Thinking about how Metatron, like most angels, conceptualizes humans as emotional, and yet... what have we seen on our actual screens?
METATRON Frankly, I never got used to them. I lived among them for centuries. I had to isolate myself to keep sane. GADREEL-IN-SAM Humans do seem chaotic, Metatron. METATRON Which makes them fascinating, but... All that emotion. Geez. And the wasted energy. It's just... exhausting. 9x09
Metatron was in fact -INTENSELY- emotional this season (and last season). Despite his haughty quips and faux-academic spew, he was moving with rage and hurt, engineering things and hurting people and killing people in order to get revenge.
His rage and emotions were fever-pitch when he cast the angels out and lethally wounded Naomi with her own brain-ware drill. (“You ran me from my home. Did you really think you could do all of that to me and there'd be no payback?”)
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To say nothing of Gadreel, who has thus far been emotionally moved to helping Dean and Sam (quite genuinely, at first, searching for redemption).
It's these VERY emotions that make Gadreel easy prey to Metatron. He talks a good bit about how “Sam is a mess in here," which is SO pot-kettle. Like, dude. DUDE. You are spinning out in every direction from your own failure, your trauma, your pain.
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Angels themselves are volatile, chaotic, emotional, but they point to humans like, “WOW. Humans are -just- so mysterious and un-understandable. Not like US angels."
Angels don't conceptualize their motivations as emotional. Because a lot of reasons, probably, but also because it lets them off the hook.
The flagrant misanthropy has so much in common with garden-variety misogyny. Hierarchy works that way, of course: “My emotions and mistakes don't count.” They're not messy, like you lesser beings.
So interesting that the mechanisms of hierarchy and power can go both ways. Sometimes the “lesser" power is stripped of emotion, assumed dumb and beastly. And other times the “lesser" power's emotions are exaggerated, despised and assumed “hard to understand,” when really, they're not.
It's just interesting to me that even Metatron, supreme narrative-coded angel Geek, carries these views.
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And also!
Even here, Metatron lets slips how -LONELY- he found Heaven, even after he got his revenge. That's because what's left AFTER the mission, AFTER the symbols of your pain and failures are gone?
Just you. And your failures.
METATRON: No, and you know, at first, I thought I would love it. But it's a big place. My solitude is getting tedious. 9x09
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It reminds me a bit of what Amara said to Chuck:
AMARA: You're trapped, diminished, abandoned. So I guess you got what you've always wanted. You're on your own. 15x02
Amara became the (false?) symbol of Chuck's independence.
Like Sam, Chuck tended to work in extremes, that niggling, age-old thing everyone succumbs to (even Dean, but especially Mary): all-or-nothing mentality. All in or all out.
I feel like sometimes we see view mirrored in fandom. It's with relish that certain viewers salivated over and pathologize Dean's expressed desire for balance and family inter-communication. (SEE 1x16: “Yes, that, but it’s more than that, man. You and me and Dad—I mean, I want us….I want us to be together again. I want us to be a family again.“)
Dean has expressly talked about what that means: it means talking, picking up the phone, seeing one another instead of living in perpetual banishment. But it's funny . Sometimes I think this gets pathologized, while Chuck-Sam one, “[I won't call, but we are family.] You have to let me go my own way,” until of course, I need your help, gets held up as the healthy way.
Many of this inspired by @jasmineintheforest re: power hierarchies
