Everything in the Heavens is pure (most of the time). Of course, Pure Is Not Good, so any gods or angels residing there might be too detached from the "impure" mortal life to understand some human feelings or maybe any of them.
This trope is in action when heavenly creatures are outright robotic or simply out of touch with human feelings and attachments, viewing them as unnecessary and nonsensical, and in the worst-case scenario, seeing mortal lives as worthless. This alienation often puts them into antagonistic roles. It's not that God Is Evil — it's that he just doesn't care.
If they are collectively on the side of good, however, it's usually because God Is Good or maybe they are Intrigued by Humanity.
Subtrope of Pure Is Not Good. Angelic Abominations, Light Is Not Good and Holy Is Not Safe can be expected.
Likely to be on the side of Order if there's an Order vs. Chaos conflict. If on top of being detached and logical they're also extremely rulebound, you may get a Celestial Bureaucracy. Likely to be run by Malevolent Angels.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In The Sandman (1989), when Hell is put up for sale by Lucifer, the Shining City deploys two angels to the Dreaming in order to observe the sale. Just as Dream is about to announce his intention to leave Hell empty, the Shining City suddenly intervenes, announcing that there must be a Hell, and therefore the two angels, Remiel and Duma will become its new administrators, even though neither of them have ever rebelled as Lucifer did, and even though it's clear that neither of them expected to get this gig.
- In Tom Judge: The Rapture, Angels, and by extension Heaven, are presented as this. The Angels are shown as apathetic and indifferent to suffering and insults and only concerned with enforcing decrees from Heaven. They are also fiercely militaristic and cynical of demons and humans alike.
Fanfics
- Lies That Bind: Averted, and very intentionally according to Word of God; much of the story is about exploring the exact reasons for the War In Heaven and the creation of Hell, and it's made clear that while the Archangels have some level of Blue-and-Orange Morality, they are most definitely not unfeeling, cold order-enforcing-machines. The conflict between them and Lucifer is presented as an ideological conflict that got way out of hand, born from different ideas on what was the best way to care for humanity. The one who comes closest to this trope is Michael, and that is only because millennia of being Heaven's protector has worn him down to the breaking point; he even explicitly apologizes to Vaggie for how she was treated by Adam, makes clear she is not considered damned for her relationship with Charlie, and restores her halo before returning to Heaven.
Films — Animation
- Kubo and the Two Strings: Kubo's aunts and his grandfather, The Moon King, want his remaining eye so that he will be as blind to humanity as they are.
- The Heavenly Beings in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya do not show or seem to understand any emotion other than joy.
Literature
- In the The Blood War Trilogy the Upper Planes are presented this way, In the first book one of the "patry members" Phaeton the Deva is presented as completely detached from how mortals live their lives, at one point he kills a Mook with a lightning spell only for a Dwarf party member to chew him out for it, claiming he should have tried to reason with him first, over the course of the books however he grows out of this as he lives among mortals, even becoming a godfather to a child, exemplified at the start of the third book where the party visits him on Mount Celestia, his Neighbours are a bunch of self righteous jerks living in white marble palaces with golden roofs while he lives in a more humble overgrown tower with a herb garden, when his neighbours find out that the rest of the party are fought in the Blood War they form an angry mob and try to have them killed.
- Grounded for All Eternity: Downplayed. Heavens' solution to Parris escaping into Salem is to simply smite the entire town to keep his influence from spreading, and attempt to go through with this even after the threat has been neutralized.
- Piers Anthony used a variant of this trope to justify replacing the Incarnation of Good in And Eternity: Orlene travels into Heaven to appeal to God for her dead baby's salvation, only to find that the current God is lost in contemplating his own greatness, and isn't paying attention to anything outside himself.
- Johannes Cabal: The title character claims that God is so obsessed with order that he scrubs the personalities off of everyone who enters heaven, simply for neatness' sake.
Johannes: That's what the Heavenly Host is, countless thousands of bars of light, souls burning, all the same. Your personality lost forever.
Live-Action TV
- Good Omens (2019) gives the side of Heaven more appearances than they got in the original novel. The angels are portrayed as unsympathetic, stoic anti-heroes (at best) whose main priority isn't saving the Earth or humanity but rather getting to fight a war against Hell, and go after Aziraphale for caring more about the former. They are so thoroughly detached from humans that when posing as one, Gabriel is... unconvincing.
- The Good Place has a variation. The residents of the Good Place are genuinely nice, well-meaning, and accommodating, but they're so detached from humanity and obsessed with bureaucracy that they are completely ineffectual against the Bad Place's machinations and prove to be no help to the heroes. In the finale, they're so jaded from centuries of impossible management requirements (namely, nobody can be happy in The Good Place anymore) that they fork all their careers to Michael the instant he fixed one thing about The Good Place and ran away screaming.
Mythology and Religion
- In Islamic teachings, angels are creatures of pure reason and no desires of their own. While they make good servants, they don't make good "Earth managers" — which is why God created humans with both reason and desire.
- Deism is the belief and philosophical position in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The reasons why this being is transcendent, but not immanent, vary; the general consensus among deists is that this being is impersonal and honestly doesn't care what tiny humans on this Insignificant Little Blue Planet think or do with their lives.
Tabletop Games
- Demon: The Descent: The God Machine is the closest thing the Chronicles of Darkness have to a traditional monotheistic deity, but — as the name implies — it's a cold and amoral machine who operates on scales too huge to care about mere people. Humans, along with everything else, are either resources to be used, threats to be removed, or simply insignificant and ignored. Either way, the Machine ticks on.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Stormcast Eternals are not supposed to be this, as Sigmar very much intended them to be heroic paragons to defend humanity. But the Resurrective Immortality that gives them the "eternal" part chips away at their humanity with each Reforging, until they eventually become this trope. It's a flaw Sigmar and his allies are working very hard to fix.
Video Games
- Diablo: A major problem throughout the series; while some angels (Tyrael in particular) care about the fate of humanity, the ruling caste and majority generally leave the mortal world alone, especially when demonkind eagerly rampage all over the face of the planet. They do give supernatural aid from afar (such as supplying Hope to mortal souls), but it's never a shield to stop a demon from stabbing mortals in the face.
- Shadow Hearts 1: The final boss is Meta-God, an entity that may or may not be an actual deity. (The offered alternative is that it's an unbelievably Sufficiently Advanced Alien.) The real Roger Bacon explains that it really couldn't give less of a concern about life on Earth; compared to it, we don't even qualify as amoebae. But the activation of the Float has drawn its attention, and while it doesn't care about humanity, that also means it could well exterminate us on a whim the way we'd wipe off a counter.
- Taken to the logical extreme in Tales of Symphonia where it's revealed that the Cruxis angels of Derris-Kharlan are beings incapable of emotion and feelings. This is the natural end state of all chosen ones who succeed in the Journey of World Regeneration, as Colette and the rest of Lloyd's group find out the hard way each time she succeeds in the temple trials. First, she loses her sense of taste, then her abilities to sleep and speak, until finally, she's unable to feel emotion at all. Lloyd gets around this by carving a Key Crest into her necklace, restoring her senses.
- Touhou Project: The Lunarians operate on Blue-and-Orange Morality that seems to fade away when they stay away from the Moon for some time. Because they're obsessed with purity, eternal and more or less amortal, the concept of death is utterly alien to them, to the point where they expelled Kaguya and Eirin for coming up with the Hourai Elixir (an Immortality Inducer that required both of their powers to work, and by removing the possibility of death, permanently marks the drinker with its impurity). In a later game, we find out that mortal humans walking on the Moon caused some severe existential damage, which is exploited by the Big Bad, who used a fairy made of pure life force dressed as an American flag to fight them.
- World of Warcraft: The Kyrian's portion of the Shadowlands campaign explores this; Bastion is the afterlife for souls who devoted their lives to serving a greater cause, and are expected to do so eternally as Kyrian, the guides of souls to the afterlives. They're generally benevolent, angelic beings, but to perform their duties are required to undergo Loss of Identity to ensure their impartiality; a Kyrian who maintains connections to their former lives might decide to abuse their power by taking revenge on souls that wronged them in life, like Uther did to Arthas. The crux of the campaign is a civil war between Kyrian who still believe in this path despite increasingly obvious flaws, and Forsworn who want to abandon it but are violently ripping the realm down in vengeance. It falls to the Player Character to sort this mess out and try to find a solution.
Webcomics
- Sorcery 101: One angel claims that its Jerkass tendencies come from not understanding mortals and their feelings. A human counters that it knows them well enough to manipulate people into serving it, it just doesn't care about people beyond their utility to the forces of Light.
- I'm the Grim Reaper: God is absent from his kingdom, his second-in-command is mindlessly obedient and refuses to disobey orders to stand by even though she could easily fix the Crapsack World Earth has become, and his third-in-command has partial clairvoyance and knows everyone is screwed so he doesn't see the point in trying to change anything. The fourth-in-command gives a crap about humanity, but is too detached from Earth to understand the damage she does whenever she visits. Even worse, the Akashic Records reveal that God was born without emotion or empathy, and had trouble understanding what he was experiencing when he finally evolved a sense of feeling. Episode 130 reveals that the purpose of existence is for God to understand empathy and themselves - by devouring Heaven and Hell after the final apocalypse.
- Zig-Zagged in Kill Six Billion Demons. With the corruption of Throne (this setting's Heaven), the angels have generally split into two factions. The Eyes seek to fulfill their original duties even as tyrants rule the multiverse, meaning they have to turn a blind eye to much of Throne's corruption to maintain the old laws and protect the majority of people. The Thorns have given up on upholding the old laws entirely, becoming more free but far less empathic to mortals in general, as many become mercenaries or spree killers. White Chain, as a member of the Eye faction, first appears as completely unfeeling, but that's more due to their mission in their existence souring them to life than to being intrinsically cold.
Web Videos
- A for Angel
: Ray insists that everyone should use their free will to do whatever they want, which makes her come across as extremely aloof, when Ray and Clementine are assigned to help a human girl with a moral dilemma Ray's attitude proves unhelpful to the point that that the girl notes that Clementine's advice sounds more like something Ray should be saying. Clementine's teacher actually suggests to Ray's teacher they should swap since they're both more proficient on giving the opposite sides arguments instead of their own.
Teenage Girl: Sorry, aren't you... (points at Ray) the one who's supposed to be saying that stuff? (points at Clementine)Ray: You're not the only being with free will. Rude. This is why you have no friends.
Western Animation
- Hazbin Hotel: Downplayed; season 2 reveals that while the inhabitants of Heaven, barring the Exorcists, are good, they don't understand how Mortality Phobia and suffering can encourage humans or demons to evil resulting in coming across as Innocently Insensitive. Even Abel and St. Peter, who are former humans, were in Heaven for so long they can't relate to the human condition anymore, because of that when Sir Pentious, the first Sinner ever to be redeemed manages to get to Heaven, they, along with Emily, who is a Seraphim and thus never understood humans in the first place, make a terrible impression.
Emily: [reacting to her attempts to make Sir Pentious feel at home in heaven instead making him try to blow his brains out] Oooh, maybe that didn't help actually.
Real Life
- When was the last time the afterlife gave a direct call to the public? Nobody knows...