her-roses-never-fall:

hunenka:

frozen-delight:

hunenka:

I’m crying over spilt milk here, but I’d
really like to know why the writers hate Michael so much. He’s one of the
major players of the Apocalypse, the most powerful and influential angel in
Heaven, but he barely does anything in season 5. It’s like he’s not even there,
and other angels are doing his work for him. The extent of his personal involvement
doesn’t go beyond killing Anna and giving Dean a rather unconvincing speech
about destiny and free will.

He doesn’t get his true vessel, and somehow
that’s okay with him. But maybe that makes sense, since he didn’t put any effort into trying to “seduce” Dean (he doesn’t even try to invade Dean’s
dreams like Lucifer did with Sam).

In Swan Song, the bad writing in combination with Jake Abel’s acting
make Michael horribly underwhelming. He’s just a bland, boring guy, he doesn’t
even look like he’s not human, let alone the most powerful archangel. There is
nothing Other about him. (The same goes for Jared’s Lucifer in the “showdown”
scene.) And then he’s pulled into the Cage, and that’s it.

After that, he’s forgotten, even when Sam
starts remembering the Cage and has hallucinations of Lucifer. Was Michael helping Lucifer torture Sam or
was he trying to protect him? Was he busy torturing Adam instead? We don’t know. 

In season 11, Michael’s existence is again
completely ignored, except for the brief mention of how he couldn’t stand
being in the Cage and went crazy (?!?), which conveniently gets him out of the
picture. Chuck even considers bringing back the other
archangels, but Michael, the leader of the Heavenly Host, God’s first angel, the
obedient son, is “in no shape for a fight”. All the while Lucifer gets to
be a whiny, bratty teenager and eventually resolves his daddy issues with Chuck.

So Lucifer got a (far too) long character arc. We had several episodes
of Gabriel, who got his own nice, heroic redemption arc. We’ve even seen quite
a lot of Raphael. Metatron had a big, long redemption arc. But Michael? We
know practically nothing about him. He has not much of a personality and he was
given absolutely no space for any character development. He was the obedient
son who went along with God’s plan, then he fell into the Cage, went mad, and
that’s it.

This isn’t even about how we (and Jensen)
got robbed of Michael!Dean. It’s about the complete lack of interest in Michael
as a character.

To be honest, I don’t get this Michael obsession that I see in so many Dean/Jensen fans. Maybe you can explain it to me?

From the very beginning, Michael has been an incredibly lame character. He never gets involved, instead lets Zachariah do all the dirty work. And he doesn’t stand for anything. Pre-Swan Song Lucifer is a fascinating character – he’s got history, dignity, integrity, and a complex love-hate relationship with God’s creation to boot. He thinks he’s in the right. And Mark P does an amazing job at making him both seem like one of the oldest, most powerful creatures of the universe, abstract, aloof, and emotionally relatable.

Meanwhile, Michael’s never more than “the obedient son” who wants to fight his brother because apparently “he has to do this”. So why would anyone ever take interest in him? Why would he neeed a redemption arc when he’s simply never had a story to begin with? And, even more so, why would anyone want Jensen to play such a drag?

Not trying to attack you. I’m just honestly curious because I simply don’t understand this at all.

From the very beginning, Michael has been an
incredibly lame character.

But that’s exactly my point. On the show, Michael is indeed a very
lame character, but as @juppschmitz said, the “real” Michael is anything but.
Even if he remained the loyal, obedient son of God and never came around and
tried to take charge of his own destiny like many other angels did over their
tenure on SPN, he still should have been a powerful, imposing leader figure, a
commander, a warrior. And he should have had the same qualities you so aptly described
in pre-5×22 Lucifer.

That’s the Michael I would love to see. And
that’s the Michael I would love to see Jensen play. So to explain the “Michael
obsession”, for me at least, it’s got nothing to do with SPN’s incredibly disapointing version of
Michael, because he truly isn’t interesting at all. It’s more of a regret about what the character could have been,
and should have been.

Michael is basically Heaven’s Navy Seal. His name in Hebrew means “Who is like God?” In the book of Joshua he’s implied to have helped the Israelite army take Jericho and in Jewish apocrypha, he’s the angel that regularly attacks Israel’s enemies. In the Book of Revelation, Michael not only casts down Lucifer the first the time around, but at the end of the Apocalypse he wipes the floor with the Antichrist, False Prophet and The Beast before Jesus finishes the job. Catholics pray to him for protection against evil and he’s the patron saint of soldiers. Sometimes, he’s even portrayed as the angel of Death. In short, Michael is a cold stone bad ass. Michael could have been a amazing character, but he wasn’t allowed to be.

Which brings me to my next point.

I know I’ve brought this up in other posts, but there are a few Non-Trinitarian strains of Christianity like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists who believe that Christ and Michael are the same being. In spn, with Michael being the eldest the son of God, the defacto ruler of Heaven in God’s absence and the only being short of God Himself who can wreck Lucifer’s face, I think you can argue very easily that Michael is a Christ expy and that is he needed to be one given the source material for the Apocalypse arc.

I think that’s why Michael was such a nonentity during season five and why he’s been one ever since. They needed Michael as a character for the story and they needed to align him with Dean so that the Cain/Abel metaphor worked, but by including Michael in the story and aligning him to Dean, he directly subverts the ‘Sam Winchester is The Hero/Jesus figure’ narrative they are so desperately trying to sell.

Michael makes it very clear that Dean is just as if not more special than Sam. As The Righteous Man, Dean is, by definition, a saint. As The Michael Sword, Dean is basically a messiah in all but name. Never mind the fact that Dean is a true blue hero in his own right. He wanted to say ‘yes’ to Michael to save those he cared about and (at least half of) the world,

something that without question would have been self-sacrificial.
 
Sam, on the other hand, is the literal vessel of Satan and has been referred to as the Antichrist twice in narrative. (The fact that spn has an actual Antichrist, not withstanding.) Often, Sam acts out of his own self interests. He flat out says in Swan Song that he wants to sacrifice himself to atone for letting Lucifer free. Saving the world is apparently just a fringe benefit.

Dean is -arguably- The Hero, but Dean isn’t supposed to be allowed to be The Hero because that’s (apparently) Sam’s job.

That’s why I think Adam comes back as a Michael vessel one episode after Dean is revealed to be a True Servant of Heaven and is planning on saying say ‘Yes’ to Michael. That’s why Dean is vilified for it, even though Sam later get’s praised for doing the same thing: come hell or high water, the story needs Sam to be The Hero. Not because Sam earned it through character development, but because Joseph Campbell and Kripke said so.