Character name: Michael Character canon: The Good Place / Azume CRAU Canon point: End of Season 2 / Post-game Physical Description: Michael is 6'2'', lanky, looks like he's in his sixties or seventies.
(Without his human body, he's usually imperceptible to humans. I think he's some kind of Lovecraftian horror.)
About the Character: Michael is a demon, a race of eternal, transdimensional entities from the dawn of time. Evil by nature, they operate the Bad Place – the section of the afterlife where human souls deemed unworthy to enter the Good Place are sent to face an eternity of torture.
The Bad Place is intensely bureaucratic, and demons have no lives or identities outside their work. Michael worked in the Department of Human Affairs, and as such was assigned a human-shaped body to inhabit, so that he could understand how best to inflict pain upon them. He spent quite a while in the same lower-ranking design position, but immortals have all the time in the world, and eventually he received a promotion to architect. Traditionally, architects take a group of humans, craft a "neighborhood" in which they'll be tortured forever, and then move on to the next group. This is the way it's been done for all of human history, and it satisfies most demons. Michael, however, is a rather unusual sort. Ambition is normal, but Michael’s particularly creative and innovative, and has never been entirely satisfied with the status quo. So he decided to flout tradition and use his very first assignment to pilot his own personal idea for a better way to torture humans.
His plan was sort of like the plot of No Exit: he hypothesized that humans could be manipulated into forming tangled, toxic relationships and tormenting each other forever. He decided to test this theory with four hand-picked humans, placing them in a fake Good Place environment and remaining among them to oversee the experiment and secretly play them against each other. While he did believe it would be more efficient and effective than real torture, it also definitely played into what he thought would be fun: getting to really know his victims on a personal level and interact with them. Challenging the system was risky, and mostly just got him a death threat or two from his boss, but he was determined and managed to get his experiment up and running with the help of Janet, a Good Place artificial intelligence who he stole and told that he was an angel.
Michael, being the only demon he knew who found humans interesting beyond their potential to be torn apart, thought that he understood them entirely. As it turned out, he very much did not. He didn’t believe that a human condemned to the Bad Place could start to become a better person, so he selected a total garbage person, Eleanor, and a professor of moral philosophy, Chidi, to make each other miserable as Chidi tried and failed to help Eleanor improve herself forever. Instead, she, Chidi, and the other humans became friends, banded together, and eventually discovered the truth. Michael’s psychological torture setup couldn’t work if people knew it was happening, so he was forced to erase their memories and reboot the experiment. This initial failure put him on thin ice, and his boss warned him that if he failed again, he would be retired – an extreme form of eternal torture that’s about as close as a demon can come to actually dying.
Michael's second chance failed within a day. He hid this from everyone, and proceeded to spend three hundred years trying the experiment again and again. In all of the reboots, the humans eventually came together as friends and the truth came out. Michael became increasingly frustrated and despondent as this continued, but he was trapped: if he admitted defeat, he’d be retired, but every unauthorized attempt just dug his hole even deeper.
Michael wasn’t the only one going through this self-imposed Groundhog Day scenario. Though Janet and the humans got their memories wiped every time, his demonic employees did not. Eventually they lost patience and blackmailed him, threatening to reveal what he'd done unless he handed over control of the neighborhood to them for one last attempt. If they succeeded, they'd get all the glory, and if they failed, they’d turn him in anyway so they could go back to their former jobs.
In order to save himself, Michael struck a bargain with the humans. He offered to not wipe their memories again and to help them all escape to the real Good Place, if the they’d pretend that their memories were reset and play along with the other demons' psychological torture efforts in public. In private, they could continue being friends and taking ethics lessons together. Realizing her bargaining power, Eleanor added her own condition: if Michael wanted to be on the human's team, then he had to act like it, and that included attending Chidi's ethics lessons with the rest of them. Michael was openly scornful of the idea – he was an immortal demon with thousands of years’ worth of knowledge, and also thought that ethics were for losers. But he was forced to agree.
Things didn’t start smoothly, but over time, Michael came to enjoy spending time with the humans. He’d often been considered sort of a dork by other demons, and was now very unpopular with his employees; the humans, meanwhile, didn’t really trust him, but they were generally friendly as long as he didn’t do anything shitty. This isn’t to say that change came quickly. He was still deliberately nasty to the humans at times, and openly denigrated their species on a pretty regular basis. But the humans would reject him when he behaved poorly, and Michael started to realize that he cared about his relationships with them too much to risk that by being pointlessly cruel.
Michael was always someone who wanted to build and improve. At first he wanted to pioneer a better form of torture; now, he turned that impulse inward, applying himself to the ethics lessons so that he could continue being part of his new group. By the time he was offered a chance at another promotion in exchange for the humans, he was willing to openly betray his own species, risking his own existence to get his friends a second chance at life and admittance to the Good Place.
Somewhere after that, he ended up getting kidnapped to Sinnoh, where he caught a lot of Pokemon, made a lot more human friends, and helped save the Pokemon world!
Michael is, above all, an extremely creative and driven person. He's something of a demonic visionary - where others are satisfied with age-old tradition, he's eager to invent new things and shake up the system literally the instant he's given enough power to meaningfully do so. The status quo means nothing; he doesn't hesitate to question the way things have always been done, and believes that there's always room for improvement. He'll apply this to his own beliefs and actions as well. Though the morality of his actions swings wildly from experimenting with new forms of torture to challenging the afterlife system as a whole on humanity's behalf, everything he does is rooted in that same innovative impulse.
He's not just an ideas guy. He seems like a very dedicated worker in general, but when it comes to things he's personally invested in, he's a meticulous perfectionist, to the point of having neurotic breakdowns when things aren't going the way he expects. Planning and manipulation are particular strengths of his. He's good at getting people to do what he wants, and can pull off fairly large and complex schemes with little preparation and no help.
Perhaps being good at his work is part of where Michael's egotism comes from. He considers himself extremely intelligent - and he certainly is by human standards, but he's far from infallible. He easily becomes insecure about gaps in his knowledge or ability, and he's been known to get angry and lash out to cover for them. He also tends to severely underestimate others; overall he just really, really does not like to appear vulnerable. Part of that is a classic inferiority complex. His desire for creativity and change are strange enough, but even before that, he was clearly curious about humanity in a way most of his kind aren't. He was a bit of a weird nerd by demonic standards, and though he'd probably have trouble even admitting it to himself, it's clear that he's wanted some validation for a very long time. Demons don’t form close personal relationships, so Michael couldn’t have even formulated a desire for friendship before bonding with his humans, but now that he's been introduced to the idea, he continues to be enchanted with it. Losing people he cares about has quickly become a particular terror of his, one that's only become worse after his time in Azume, when he befriended a bunch of living mortals who will presumably someday die and may not end up somewhere accessible to him afterwards. He’s willing to risk nearly anything to prevent this from happening, if only for a little while longer.
Whether by nature or nurture, Michael is clearly pre-disposed towards evil. Nearly everything he's done throughout his life has been self-serving, including his original pact with the humans. His sense of humor ranges from mean to outright sadistic, something he's still unapologetic about. But he's become invested in being a better person, and has redirected all his effort towards this new goal. The academic framework of moral philosophy is how he was introduced to the concept, but it’s also especially helpful to him because his instincts in this area tend to be poor; though he can identify other people’s feelings easily enough, he doesn't seem to experience any reflexive empathy, and can often be callous even towards close friends if he’s not careful. Moral philosophy gives him a framework to look to when he’s unsure of the right course. His time in Azume has made him more confident in this realm overall, since he spent a good six months among humans and no one was especially horrified by anything he said or did. When last seen, he had evacuated his friends to Sinnoh for safekeeping, and had vague plans of trying to locate and befriend the Pokemon god of death, because the afterlife is garbage and sometimes you need a little firepower in order to enact reform!
Character abilities: Extrasensory Perception Though he's currently inhabiting a human body, Michael still exists on several planes at once. He can pick up on a lot of sensory data that humans can't. Some of this appears to manifest as a type of synesthasia; he associates other people's emotions with colors and tastes, for example, and he's mentioned vague things about auras before. He's probably capable of picking up on magic shit too?
Durability The human bodies created for demonic use can definitely experience pain. However, they seem to be able to take a lot more punishment than a normal human. Demons can walk off pretty nasty beatings. They also seem to ignore extreme heat, judging by Michael's ability to stand very close to lava and also wear those suits in fucking Florida without complaint. Because it's not like he doesn't complain loudly when he feels there's something to complain about.
Lack of Human Needs While demons are shown eating and enjoying human food, the show also goes out of its way to observe that Michael does not need to use the bathroom. But we've seen other demons use the bathroom? He can also both get drunk and shake off the drunkenness very quickly if he needs to. My conclusion is that he can sort of pick and choose whether his body processes things using normal human digestion or if it's just goddamn vaporized or whatever he does???
Demons are also shown casually consuming shit like antimatter, physical manifestations of envy, and the concept of time. Basically, Michael can probably eat anything with no ill effects, including things that aren't actually made of matter. He doesn't need to sleep. He might not actually have internal organs.
Astral Projection This has never been shown in canon, but in theory Michael is fully capable of abandoning his physical body to dick around as an intangible horrorterror for a while, and then returning to it later. He isn't terribly likely to do this without a specific and pressing reason, because he likes being able to talk to people.
Immortality Michael is an immortal being from the dawn of time, and the closest he can come to dying is a form of eternal torture that would not actually end him. If his body were destroyed, or if he left it, he would continue just existing in his natural form. Evidently, they haven't even found ways to kill each other in this form, so that's a thing.
Information Processing Michael has a perfect memory, and also seems capable of absorbing new information extremely quickly. He claims to be able to read all human literature in a couple of hours; while the scope of this could easily be a boast, he definitely does prove that he can read far faster than a human. The flipside of this is that absorbing information doesn't always equate to comprehending it. He could probably perfectly recite all the philosophy texts he's read, but he still needed Chidi's teaching and a lot of effort to actually parse the words into something meaningful.
He seems to have strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities. He also just knows a lot of facts - it just comes with having lived forever and never forgetting anything.
Manipulation Michael's very good at lying and manipulating others. He can look anybody in the eye and spin a story without even thinking about it, and he's also good at predicting how people will respond to his actions. He can maintain large webs of lies and even entire fake personas for a long time. More recently, though, this ability has begun to degrade a little as he's gained the ethical awareness to feel bad about that kind of thing.
no subject
Character name: Michael
Character canon: The Good Place / Azume CRAU
Canon point: End of Season 2 / Post-game
Physical Description: Michael is 6'2'', lanky, looks like he's in his sixties or seventies.
(Without his human body, he's usually imperceptible to humans. I think he's some kind of Lovecraftian horror.)
About the Character:
Michael is a demon, a race of eternal, transdimensional entities from the dawn of time. Evil by nature, they operate the Bad Place – the section of the afterlife where human souls deemed unworthy to enter the Good Place are sent to face an eternity of torture.
The Bad Place is intensely bureaucratic, and demons have no lives or identities outside their work. Michael worked in the Department of Human Affairs, and as such was assigned a human-shaped body to inhabit, so that he could understand how best to inflict pain upon them. He spent quite a while in the same lower-ranking design position, but immortals have all the time in the world, and eventually he received a promotion to architect. Traditionally, architects take a group of humans, craft a "neighborhood" in which they'll be tortured forever, and then move on to the next group. This is the way it's been done for all of human history, and it satisfies most demons. Michael, however, is a rather unusual sort. Ambition is normal, but Michael’s particularly creative and innovative, and has never been entirely satisfied with the status quo. So he decided to flout tradition and use his very first assignment to pilot his own personal idea for a better way to torture humans.
His plan was sort of like the plot of No Exit: he hypothesized that humans could be manipulated into forming tangled, toxic relationships and tormenting each other forever. He decided to test this theory with four hand-picked humans, placing them in a fake Good Place environment and remaining among them to oversee the experiment and secretly play them against each other. While he did believe it would be more efficient and effective than real torture, it also definitely played into what he thought would be fun: getting to really know his victims on a personal level and interact with them. Challenging the system was risky, and mostly just got him a death threat or two from his boss, but he was determined and managed to get his experiment up and running with the help of Janet, a Good Place artificial intelligence who he stole and told that he was an angel.
Michael, being the only demon he knew who found humans interesting beyond their potential to be torn apart, thought that he understood them entirely. As it turned out, he very much did not. He didn’t believe that a human condemned to the Bad Place could start to become a better person, so he selected a total garbage person, Eleanor, and a professor of moral philosophy, Chidi, to make each other miserable as Chidi tried and failed to help Eleanor improve herself forever. Instead, she, Chidi, and the other humans became friends, banded together, and eventually discovered the truth. Michael’s psychological torture setup couldn’t work if people knew it was happening, so he was forced to erase their memories and reboot the experiment. This initial failure put him on thin ice, and his boss warned him that if he failed again, he would be retired – an extreme form of eternal torture that’s about as close as a demon can come to actually dying.
Michael's second chance failed within a day. He hid this from everyone, and proceeded to spend three hundred years trying the experiment again and again. In all of the reboots, the humans eventually came together as friends and the truth came out. Michael became increasingly frustrated and despondent as this continued, but he was trapped: if he admitted defeat, he’d be retired, but every unauthorized attempt just dug his hole even deeper.
Michael wasn’t the only one going through this self-imposed Groundhog Day scenario. Though Janet and the humans got their memories wiped every time, his demonic employees did not. Eventually they lost patience and blackmailed him, threatening to reveal what he'd done unless he handed over control of the neighborhood to them for one last attempt. If they succeeded, they'd get all the glory, and if they failed, they’d turn him in anyway so they could go back to their former jobs.
In order to save himself, Michael struck a bargain with the humans. He offered to not wipe their memories again and to help them all escape to the real Good Place, if the they’d pretend that their memories were reset and play along with the other demons' psychological torture efforts in public. In private, they could continue being friends and taking ethics lessons together. Realizing her bargaining power, Eleanor added her own condition: if Michael wanted to be on the human's team, then he had to act like it, and that included attending Chidi's ethics lessons with the rest of them. Michael was openly scornful of the idea – he was an immortal demon with thousands of years’ worth of knowledge, and also thought that ethics were for losers. But he was forced to agree.
Things didn’t start smoothly, but over time, Michael came to enjoy spending time with the humans. He’d often been considered sort of a dork by other demons, and was now very unpopular with his employees; the humans, meanwhile, didn’t really trust him, but they were generally friendly as long as he didn’t do anything shitty. This isn’t to say that change came quickly. He was still deliberately nasty to the humans at times, and openly denigrated their species on a pretty regular basis. But the humans would reject him when he behaved poorly, and Michael started to realize that he cared about his relationships with them too much to risk that by being pointlessly cruel.
Michael was always someone who wanted to build and improve. At first he wanted to pioneer a better form of torture; now, he turned that impulse inward, applying himself to the ethics lessons so that he could continue being part of his new group. By the time he was offered a chance at another promotion in exchange for the humans, he was willing to openly betray his own species, risking his own existence to get his friends a second chance at life and admittance to the Good Place.
Somewhere after that, he ended up getting kidnapped to Sinnoh, where he caught a lot of Pokemon, made a lot more human friends, and helped save the Pokemon world!
Michael is, above all, an extremely creative and driven person. He's something of a demonic visionary - where others are satisfied with age-old tradition, he's eager to invent new things and shake up the system literally the instant he's given enough power to meaningfully do so. The status quo means nothing; he doesn't hesitate to question the way things have always been done, and believes that there's always room for improvement. He'll apply this to his own beliefs and actions as well. Though the morality of his actions swings wildly from experimenting with new forms of torture to challenging the afterlife system as a whole on humanity's behalf, everything he does is rooted in that same innovative impulse.
He's not just an ideas guy. He seems like a very dedicated worker in general, but when it comes to things he's personally invested in, he's a meticulous perfectionist, to the point of having neurotic breakdowns when things aren't going the way he expects. Planning and manipulation are particular strengths of his. He's good at getting people to do what he wants, and can pull off fairly large and complex schemes with little preparation and no help.
Perhaps being good at his work is part of where Michael's egotism comes from. He considers himself extremely intelligent - and he certainly is by human standards, but he's far from infallible. He easily becomes insecure about gaps in his knowledge or ability, and he's been known to get angry and lash out to cover for them. He also tends to severely underestimate others; overall he just really, really does not like to appear vulnerable. Part of that is a classic inferiority complex. His desire for creativity and change are strange enough, but even before that, he was clearly curious about humanity in a way most of his kind aren't. He was a bit of a weird nerd by demonic standards, and though he'd probably have trouble even admitting it to himself, it's clear that he's wanted some validation for a very long time. Demons don’t form close personal relationships, so Michael couldn’t have even formulated a desire for friendship before bonding with his humans, but now that he's been introduced to the idea, he continues to be enchanted with it. Losing people he cares about has quickly become a particular terror of his, one that's only become worse after his time in Azume, when he befriended a bunch of living mortals who will presumably someday die and may not end up somewhere accessible to him afterwards. He’s willing to risk nearly anything to prevent this from happening, if only for a little while longer.
Whether by nature or nurture, Michael is clearly pre-disposed towards evil. Nearly everything he's done throughout his life has been self-serving, including his original pact with the humans. His sense of humor ranges from mean to outright sadistic, something he's still unapologetic about. But he's become invested in being a better person, and has redirected all his effort towards this new goal. The academic framework of moral philosophy is how he was introduced to the concept, but it’s also especially helpful to him because his instincts in this area tend to be poor; though he can identify other people’s feelings easily enough, he doesn't seem to experience any reflexive empathy, and can often be callous even towards close friends if he’s not careful. Moral philosophy gives him a framework to look to when he’s unsure of the right course. His time in Azume has made him more confident in this realm overall, since he spent a good six months among humans and no one was especially horrified by anything he said or did. When last seen, he had evacuated his friends to Sinnoh for safekeeping, and had vague plans of trying to locate and befriend the Pokemon god of death, because the afterlife is garbage and sometimes you need a little firepower in order to enact reform!
Character abilities:
Extrasensory Perception
Though he's currently inhabiting a human body, Michael still exists on several planes at once. He can pick up on a lot of sensory data that humans can't. Some of this appears to manifest as a type of synesthasia; he associates other people's emotions with colors and tastes, for example, and he's mentioned vague things about auras before. He's probably capable of picking up on magic shit too?
Durability
The human bodies created for demonic use can definitely experience pain. However, they seem to be able to take a lot more punishment than a normal human. Demons can walk off pretty nasty beatings. They also seem to ignore extreme heat, judging by Michael's ability to stand very close to lava and also wear those suits in fucking Florida without complaint. Because it's not like he doesn't complain loudly when he feels there's something to complain about.
Lack of Human Needs
While demons are shown eating and enjoying human food, the show also goes out of its way to observe that Michael does not need to use the bathroom. But we've seen other demons use the bathroom? He can also both get drunk and shake off the drunkenness very quickly if he needs to. My conclusion is that he can sort of pick and choose whether his body processes things using normal human digestion or if it's just goddamn vaporized or whatever he does???
Demons are also shown casually consuming shit like antimatter, physical manifestations of envy, and the concept of time. Basically, Michael can probably eat anything with no ill effects, including things that aren't actually made of matter. He doesn't need to sleep. He might not actually have internal organs.
Astral Projection
This has never been shown in canon, but in theory Michael is fully capable of abandoning his physical body to dick around as an intangible horrorterror for a while, and then returning to it later. He isn't terribly likely to do this without a specific and pressing reason, because he likes being able to talk to people.
Immortality
Michael is an immortal being from the dawn of time, and the closest he can come to dying is a form of eternal torture that would not actually end him. If his body were destroyed, or if he left it, he would continue just existing in his natural form. Evidently, they haven't even found ways to kill each other in this form, so that's a thing.
Information Processing
Michael has a perfect memory, and also seems capable of absorbing new information extremely quickly. He claims to be able to read all human literature in a couple of hours; while the scope of this could easily be a boast, he definitely does prove that he can read far faster than a human. The flipside of this is that absorbing information doesn't always equate to comprehending it. He could probably perfectly recite all the philosophy texts he's read, but he still needed Chidi's teaching and a lot of effort to actually parse the words into something meaningful.
He seems to have strong mathematical and spatial reasoning abilities. He also just knows a lot of facts - it just comes with having lived forever and never forgetting anything.
Manipulation
Michael's very good at lying and manipulating others. He can look anybody in the eye and spin a story without even thinking about it, and he's also good at predicting how people will respond to his actions. He can maintain large webs of lies and even entire fake personas for a long time. More recently, though, this ability has begun to degrade a little as he's gained the ethical awareness to feel bad about that kind of thing.