Not that you should feel sorry for him, or sit around boohooing it up. Whether he did what he did willingly, or whether he was manipulated into it, it doesn't really matter. He is still knocking off the friends, the freelancers, the people he used to work beside, like they're parasites that need to be stamped out, like they're not familiar to him at all. Like he doesn't even know who the fuck they are.

And maybe he doesn't. Maybe he barely remembers. Either way, it doesn't change what he's done, and what he's still willing to do when it comes to retrieving the AI fragments, when someone -- past friend, old friend, family, whatever -- is standing in his way, refusing to move. He'll plow right through you, and move the fuck on.

It would also be fair to assume that the Meta and Maine are two entirely separate entities. While Maine is most definitely the Meta, the Meta isn't necessarily Maine. The Meta is what's left of Maine, what's become of him after his mind's been squeezed through the AI wringer. And while the Meta will respond to his call sign (and his actual name), don't expect it to do you any favors. A nervously stuttered "Maine, come on, buddy, come on, big guy, you're better than this!" won't trigger some running-through-a-field-of-pacifist-flowers flashback, and it certainly won't stop him from taking off your head.

But he'll give you points for trying.

The Meta is adaptive and creative; if his target has somehow managed to evade capture, he'll figure out some ridiculous goddamn way to corner them against a wall, even if he has to physically embed them in that wall. He's stupidly strong, as intelligent as calculative predators get, and though he has trouble sustaining them without the AIs, he has a number of armor enhancements installed in his MJOLNIR that he's jacked from his fellow freelancers.

While he favors his Brute Shot, he seems to typically prefer close combat over ranged combat. Whether that's because it's just easier for him to snap someone's neck than it is to embed a bullet in their skull, who really knows. But who needs weapons anyway when you're capable of picking up objects that weigh over 3000 pounds and chucking them effortlessly across hundreds of feet.

It's tempting to classify him as inhuman, but that's not really a good description for him. He definitely has some crazy ass inhuman-like qualities, but he's not actually inhuman, nor is he immune to human weaknesses. No one's ever exactly put him down, though he has been successfully stalled and deterred a number of different times throughout the series. Red vs. Blue has made him virtually unkillable, at least to the main characters in the show, and his big, glaring weakness would have to be his lack of any semblance of sanity.

His armor enhancements also don't work as well as they used to, and he has problems utilizing all of them at the same time. This makes him considerably less of a threat than he had been in Reconstruction, when he'd been in possession of a number of AI fragments.

He can be distracted or led astray; it's just not easy to do. He's also been shown to randomly hesitate for ~mysterious~, unknown reasons, directly before bitchslapping a potential target into the next century. These are all open opportunities for someone to catch him off guard.