#michael's dialogue that it's a matter or scale lives rent free in my head

[shallowrambles]

But Cas is complicated.

He is 100% behind hunting; he admires it; he thinks it's a good thing because he has chosen to center his sense of morality from that human hunter perspective. Could he have chosen bugs? Yes. Cows? Sure. Angels and Gods? Hell yeah. But he chooses hunter humans because his chosen spouse fambly is hunter human and it's easier to assimilate with them for his own satisfaction that way.)

He knows it's selfish, too. He grapples with that in season 10 and ultimately STILL chooses to work with Hannah to scoop up other angels and deny them the chance to live lives for themselves on Earth.) The hypocrisy is painful and lovely.

Lily Sunder's kid is just ONE of the innocent humans Cas has slaughtered over his very, VERY long life.

It's highly suggested that angels can eat souls, if they choose to (Grigori, other demigods). Cas ate Purgatory souls for funsies in a story arc that focused on overconsumption. It's a frightening fact that lives in the margins. Dean snd Jack become soul bombs. Cas and other angels eat them, same as Amara does. It's horrifying. Side note: Amara abd Jack can eat angels; they're even higher level predators.

But anyway, compared to being an angel, Cas sees hunting as a quaint, honorable, acceptable level of warriordom, and that's what he wants for Jack. He wants Jack to be a human, a hunter. He even compliments him on being a hunter (in 14x05 I think, with the witch necklace and the girl). When Jack loses his Humanity, that's a Bad Thing. Cas wants Jack nestled at the human level of hierarchy so that his power covers them..

Cas lip-services angels as Bad but uses His angelic connections and powers at every turn because he feels Entitled to use them for his own goals. He even feels Entitled to demand Heaven help him look for Jack. Cas will beat up a guard and break into Heaven if they don't let him in. That is, Cas will reject Heaven AND expect them to help him when he needs it. That's so...fambly of him. I love it.

In one of the Tombstone scripts, Cas feels frustrated that "everyone in heaven has a different idea of right and wrong." And just...it almost sounds like he is frustrated that not everyone in his family sees right and wrong as HE does. (It's why Cas can sink into being an Authoritarian at his worst.) He recognizes that empathy helps humans feel what is right and wrong, but he's very jaded about angel wars and politics. He assumes the worst of them. It makes me think so much of the notion of "women and children first" in many moralistic tales. That somehow, indiscriminate killing is fine but punching down, that is, killing "women and children" is somehow uniquely immoral. That's how Cas conceptualizes humanity for a large portion of the story. (Gabe, too. That is, he woobifies them a bit and gives them this cherished, pedestal-like status. He holds their sense of morality in high esteem, unlike the morality of the brutish gods and angels.)

He does not push Jack towards his angelic status at all, to the detriment of both himself and Jack. You can see this push-pull SO well in the AU!Zacahariah-Jack conversations, as well as AU!Michael-Jack chats. Even though Cas tacitly disapproves of Jack acting like an angel...until very, very, VERY late in the game, Cas conversely feels like Jack is entitled to utilizing the angel/godlike powers for Good (TM). Jack must wield angelic powers for the good of the universe, but that goodness needs to be centered on humanity. It must not punch down. That's hard on Jack...and confusing.

We get a glimmer of Cas's relationship to his angelic status with Donatello, and Meredith's script of that beautifully engages with Cas's notions of pretending to be something he's not for Dean's sake. Piggybacking on her view, if Cas engages with Jack's angelic-ness, soullessness, then he has to engage with his own! And if he does that, he faces how fundamentally incompatible he is with his loved ones, which is...horrible.

Anyway, I just think it's neat and messy. That Cas's locus of morality was originally located SO MUCH HIGHER. And now, all that's really changed for him is that the morality is located lower in the cosmic hierarchy. In a sense that's what God commanded, to love and woobify humans. Cas doesn't blink at slaughtering pigs, cows, etc. and neither will he really blink at slaughtering monsters, Others than rise to the level of Threat, etc. Being an angel is just doing that on a larger scale, without as many human hangups, and the hunters' issues with it are largely just their instincts and just...FEELING that frightening, frightening difference. It's why the scene in Absence is a scene of Mary admitting she's afraid of Cas.

It's why seeing a demon in Jack's body hurt so much. He finally understood the pain deeply. It's also why he didn't explode or react in an unhinged way, because he knows that he's done the same. It's constantly on his mind, even in season 14 when he chats to Jody. ("I took a parent from her.") Cas knows and is constantly self-shaming for his hypocrisy. With each passing year, his past actions grow more horrific in his head.

This is why Cas doesn't go nuclear with grief when Jack dies. He understands his own hypocrisy in even having the gall to grieve. And that's tied to his self loathing and shame.