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Sandman
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Well. If they had to depict the SA scene, I’m glad they did it with a camera zoom onto a word processor screen and an ugly musical sting.
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@GF Thank you!
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I just watched the new episode.
And I also made the mistake of reading two articles about the new episode after the fact, one written by a man, one written by a woman.
The episode was lovely. The articles… have me expecting that any conversation about Calliope’s story is going to be dominated by a very specific subset of male comic nerds who are too fucking stupid to even understand what happened, let alone be entitled to write paid think-pieces about it in popular media.
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@Aria Well now you gotta share the link. I am in the mood to see if I will laugh or get angry.
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@GF Have you read the comics? Because it’s VERY spoilery if not.
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@Aria I have. I’m very familiar with the story.
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@GF Well in that case, here we go.
The article bothers me because it’s so completely reductive about Calliope’s story, glossing over it almost entirely save to explain how it affects the men involved and Dream in particular. I find the last few paragraphs especially egregious because the author literally argues that before Morpheus had a Big Big Sad (which is tragic and horrific, but not the focus of this episode or what’s going on with Calliope), his real problem is that he cares too much and is just a sensitive soul who has always felt things too deeply.
Because, y’know, what he did to Nada at pretty much the dawn of humanity was just a real tragedy for him, I guess? And not, y’know, that he’s been a bit of a melodramatic, self-obsessed knob who is terrible at relationships since basically the dawn of time, to the point that even his sister is all “Dream, love. Petal. Pumpkin. My dearest bro-bro. Pull your head out of your ass for, like, five minutes.”
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@Aria I was first struck by how it’s just kind of badly written. I’m sure he thinks lines like “After bonding over their mutual bondage” are clever, but they just come off as clunky. I don’t even know what he means about writing in blood saving on the electric bill.
But yeah, his assessment of Morpheus is pretty shallow and idealized. He does not seem to understand that Morpheus has a lot of toxic masculinity he needs to deal with, especially in the story about sex slavery of a goddess where those traits are thematically resonant. I don’t expect a random dude writing wiki-style summaries of comic book plots to have a solid foundation in feminist theory, but this guy does need to improve his media literacy.
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@GF I am profoundly disturbed that the man claims to specialize in LGBTQIA+ media. I saw that and I reflexively said, “…Please don’t.” Like, out loud.
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The way I always read it is that the true tragedy of the story is Morpheus wants to be better. He can be better. He has it in him; there are moments where he is genuinely… well, human.
But he’s also such an asshole. Too proud, too stubborn, too stuck in his ways. He’s good enough to make people care for him and then he fucks them over when they do - sometimes because they do.
He knows this. He wants to change. He can’t.
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@Arkandel I wonder how the show will go, given that the comic is about him being unable to change and the show keeps talking about how much he already has changed.
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A good clarification there imho is that it isn’t that he can’t change, it’s that he can’t change enough and ultimately – without getting too spoilery here – the consequences of his fuckery catch up to him in the end, and he gets his comeuppance pretty unambiguously. As far as I understand it the show will probably stick to the plot from the comic there, because it’s great.
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@Arkandel I wonder how the show will go, given that the comic is about him being unable to change and the show keeps talking about how much he already has changed.
The parts in the show about how his imprisonment changed him were also in the comics to varying extents, to my memory. It’s not unique to the show.
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@Wizz Yep! And that’s kind of the fun part of all this.
I love flawed, imperfect but likable characters and Morpheus absolutely fits this bill. He can be (and is, often) both the hero and the villain of this story.
I’m rooting for him not because he’s a great person but because he has it in him to be one. And when he fails my expectations, when he comes >this< close to meeting his potential but completely fucks it up so badly, well, that’s why it’s so much fun.
It’s a great role.
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@Roz @Wizz Yeah, there are lines peppered throughout the series about him having changed, most of which he denies, as I recall. Not to get spoilery, but the whole incident that ultimately brings about his previously mentioned comeuppance is an attempt to undo change and return his life to something it used to be.
In the TV show, he seems to be embracing his own change more than I remember happening in the source material, which isn’t a bad thing. I don’t like slavishly faithful media translations anyway. I just wonder how it’s going to play out with this new take on the material.
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@GF Frankly while Neil Gaiman himself is so directly involved in it I’m not worried. It’s been very clear he’s not just a passive passenger in this production but has a lot of input in what’s going on.
This is his baby.
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@Arkandel Only tagging you because your post made me think of it: I hope no one is confusing me wondering about the TV series with me worrying about it. This is curiosity, not concern.
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If anything, perhaps optimistically, I think that Gaiman’s intent with the Netflix series has been to make the overall arc more of a cohesive whole. Using things like the Corinthian as a running throughline through the first half of S1 so that his role as the big threat of the second have is a culmination rather than a thing that happens, and giving him the agency to try to actively use Rose, Jed, and the Vortex to further his aims as opposed to only being related in that it gives an in-universe explanation for why all this random dream shit is happening around her. (And linking her to Hippolyta right from Doll House if things reach the point where we see them again.)
Part of it is the difference between binge TV streaming services and monthly comic book issues or even TPBs, but I do think part of it is that Gaiman is getting the chance to go back and write the story with the knowledge of where it’s going and how it ends. It’s fairly clear that the original work was largely written by the seat of his pants, and there’s certainly no shame in that, but the adaptation is letting him mindfully include themes and elements that were present from the start but perhaps not included consciously and certainly not with the awareness of how much of a role they’d play further on. (Gaiman has talked about some of the other ways the story might have changed, including a fundamental change to the way the series ends, that he included buildup for which never went to use.)
He’s also pretty clearly using the opportunity to make some changes to his stories with the benefit of hindsight, and Calliope definitely shows some of that. She has more agency in the show, taking the details the Triple Goddess gives her and realizing that Dream has escaped his confinement to call on him (rather than waiting passively for his release). It also makes Ric’s “inspiration” less graphic without making it too subtle to realize what’s going on (although, as @Aria 's linked article shows, still managing to be too subtle for some people. What really gets me is that this guy has obviously read the comics, where it’s spelled out in literal narration, but still apparently manages to miss this).
I also noticed that Calliope says that she’s going to try to change the laws that let her be bound in the first place, something that’s never even suggested in the original work. This actually strikes me as something that might be a big difference going forward, specifically when or if Game is adapted to the screen. The original work was always fairly clear that many of the “Laws” magical beings work under are unfair and unjust, but I feel like it’s a good thing to have it spelled out. Both because it makes the characters more seem developed to be aware of this, and to make it really clear that no the authorial intent is not behind the character who packs the most metaphysical punch.
I’m thinking about this in terms of Game specifically because, not too long ago, people were trying to use that story as proof that Gaiman had either “gone woke” or been bullied into appearing so by Wokedom and using Thessaly and the Moon as proof. (This was when they were also trying to TERFsplain to Rhianna Pratchett about what her dad’s opinions on trans issues would be.) I don’t think we should have to dumb down every piece of media for the sake of the densest or most bad-faith members of the audience, but while the trans representation and narrative in Game was frankly revolutionary for the time it is probably something that needs to be reassessed and reworked in 2022 on.
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@insomniac said in Sandman:
He’s also pretty clearly using the opportunity to make some changes to his stories with the benefit of hindsight, and Calliope definitely shows some of that.
I’m thinking about this in terms of Game specifically because, not too long ago, people were trying to use that story as proof that Gaiman had either “gone woke” or been bullied into appearing so by Wokedom and using Thessaly and the Moon as proof.I feel like Gaiman realized before the comic series was even done that he made a lot of mistakes. For example, there’s an issue near the end of the run where a character remarks that all the stories being told are boy’s stories, with no real women in them. In the context of his work to that point, it came off to me as him realizing and acknowledging his own implicit biases as a writer. That one passage makes me a bigger fan of Sandman than I’d otherwise have been.
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@insomniac said in Sandman:
He’s also pretty clearly using the opportunity to make some changes to his stories with the benefit of hindsight, and Calliope definitely shows some of that. She has more agency in the show, taking the details the Triple Goddess gives her and realizing that Dream has escaped his confinement to call on him (rather than waiting passively for his release). It also makes Ric’s “inspiration” less graphic without making it too subtle to realize what’s going on (although, as @Aria 's linked article shows, still managing to be too subtle for some people. What really gets me is that this guy has obviously read the comics, where it’s spelled out in literal narration, but still apparently manages to miss this).
Edited to add that THIS IS SUPER SPOILERY AND THERE ARE NO FUNCTIONING SPOILER TAGS ON THIS BOARD. If you haven’t yet seen the latest episode of Sandman but are planning to YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO READ THIS POST.
There’s a few areas where they give Calliope more agency than she had in the comics and I think they’re subtle, but very important.
In addition to what @insomniac has pointed out, there’s also the fact that while Madoc is tormented by Morpheus, the decision of what his ultimate fate will be is determined by Calliope. Morpheus clearly disagrees with her here, feeling that he deserves far worse than this brief brush with madness, but respects her wishes and leaves the choice in her hands. This is extremely important because the entire story up to this point is one in which her wishes, her desires, her choices haven’t mattered to anyone for the last sixty years. He also asks her what she’s going to do now that she’s free, to which she replies that she wants to inspire humanity to be better than this. This is also important because it reflects the power which she has, making her more than a damsel (read: victim) that Morpheus needed to save.
From a visual standpoint, the narrative also ends on Calliope rather than Morpheus. That change is extremely subtle, but it hammers home yet another important message. This is not Dream’s story. This is a story that has Dream in it, but it’s her story. It’s about Calliope, her bondage, her suffering, and her freedom. The story ends on a note of hope because we see her walking into a future that will be of her own making.
