Dillon is being creepy and obsessive in a different way.

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No, hypocritical would be if she had done the exact thing, here we see that she thinks what Dillon is doing is going too far. I'm not saying she isn't obsessive, I'm saying she's not obsessive to Dillon's degree.

But Angel has been chasing Jerzy for much longer, despite Jerzy saying repeatedly that it ain't gonna happen.

Which is apples vs. oranges when compared to Dillon's brand of stupidity. But Angel is definitely creepy-obsessive enough that Angel using those words about anyone else, ever, is flat-out hypocrisy in my book.

I'm not sure it can count as hypocrisy if you aren't aware of the dissonnance between your deeds and your words. And Angel strikes me as pathologically delusional.

An awful lot of hypocrites convince themselves that their own behaviour is just fine. Angel may be an extreme case, but I'm not sure what does go through his (fictional) mind.