Web Video / Metatron

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Metatron is a YouTube channel created in 2013. It is run by Raffaello Urbani, who hails from Italy, and it is centered on languages, video games, and medieval history, weapons, and armor. He has another channel, Metatron's Academy, which is dedicated to languages, and The Protectorate, which is about video games.

His main channel is right here.

Tropes in Metatron's videos:

• Crossover: He did a number of collaborations with Shad Brooks of Shadiversity. For instance, they both compared castles in Medieval Europe and Feudal Japan, with Shad looking at European castles and Metatron Japanese castles. He also banded with Shad, Thomas Riley of "Medieval Review", and Antony Cummins in tackling five medieval myths; Cummins discussed myths about the ninja, Riley about European armor, Metatron about samurai, and Shad about swords. Ian LaSpina of Knyght Errant and Joel Sutherland of KnightSquire joined them in a collaborative series called Medieval Mythbusters, in which they examine Excalibur (1981) from a historical perspective.
• Iconic Outfit: Metatron often wears a late 15th-century arming doublet when he's outside, indicating his passion for medieval history.
• Misplaced Accent: He is Italian, but he speaks with an English accent, having learned to speak English in the United Kingdom.
• Ninja: Discussed in multiple videos. Metatron explains that ninja in real life were actually spies and that the distinction of "samurai" and "ninja" as mutually exclusive categories is incorrect, given that "samurai" refers to a social rank and "ninja" refers to a job, and that there have been many instances in which a samurai has served as a ninja. He once reacted to a video in which Jazza made a couple of drawings showing what samurai and ninja were like in history, and he consistently praised Jazza for being largely accurate while occasionally providing a few corrections along the way.
• Omniglot: In addition to his Italian and Sicilian, which are his native languages, Metatron can speak English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Latin, Greek, and Japanese. He went to the United Kingdom to study English and become an English teacher, then majored in Japanese and minored in Mandarin Chinese. He eventually picked up French, Greek, and Latin along the way.
• Pet-Peeve Trope: Among all historical inaccuracies in modern media, he particularly hates Real Is Brown and leather bracers.
• Precision F-Strike: Metatron typically refrains from using profanity, only resorting to it when sufficiently angry. For example, after going on a linguistic rant about the crappy writing quality of a Cracked article...:
  Metatron: In conclusion, this extract is a linguistic travesty that manages to violate principles of historical accuracy, register consistency, and narrative coherence, in five fucking sentences!
• Rage Breaking Point: In this video, Metatron reads a Cracked article that talks about 21 different things that were considered normal in the Middle Ages but are now considered out-of-place. Just reading the first sentence, "Medieval times were, like, really weird." is enough to make him angry.
  Metatron: What is that? Gen- Gen Z? Gen Alpha? I don't even know anymore. Let's call them "Generation Digital Natives", the same people that have ushered in a veritable apocalypse of the English language. Their writing, if one can even dignify it with such a term, is a grotesque pastiche of abbreviated atrocities, syntactical abominations, and lexical nightmares that would make Strunk and White spin in their graves.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The name "Metatron" is taken from an angel in mystical Kabbalistic texts within Rabbinic literature.
• Samurai Shinobi: Metatron points out that "samurai" and "ninja" are not mutually exclusive terms because "samurai" and "ninja" is that "samurai" refers to a social rank while "ninja" refers to a job, not unlike a spy. In fact, Metatron notes there have been samurai who also worked as ninja.
• Sanity Slippage: Occurs very abruptly when reading "21 of the Weirdest Things That Were Normal in Medieval Times" on Cracked, and after reading the first five sentences of the article. He then goes on an unapologetically pedantic linguistic rant about the article's terrible writing quality.
• Self-Deprecation: Metatron has occasionally poked fun at himself for being pedantic. Sometimes, he deliberately doubles down on his pedantry.
  Metatron: [mockingly] "Oh, Metatron, but you're so pedantic. Pedantic. It's pedantry. You're the- you're the reincarnation of pedan-pedantic!" [sternly] You don't know pedantic.You've never seen pedantic in your life. You wanna see pedantic? I'm gonna show pedantic. I'm gonna show you... pedantic.
• Take That!:
  • He does not hide his dislike of TikTok, calling it "a digital petri dish for the cultivation of vapid content and the erosion of attention spans, a representation of nadir within human communication". He once stated that the author of "21 of the Weirdest Things That Were Normal in Medieval Times" defines the medieval period by what it lacks, listing TikTok, Target, and Popeyes as three of these things. However, he says that the absence of TikTok in the medieval period should be seen as a blessed state that should be envied.
  • Metatron does not like Ubisoft and refuses to accept sponsorships from them on principle. He says this is because Ubisoft has ruined the Heroes of Might and Magic series after acquiring it from The 3DO Company.
    Metatron [holding up a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic III] You see this, Ubisoft? You see it? This... is perfection. And you ruined the series.