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.

i mean I’m not saying every person who MU*s is some intersection of ADHD and autistic but

uh

…

i had something here

I know the chimpanzee one is under 20% even for Americans but that is still way the fuck too high.

Like if we’re ranking “pick one to fight” in the options from chimp down I’m taking wolf over chimp. Crocodile if I can call “annoy/ flee until it gets bored” a win.

Chimpanzees are faster, stronger, and meaner than you think. That part of Nope (2022) is basically a documentary.

@RightMeow said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

Magic obviously too. What was yours? I like to hear the personal spins on rostered/non-OC characters.

Oh, and magic too, didn’t answer that.

So I’m proud of this one–this takes a sec but bear with me. Years back @Aria did an action to collect the oral traditions of the Prodigals Riven had been collecting into books. I started writing out some of these folk stories in the Whites, some of them involving an antagonist named Wildfire whose motive and characterization in every story was aggression and mass murder (and so the protagonist needs to think of something clever to either save everyone from Wildfire or to save Wildfire from whatever invincible opponent he plans on trying to 1v1). What I never told anyone outside of some Black Journals was that Wildfire was Thesarin’s nickname in his wilder days, and the story is a generally wildly fictionalized version of his pre-Compact exploits.

So fast forward years ahead and I need to make the decision about magic. I definitely settled on Adept quickly, study & control or invocation of a higher power really aren’t Thesarin’s Thing and my impression at the time was that Adepthood was tied to magic as performance-enhancer rather than more esoteric effects, which suited my concept. The Brand was simple; Thesarin has already tattooed his entire life on his skin, so he already has a forest of marks defining his identity; “they’re magic now” is a pretty direct step. When it is made clear to me that an Adept has a lot more options for magic than I’d initially thought, at first I do try to work out if I should expand things–can something else really define him? And my conclusion is “no;” he can try really hard at other parts of his life but when the question is “who is Thesarin Riven, what defines him, what is his truth” then as much as he might complain or regret it the answer is “he commits horrible violence.”

So then I’m thinking about it further, with the advice from people about how personal magic is, and I decide to tie in the Wildfire stories. So in addition to the preternatural prowess I’d already had in mind I decided to add in a fire effect when he gets going, where fire starts to pop up around him as he fights. Thesarin, the violence he commits, and the barely-directed fury and hate that drive him to do so are a metaphorical raging inferno, but because it’s magic there is also literal fire everywhere. He is the Wildfire of Greenwood and ash and death follow him.

@Roz said in Sandman:

(Something that was overall a rare occurrence in the Sandman comics, even though they were part of the DC universe.)

True to a point, but less so in the instalments being adapted for Season 1.

Off the top of my head, the DC legacy characters who were involved in Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll House included:

Wesley Dodds (1939 Sandman), Cain, Abel, Gregory, John Constantine, the Etrigan, Hell’s Triumvirate (borderline, since all the characters are public domain, but the triparty rule was the result of other DC titles so I’m counting it), Scott Free, J’onn “the Martian Manhunter” J’onnz, Dr. John “Destiny” Dee, Dr. Jonathan “the Scarecrow” Crane, Destiny, Matthew, Brute, Glob, and Hippolyta and Hector Hall (filling in the role of 1974 Sandman).

Also, while not present in the story, the absence of both the Bogeyman and the Family Man from the Collectors’ convention are plot-relevant, and caused by their deaths in Saga of the Swamp-Thing and Hellblazer respectively.

(Edited because I got the titles backwards. Feh.)

My revolutionary Free Councilor had me looking up some stuff on making bombs at home, which is definitely my biggest “watchlist” research.

My Arx Prodigal had me looking up pre-modern tattooing techniques. They range from the impressively hardcore to… well, just literally cutting patterns in the skin and adding some dye.

Yeah, gonna +1 here on what folks are saying about incorporating player backstories. Most people I know would love to have their PC history come up, it’s a great bit of collaboration and an excuse to get some great melodrama in.

There are only two big things I’d caution about, which amount to either retconning or resolving the PC backstory, which can seem like good ideas but can wind up upsetting players if they’re not handled carefully. (I’ve seen these more often in TT than online, but I think it still holds.)

Retconning is when you drop a big reveal that the PC only thought they knew what happened in their history and there’s some (usually dark) secret going on there. Ranging from your classic “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father” to full-on, like, “your history was actually a Total Recall implant by the bad guy and your life is a lie.” This can actually be really fun! But it’s a big change to the character going forward, and one that people might not appreciate implementing in RP. It’s not something I’d recommend doing without explicit permission from the player; even if it diminishes the impact of the big reveal, it’s just a huge risk unless you know how they’ll take it.

Resolution, meanwhile, can seem like it’s an unambiguously good thing but can actually wind up making a character unusable. The A-Team was sentenced by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit, so if someone offered them a pardon for a job they’d presumably be over the moon… and then if they got it they wouldn’t be the A-Team anymore, they’d just be Some Guys. If my character wants something they don’t have as a fundamental part of their character concept, getting it can be a great plot point that changes the character in an entertaining way that’s great to work through, but if it feels like it happens too fast or too easy it just winds up a letdown at best and makes the PC unplayable at worst. (“Oh, the banishment that forced my PC to leave their old lives behind and fall in with the game’s setting has been rescinded, and they’re free to leave the game and return to their comfortable happy life? I guess they… do… that, then.”)

I’d quibble with a few things, here and there. The first couple episodes were a bit heavy on that sort of “gentlemen, as you all know, we are cops” sort of exposition with Lucienne and Dream. A few scenes would’ve done better for a couple more seconds before the reveal. Abel’s murders are a bit less visceral than I would’ve liked. Some of the visual direction in hell wasn’t as strong as I would’ve liked. I wish they’d kept Alex’s Eternal Waking.

There are some other things that are active improvements over the book. Dee is a much stronger antagonist overall, and the way his arc is handled makes Ethyl’s amulet a much more integrated part of the story. Having Lucifer stand as Choronzon’s champion makes their antagonism much more personal. Introducing Merv and Matthew earlier is better because Merv rules and Matthew a) makes the “Dream and his raven” thing integrated from the start and b) lets Matthew take the useful narrative role of “clueless newbie who needs to be exposited to.” Integrating Rose and Lyta from the start is going to pay off in later seasons (knock on wood and curse the name of Netflix). Gregory was a much more clear and present narrative beat than Cain and Abel’s letters of commission, even if I hope Dream brings him back for later seasons.

I also liked how they really integrated the Corinthian in both the Burgess and the Vortex plots, making it feel a lot more unified overall. And I loved their take on Kirby’s Sandman.

I’m biased because I’ve loved the comics for at least twenty years, but overall, I loved this. Every casting choice was perfect and I want to see more.

But seriously, I love WoD. Both incarnations. They mean a lot to me.

People are talking about what a huge shift it was to be in games where women were playing, and that was a deliberate choice on White Wolf’s part. They were deliberately mixing up pronouns for both players and characters in play examples only a couple years after D&D was including sidebars about how “he” is totally gender-neutral and so they were gonna keep using that in every case thanks.

On top of that, they were a huge branch in the idea of who they thought would want to play their RPGs, trying to expand the appeal from the basement-dwelling pocket protector crowd to the pseudo-countercultural drama nerd wannabe author set. (I say this with all love to both demographics.) They did this in the focus of their writing, and they did this by going against the whole trend of RPG design at the time, making more and more ultra-specific rules cases for every possible eventuality (probably with a percentile chart) to rolling single-digit numbers of dice and counting high numbers on your hands.

They were a revelation, to me, in terms of what someone could do with an RPG. I know they weren’t the first people to make an RPG that went from “heroes in secondary world completely removed from our own fight monsters and get treasure” to doing something else, but they were the first one I dived into. They were writing with an eye on commentary on social issues and the world around them and the zeitgeist and a real intent of including more diverse ideas.

Now, I will absolutely acknowledge that they often did a really bad job at all of this. The social awareness and criticism were often profoundly adolescent. They frequently started from a place of “we want to really say something with our games and fiction” to unbearably pretentious “we’re doing real roleplaying for real role-players, people who pretend to be wizards in dungeons are doing baby games for babies, our games where you make pretend you’re a sexy wizard who fucks all the time and does magic with freshman-level philosophy is super deep.” The attempts at inclusion were frequently clueless to the point of being offensive, from with the Werewolf ultra-90s “colors of the wind” treatment of Native Americans to the weebtastic treatments of Japan and China (mostly treated as interchangeable) to… everything they tried to do with the Romani. One of the biggest influences on modern game design can trace its origins to a V:tM player who got hyped at the promise of a game about internal emotional struggle and then got a book whose rules were about badass fight scenes and that supposed focus amounted to “RP it out or whatever.” That image above where you get a talk about the seriousness of mental illness on the same page as the fish-smooch picture is really emblematic of a lot. I don’t want to ignore the gamelines’ faults, and for whatever it’s worth most of the people who’ve been working on the games for at least the last couple decades (barring a period right after Paradox picked up the rights) have been making active efforts to be better on these points.

The reason I’m familiar with these faults is because I do care about the games, a lot, and I think there’s a reason so many of us cared so much about them.

@GF said in Sandman:

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.

I don’t disagree, although I do feel like that particular criticism is one you could apply to World’s End but not to Sandman as a whole. There’s a lot of women in the stories from the start, often centered more than the title character for a given arc, and mixes up the “Boy’s Own” going-on-an-adventure sorts of stories with people sitting around and talking about their feelings (often with some sort of supernatural component).

@Aria said in Sandman:

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.

Yeah, and I couldn’t help take that comment she made about whether he was so eager to do horrible vengeance was because she’d belonged to him was a commentary on the male response–in fiction, but also in real life–that men seem to leap on the (at least imagined) chance to fuck up sexual predators with violence without consideration to what the actual victims want. Seeing it in terms of their obligation or opportunity to perform masculinity through violence rather than any consideration of what would or could help. Calliope has been victimized, but she hasn’t been “fridged;” she needs to be rescued, but she’s not just there to motivate Morpheus to feel bad and give him license and motive to act.

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 […] This is not Dream’s story. This is a story that has Dream in it, but it’s her story.

Very much agreed on both.

Two more thoughts about the episode.

First was the Ric’s portrayal of himself as a progressive feminist. It was touched on in the book, but the real centering of how he depicts himself as promoting women and POC while being a self-obsessed predator with literally no regard for Calliope’s inner life or personhood is new for the show and I wish it was less relevant than it is.

Second was how this really makes me think of how Sandman really does harken back to the old horror comics that were long-defunct (killed by Fredrick Wertham and the CCA) even when the Sandman comic was new, never mind when I discovered it in the early aughts. You mostly got them in two broad types, either unrelated vignettes only connected by the narrator who shows up to be like “THAT’S SOME FUCKED-UP SHIT HUH, I’M ROD STERLING” at the end (Tales From the Crypt itself, but also series like the Houses of Secrets and Mysteries Cain and Abel were drawn from) and the ones where you have initially-unconnected stories that get resolved by the title character showing up ex machina to deliver some nightmarish cosmic justice (like the Specter, before he started hanging out with Batman and the Justice League). Sandman takes from both in terms of its story structure, and Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope are essentially one of each.

In terms of the content and structure, it definitely veers more into fantasy than strict horror even if the horrific elements are still present, but you really see the horror comic influences early on. The art in the first issues is extremely characteristic of the old horror styles, as is some of the content (things like Alex’s Eternal Waking, cut from the Netflix series, would’ve fit right in with a cackling Crypt Keeper giving some closing narration). It’s a connection that I hadn’t made when I first read it, but I think it’s a really cool influence on the comic that would eventually start to mesh better with Gaiman’s specific voice and sensibilities as a writer.

I know the chimpanzee one is under 20% even for Americans but that is still way the fuck too high.

Like if we’re ranking “pick one to fight” in the options from chimp down I’m taking wolf over chimp. Crocodile if I can call “annoy/ flee until it gets bored” a win.

Chimpanzees are faster, stronger, and meaner than you think. That part of Nope (2022) is basically a documentary.

@dvoraen Just as @Roz says, my understanding had been that Adept magic was restricted to physical enhancements. Work it harder makes it better do it faster makes us stronger kind of stuff. Being a sword dude but more so, as opposed to conjuring up a blood couch when there weren’t enough seats (Tyrval). This suited me fine; I didn’t need Thes conjuring spirits or throwing around fireballs, I just needed him fighting hard enough to keep up with the Second Reckoning.

However, after I did get the Threshold scene, I was made aware that there was no more restriction on the effects of Adept magic than anyone else. It was a difference of where the magic comes from and how it’s used. A Mage understands and commands the magic around them, an Invoker uses the power of a powerful patron (the Pantheon, a major spirit, the restless dead), and an Adept channels their own magic into power. Any one of the three could pick from all sorts of characterful effects.

In my case, Adept still suited me fine–again, I didn’t see Thesarin as taking on that sort of patron as an Invoker or doing the studied and intentional approach for a Mage. Adept seemed like the one that could express itself just in terms of Thesarin willing the effect into happening. But since there were all these options, I spent some time mulling over if I wanted to try a different sort of theme for Thes’ magic, if there was something else I/he could settle on for his definition; not that another option wouldn’t have included options for combat, after all. Even just in Thes’ family there was someone whose command over the land itself let her direct it against her enemies, someone whose magic could heal grievous wounds or cause them, and someone who could call down starlight to defend the people he cares about. I did give some serious consideration about whether I could figure out a take on magic that highlighted something else about Thesarin as a character.

Having given it that thought, though, my conclusion was that no, there isn’t anything else that defines Thesarin that way. Other characters are their truest selves as a singer, or a ruler, or an artist, or a healer, or a lover of the stars, even if they can fight when called to do so; Thesain would be the first to say that they are, almost certainly, better off for it. I decided that being true to the character meant keeping his magic restricted to enhancing his fighting prowess, plus the fire effect I mentioned that really just functioned as an aesthetic/thematic varnish on the fighting. (Plus describing how some monster that Thesarin had stabbed was starting to burn from the inside was cool as hell.)

Once I’d settled on that, I actually had a bit of trouble working out the whole spread of Attack/Defense/Utility/3 Cantrips. Attack was simple, “fight better;” Defense I more or less just settled on “fight better but defensively & don’t burn to death in the fires I start” (some people made some good suggestions on using the fire effect as a defense, but I did really want the fire to be a varnish on preternatural fighting more than the focus). I decided on magically delicious battlefield presence (inspire his side & terrify his enemy) and wilderness pathfinding as Utility and one Cantrip, although I kinda flipflopped on which would be which. For the other Cantrips I had Mage Sight, which took one, and the Legion-detecting Sight from Thes’ first Secret as another once I’d confirmed that it was different from Mage Sight and also from Soul Sight. (I also joked at this point about taking a magical Sight to determine what kinds of magical Sight someone else had, which could be called the Sight Sight.)

i mean I’m not saying every person who MU*s is some intersection of ADHD and autistic but

uh

…

i had something here

@RightMeow said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

Magic obviously too. What was yours? I like to hear the personal spins on rostered/non-OC characters.

Oh, and magic too, didn’t answer that.

So I’m proud of this one–this takes a sec but bear with me. Years back @Aria did an action to collect the oral traditions of the Prodigals Riven had been collecting into books. I started writing out some of these folk stories in the Whites, some of them involving an antagonist named Wildfire whose motive and characterization in every story was aggression and mass murder (and so the protagonist needs to think of something clever to either save everyone from Wildfire or to save Wildfire from whatever invincible opponent he plans on trying to 1v1). What I never told anyone outside of some Black Journals was that Wildfire was Thesarin’s nickname in his wilder days, and the story is a generally wildly fictionalized version of his pre-Compact exploits.

So fast forward years ahead and I need to make the decision about magic. I definitely settled on Adept quickly, study & control or invocation of a higher power really aren’t Thesarin’s Thing and my impression at the time was that Adepthood was tied to magic as performance-enhancer rather than more esoteric effects, which suited my concept. The Brand was simple; Thesarin has already tattooed his entire life on his skin, so he already has a forest of marks defining his identity; “they’re magic now” is a pretty direct step. When it is made clear to me that an Adept has a lot more options for magic than I’d initially thought, at first I do try to work out if I should expand things–can something else really define him? And my conclusion is “no;” he can try really hard at other parts of his life but when the question is “who is Thesarin Riven, what defines him, what is his truth” then as much as he might complain or regret it the answer is “he commits horrible violence.”

So then I’m thinking about it further, with the advice from people about how personal magic is, and I decide to tie in the Wildfire stories. So in addition to the preternatural prowess I’d already had in mind I decided to add in a fire effect when he gets going, where fire starts to pop up around him as he fights. Thesarin, the violence he commits, and the barely-directed fury and hate that drive him to do so are a metaphorical raging inferno, but because it’s magic there is also literal fire everywhere. He is the Wildfire of Greenwood and ash and death follow him.

@RightMeow So there were a couple big ones for Thesarin.

First off was his voice. The roster bio had him down as a man of few words, while my characters tend more toward sesquipedalian loquaciousness by default, so I found myself doing what I came to refer to “Karl Urbaning” my posts. (See, during the filming of Dredd (2012), the lead actor went through his script with a sharpie to blot out unnecessary lines because “Dredd talks less.”)

With that starting point, though, I wound up putting together what I think was a fairly unique voice for his dialogue (although I obviously had my inspirations) to make it clear that he’s not from around here without dropping in foreign words or zee fonetik aksent. Word order, dropped words, word choice that I wouldn’t generally use, so that were another character wouldn’t usually have thought something Thesarin ain’t oft had cause to reckon it. I don’t know that I always hit the balance of sounding off while being intelligible but I did try.

A bit more broadly, his whole… quasi-reluctant grizzled getting to old for this shit backstory built off of what was in his bio but was at least as drawn from other inspirations and characters as it was anything he came along with. Part of it was just being an over-40 surrounded by under-22s, part of it was just an appreciation for takes on the “old gunfighter” trope and inspirations from Bill Munny to the Bloody Nine, part of it was that his backstory had him as a super-popular barbarian war leader and I was working out what he might’ve done to get to that point. Also, I do just generally love the whole trope where the guy who generally acts as a level-headed voice of reason backslides and you get to see the person they were before they tried to work on themselves. I had been sitting on some of those “ague that walks, flood that laughs, butcher of champions and breaker of heroes, the Wildfire of Greenwood who leaves ash and death behind” lines for years and didn’t drop them until the endgame scenes.

& on the other hand, I enjoyed giving him some world-weary wisdom that he liked to drop over and over because sure he’s a barbarian warlord turned nobleman but he’s also a father of four. I always find it extremely funny hearing the stories from massive celebrities about how no amount of international acclaim or fanatically devoted fans will ever make their teenage children think they’re cool and I figure that applies just as much to fantasy heroes. (“Oh my gods dad we all know you lived in the woods a hundred years ago.”)

@GF He did a song called “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)”

Now, Courtesy Of The Red, White and Blue (The Angry American) wasn’t directly responsible for anything that happened in the wake of the September 11 attack on the WTC, and really Toby Keith wasn’t either. The end of the end of history drove the country insane, and the response was directed by the highest powers of government and abated by national media desperate to avoid being called “un-American” and eager for reels of unscheduled Middle Eastern demolition video to run at primetime. Some people were terrified, some people were furious, some people were all but openly gleeful that we had a new enemy to define ourselves against now that the commies were out of the picture.

Toby Keith didn’t start any of that, and he wasn’t the only person involved in any of that, but he tied his public image and his work to that angry nationalist hornet’s nest that defined America in the 2000s and most definitively with Courtesy Of The Red, White and Blue (The Angry American). That aggressive, jingoistic “with us or against us” warmongering that defined “American” by an eagerness for vengeance while seeing the sort of person caught up in trivialities like personal liberty, the rule of law, or whether the country we were invading had anything to do with the people who attacked us as America’s enemies would be his message and his brand from 2002 on when he released an album that had Courtesy Of The Red, White and Blue (The Angry American) as its opener and closer.

Again, I’m acknowledging that there are a lot of people who did a lot worse in those days than than release Courtesy Of The Red White and Blue (The Angry American), but Toby Keith chose to tie himself so tightly to that ugly part of our history (and a very direct “our” here–you might have inferred that this is a bit of a sore spot, something of a formative period for me) and he did very well off of it. He made it his identity and now he can be one more person for whom it is his legacy.

So, Thesarin had two Secrets, one as a direct result of the other.

The one I started knowing about was that he had some ability to detect Abyssal taint, and seeing it on the elders of his tribe (even not knowing what it was) is what drove him to break away as much as he could and leave, which of course is what brought him to the Compact in the first place.

Later I learned that it was because he’d been the Sword of House Redire in a previous life, and he’d inherited the ability to detect the influence of Legion, which is generally cool!

Yeah, gonna +1 here on what folks are saying about incorporating player backstories. Most people I know would love to have their PC history come up, it’s a great bit of collaboration and an excuse to get some great melodrama in.

There are only two big things I’d caution about, which amount to either retconning or resolving the PC backstory, which can seem like good ideas but can wind up upsetting players if they’re not handled carefully. (I’ve seen these more often in TT than online, but I think it still holds.)

Retconning is when you drop a big reveal that the PC only thought they knew what happened in their history and there’s some (usually dark) secret going on there. Ranging from your classic “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father” to full-on, like, “your history was actually a Total Recall implant by the bad guy and your life is a lie.” This can actually be really fun! But it’s a big change to the character going forward, and one that people might not appreciate implementing in RP. It’s not something I’d recommend doing without explicit permission from the player; even if it diminishes the impact of the big reveal, it’s just a huge risk unless you know how they’ll take it.

Resolution, meanwhile, can seem like it’s an unambiguously good thing but can actually wind up making a character unusable. The A-Team was sentenced by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit, so if someone offered them a pardon for a job they’d presumably be over the moon… and then if they got it they wouldn’t be the A-Team anymore, they’d just be Some Guys. If my character wants something they don’t have as a fundamental part of their character concept, getting it can be a great plot point that changes the character in an entertaining way that’s great to work through, but if it feels like it happens too fast or too easy it just winds up a letdown at best and makes the PC unplayable at worst. (“Oh, the banishment that forced my PC to leave their old lives behind and fall in with the game’s setting has been rescinded, and they’re free to leave the game and return to their comfortable happy life? I guess they… do… that, then.”)

@GF said in Sandman:

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.

I don’t disagree, although I do feel like that particular criticism is one you could apply to World’s End but not to Sandman as a whole. There’s a lot of women in the stories from the start, often centered more than the title character for a given arc, and mixes up the “Boy’s Own” going-on-an-adventure sorts of stories with people sitting around and talking about their feelings (often with some sort of supernatural component).

@Aria said in Sandman:

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.

Yeah, and I couldn’t help take that comment she made about whether he was so eager to do horrible vengeance was because she’d belonged to him was a commentary on the male response–in fiction, but also in real life–that men seem to leap on the (at least imagined) chance to fuck up sexual predators with violence without consideration to what the actual victims want. Seeing it in terms of their obligation or opportunity to perform masculinity through violence rather than any consideration of what would or could help. Calliope has been victimized, but she hasn’t been “fridged;” she needs to be rescued, but she’s not just there to motivate Morpheus to feel bad and give him license and motive to act.

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 […] This is not Dream’s story. This is a story that has Dream in it, but it’s her story.

Very much agreed on both.

Two more thoughts about the episode.

First was the Ric’s portrayal of himself as a progressive feminist. It was touched on in the book, but the real centering of how he depicts himself as promoting women and POC while being a self-obsessed predator with literally no regard for Calliope’s inner life or personhood is new for the show and I wish it was less relevant than it is.

Second was how this really makes me think of how Sandman really does harken back to the old horror comics that were long-defunct (killed by Fredrick Wertham and the CCA) even when the Sandman comic was new, never mind when I discovered it in the early aughts. You mostly got them in two broad types, either unrelated vignettes only connected by the narrator who shows up to be like “THAT’S SOME FUCKED-UP SHIT HUH, I’M ROD STERLING” at the end (Tales From the Crypt itself, but also series like the Houses of Secrets and Mysteries Cain and Abel were drawn from) and the ones where you have initially-unconnected stories that get resolved by the title character showing up ex machina to deliver some nightmarish cosmic justice (like the Specter, before he started hanging out with Batman and the Justice League). Sandman takes from both in terms of its story structure, and Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope are essentially one of each.

In terms of the content and structure, it definitely veers more into fantasy than strict horror even if the horrific elements are still present, but you really see the horror comic influences early on. The art in the first issues is extremely characteristic of the old horror styles, as is some of the content (things like Alex’s Eternal Waking, cut from the Netflix series, would’ve fit right in with a cackling Crypt Keeper giving some closing narration). It’s a connection that I hadn’t made when I first read it, but I think it’s a really cool influence on the comic that would eventually start to mesh better with Gaiman’s specific voice and sensibilities as a writer.

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.