Anon because this is a touchy subject but I'm the one who hates Mary. Thanks for fielding my ask with such patience. I'm honestly very hopeful I can come around to liking her more.
I was wondering if you could write more about Lucifer? I really liked the Lucifer-war meta you wrote. He's a pariah in the fandom, but you seem to like him and Nick?
You're welcome, I think.
About Lucifer, uh, well. I'll be honest with you. I'm not super keyed into Lucifer, so I can't promise that I have any thoughts to share? But I'll keep it in mind as I watch through again. Here's what I like about Lucifer and what I'm less interested in. If any of this syncs up with your interests, feel free to stick around!
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First, I meant when I said it's okay not to connect with a character. For example, it's taken me a long time to come around to Charlie Bradbury, and she's a fan favorite! Sometimes, there's no real reason you don't jive with a character. (There's nothing wrong with Charlie. I just happen to find her kind of annoying! And that's okay. That I like Arthur Ketch more than OG Charlie doesn't mean I'm a horrible person, right?)
I find that many of the characters featured in season 8 are kinda boring to me. Many of them I think were meant to be templated and figment-like in terms of their complexity relative to an integrated life. But some of them, like Metatron, I really love! He turns out to be so much more than the "ho-hum wiseman" that he appears to be, and then he basically repeats Cas's mistakes with regard to "punishing" his home and "trying to be God."
Yet, the fandom as a whole absolutely loathes Metatron. But I'm not going to go into their inboxes and harass them to see things my way.
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So, Lucifer...
Many Lucifer fans seem to be fans of the early-seasons Lucifer, but I'll be upfront with you and say I prefer the whiny, petulant guy that was peeled back in later seasons--the one who revealed to Anael that all he really wanted was to fit in. Yeah, he's "less edgy, less cool," but I find him way more interesting!
I think there's an echo of Sam and John here re:fitting in. Because while Sam is "rebellious" towards John, he is, according to Henry Winchester, quite like John in terms of his base personality. After Jess died and Sam focused on revenge, Sam seemed strangely glad to have something in common with John, to understand him.
Lucifer too seemed excited and more sympathetic to his dad after Jack arrived. I way prefer that to the idea of a "villainous" guy in a white suit spitting spooky lines about destiny. That Lucifer...feels like Chuck.
I guess my thesis is that Chuck's portrayal of Lucifer is pretty close to Chuck's true self: a kind of cool-headed, all-knowing sadism. But perhaps the real Lucifer is eaten up by pain and volatile emotion.
"He's stealing my best lines," Lucifer laments when he reads the Bible in season 13. There's probably some truth to that. Perhaps, Chuck takes all his worst parts and stamps them onto Lucifer, and he takes Lucifer's best parts and stamps them onto himself?
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And John...
I'll also be honest and say I find the fandom's tendency to paint Lucifer and John with all the bad in the entire universe to be sort of...frustrating? It verges on cartoonish. Engaging with their complexity automatically gets a fan painted with the dreaded "abuse apologist" label. I feel like disengaging from Lucifer and John almost...pressures you into trying to explain away TFW's own wrongdoing to hastily differentiate them from Lucifer and John.
Furthermore, I feel like John is raked over the coals for his inability to let go of his hatred of Azazel, but the fandom won't even entertain anything less than the abject destruction of John and Lucifer. In a sense, we can lurch into being quite John-coded when it comes to John and Lucifer!
It's almost like it's a badge of honor to blame them for all the evils in the universe, even the evil that Sam and Dean do on their own. Gabriel had a gorgeous speech on this very issue in season 13's Exodus! (Gabriel at once excused Chuck too much and blamed Lucifer too much, but he had a great observation!) At what point do you stop blaming your father and take responsibility for yourself? Where do we draw the line? How do we heal?
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I'm also pretty fascinated by Chuck's tendency to victim-blame Lucifer's descent as "inevitable," while taking no responsibility for his own actions. That Chuck pointed to Lucifer's "jaundiced eye towards humans" as proof of his corruption is...hmm. It's bad.
It's like viewing Demon Dean, MoC Dean, or Amara-thralled Dean as "the real Dean." Just because you have urges or thoughts does not mean that you'd act on them in your right mind! That's the whole point of being an animal with free will!
Chuck's pretty fucked up for that viewpoint. It's his own rationalization for sure.
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The other thing I'm fascinated by is that tantalizing nugget that Amara "trusted Lucifer once." Did Lucifer try to get close to her in order to catch her off-guard? "Dear nephew, my how you've changed." I'll always be rotating that line my head.
And I'll continue to ponder why Amara was so willing to make up with Chuck but was not willing to even try with Lucifer. How sad! You'd think if she felt bound to Dean, she'd also feel closer to Lucifer for being connected to her in a similar way. Maybe? And then there's the pesky fact that Amara becomes Lucifer's torturer and is willing to make up with Chuck but throws Lucifer away like garbage... It's hmmm.
If we assume that the MoC corrupted Lucifer, I say there's a good argument for his disinhibition and actions making him feel like he was beyond the point of no return, and so he continued to descend. There's something here that shackled Lucifer's free will just as it shackled Dean's.
And yet his own family is not even willing to extend the slightest bit of kindness, and that is why Lucifer is like that when we see him in Vince. He spends most of his time pleading to Cas, because that turns out to be his most stable family member. Same with Gabriel. (Though they try to kill each other over and over.)
Honestly, I find it difficult to ignore Amara and AU Michael's torture of Lucifer, and how frightened Lucifer was of AU Michael. It's also hard to look away from just how much "having a mission" fills Lucifer with purpose and surface-level loyalty for those around him.
It's hmmmm. Lucifer is simultaneously the worst version of himself AND he's also scapegoated for things that he didn't do and that aren't his fault.
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And lastly, I'm always going to be interested in Jack. That Lucifer wanted Jack to give his life meaning is not nothing. It speaks of a life that means nothing. Forgiving Chuck and then getting tossed by Chuck, not to mention having gray-rock stability with Cas as his roommate and then getting ripped away from Cas, was honestly...probably the worst thing that ever happened to Lucifer. It's the thing that made him give himself over wholly to nihilism.
After that, Lucifer became single-mindedly focused on having a kid to plug the whole of his existence. He obsessed over Jack to a point that he was rushing to cross worlds to get to him. And yet, that care never really grew into anything truly parental. He was so willing to slit Jack's throat! He was so jealous of Sam being important to Jack that he tried to make Jack kill Sam.
It's hmmmm.
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And Nick.
Nick is a festering sore...and how Lucifer manipulated his personal life in order to Stockholm him was gut-wrenching. Nick lost his entire identity!
I'm sure that "Like" is a strong word, but I think his plight in season 14 is certainly something we're supposed to pay attention to in the context of the Dean-AU Michael possession.
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Things I don't care about?
Well, I'm not so much about Lucifer, Rowena, and Sam directly, because I feel like his interactions with them are cartoonishly straightforward: with them, Lucifer is his worst self. There's not much to add.
Lucifer does show some glimmers of being Gabriel-like with respect to Sam, in that he "respects Sam," engages in "torture of the brothers," and tries to "train him to recognize illusions" and "come to certain conclusions via illusions."
It's also sort of interesting to me when the reflection of Lucifer ricochets onto TFW, reminding them of when they were their shadow selves. (Jimmy Novak possession, cannibalism, killing innocents, sacrifice, lying, etc.)
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