Comments | amonitrate: Walking off the chessboard: part 3

amonitrate

Walking off the chessboard: part 3

Jul 14, 2010 19:05

Walking off the chessboard: Sam and Lucifer and the role of the Scapegoat in SPN

( master post)

Part 3

The Scapegoat as truth teller

Perhaps because there is less pressure on the Scapegoat to project the “success” of the family (as with The Hero) and because of their position as the focus of the family’s negative attention, the Scapegoat often sees ( Read more... )

scapegoat, meta:spn, essays

Comments 4

The classic questions of theodicy deiseach July 15 2010, 09:28:28 UTC

Lucifer here in your account is acting as the Accuser in the Book of Job ( ... )

Re: The classic questions of theodicy amonitrate July 15 2010, 13:31:01 UTC

Yep. Lucifer might be a truth teller, but he's not telling the truth for the sake of the truth. He's doing it out of manipulation and resentment. Which... frankly, can be a dysfunctional family trait as well. The "truth" can be used in a lot of ways. It's kind of a neutral thing by itself. We typically say "telling the truth" is a good thing, born of honesty, but that's not always the case.

I agree Lucifer was interested in wiping the earth of humans; I think he wasn't interested in Heaven's Apocalypse though, maybe this is a technicality or semantics but in SPN at least, the Apocalypse was pretty specifically framed as Michael fights Lucifer and then Paradise happens afterwards (assuming Michael beats him, which the angels were unable to imagine happening any other way). So probably I worded this part in an overly simplistic way that made Lucifer sound too much like a good guy, which he really isn't.

I think Lucifer wants to win Michael over to his side as an act of vengeance against God; he wants his big brother to choose him ( ... )

Been thinking about the absence of fathers deiseach July 16 2010, 14:33:48 UTC

I agree that Lucifer is the truth-teller about the roles in the heavenly family and how they're not working. We see ample evidence of that with God being absent and apparently heaven falls apart; either the angels think God is dead (Uriel, Raphael, possibly Gabriel though it's hard to tell with him, maybe even Anna, because we don't really know why she decided to rip out her Grace and fall - yeah, yeah, wanted to be human - but why did she want this now?), not particularly caring one way or another (Zachariah), or trying to act in what they perceive is the way God would want (Michael and Castiel, and there's two different approaches ( ... )

Re: Been thinking about the absence of fathers amonitrate July 16 2010, 15:22:57 UTC

But God not being around gives them all the chance to make their own way, to use their free will - except that they don't. The angels are all "destiny, fate, it is fore-ordained" and are thrashing around for a plan to follow.

Yep, exactly. And it's a great metaphor for those dysfunctional family cycles, because it is really, really hard to break free of them even when you're aware of them, which many people they effect are not -- instead it's just the way things are, the way things have always been.

They don't take the chance to grow, to become independent, to renegotiate their relationship, to grow up.Yes! And I think over the course of the series, this is what Sam and Dean have struggled with. And yeah, they got close in the first season. But the second season everything had gone backwards, after John made Sam back into Dean's responsibility, and Dean accepted that burden and struggled with even telling Sam about it. Understandably, but it did set them back to the point where they were barely getting back to anything remotely ( ... )