#the sandman essay

[so-i-grudgingly-joined-this-site]

About The Corinthian...

So, while I’m on about individual character analyses and The Sandman, I thought it was about time I addressed The Corinthian.

                Now, since he’s a nightmare, naturally the fandom is bound to ask exactly what type of nightmare he’s supposed to be.  I’ve seen a handful of great posts that examine him specifically through the lens of being a queer man, of how he represents the danger of intimacy and “eyes that devour” in a culture where being any variety of LGBTQ+ is stigmatized.  While I think that analysis holds true, I also feel like that’s not the only way in which The Corinthian is a culturally relevant nightmare.

                The Corinthian is a man.

                He is a white man.

                With an accent from the Southern USA and (in the show at least) clothes and mannerisms that suggest some level of wealth or class.

                He can very easily hide the fact that he is a monster.

He can escape any human attempt at arrest, punishment, or justice.

                I feel like The Corinthian does not just represent a queer community fear, but a collective fear held by minorities—or at least minorities in America—more generally.  Obviously those fears are probably similar in other countries too, but his accent places him specifically in association with a region of the US infamous for inequality.  He also invokes the American Dream in his speech at the Cereal Convention.  I find it fascinating that the character is actually so much older than the USA, yet is associated so heavily with the country.   If he is the “dark mirror of humanity,” perhaps that says something about how the author perceived America?  (Note: the books were written around the Reagan and Bush Sr. years… notably bad times for minorities there)

                Complicating this otherwise near-painfully straightforward symbolism is that Cori himself is queer.  What exact label one might apply to him isn’t exactly clear and a matter of minor fan debate, hence my choice of the broadest label.  The Sandman Companion, the official analysis book from 1999 (which I am loathe to quote since I find it unreliable), states that The Corinthian “doesn’t have sex, he eats eyeballs” and that he’s “homosexual, in the sense that he prefers to eat the eyeballs of boys.” (It’s on page 57 of my edition.)  In the context of the time, I interpret this as Hy Bender and Neil Gaiman feeling that, somehow, audiences in 1999 would’ve been too shocked by the supernatural creature being outright gay that they made the strange half-excuse of “he likes men but not in a sex way, but in a murder way, which is also a sex way.”  Meanwhile, the Netflix version of the show features him definitely having sex with men in addition to eating their eyes (and sometimes without eating their eyes), while also flirting with the female serial killer The Good Doctor and eating the eyes of the female social worker he kills.  So, he’s certainly not heterosexual, but his eye-eating is no longer exclusive to boys… but heck if anyone knows what exactly to label him, or if human labels could apply at all.

                So, then, The Corinthian is a layered fear.  He not only represents a member of the majority who can hide a monstrous nature and commit injustice with impunity, but also the danger, perhaps, of someone whom you thought you could trust turning out to be harmful.  Someone whom you thought was “like you,” a potential partner, ally, confidant, or community member turning out to be the exact opposite.  One could also argue that from a heterosexual majority viewpoint, Cori’s queerness also functions as a “hidden danger,” at least for those who are intolerant.

The Corinthian, then, exists at an intersection that makes him threatening to everyone in some way, on an ideological level and not just a physical one.  Obviously, the whole murder thing makes him threatening to everyone on a base level, but, ultimately, it is not the fact that he has mouths for eyes that makes him monstrous.

(Oh, and one last side note.  I never found the eye mouths scary.  I actually thought he looked goofy the first time I saw him.  The dude can just faceplant in a bowl of popcorn and munch away if he wants.  The scarier thing would be having three mouths—imagine all the flossing! imagine the extra dental/orthodontic work!—than meeting someone who had three.)

If you liked this, you may enjoy my other metas:

My extra-long analysis of the endings and the implication of Morpheus being suicidal

An addendum to the above focusing on Season of Mists

Another addendum focusing on Fear of Falling

Analysis of Death of the Endless as a flawed character

@serenityspiral @duckland @notallsandmen @ambercoloredfox @roguelov

[densewentz]

more dreamling dad au bc thats just what i do now apparently i like lazy afternoon naps and so do our boys

[so-i-grudgingly-joined-this-site]

Oh wow, thank you for such a thorough explanation @orionsangel86! I have a lot of thoughts on this too, far more than could fit within the character limit of an ask, so hopefully this will come across as a coherent response.

I TOTALLY agree on what you say about The Kindly Ones. In general, I feel like the ending of The Sandman was incredibly insensitive towards those with mental health struggles, and the fact that few readers seemed to question that it was kinda fucked up spurred a large part of my meta writing. I feel like one of the most insensitive lines in the whole book is Lucien's "nothing has died but an idea" from The Wake. It seems so cruel to both Dream and to the readers alike. And then there's the whole way the book treats Daniel...ugh.

(I cannot reiterate enough that the only message I got from Daniel's whole ascension was "if you're mentally ill, kill yourself and someone better will take your place, and the world will be better." Which is one of the most yikes messages I've gotten from acclaimed media in a while. It took some mental gymnastics to try and find a positive spin on it or interpret around it)

I like the idea that Dream isn't a "bad person" because he does fundamentally care about people. What's tough is that I'm not sure if that was the authorial intent at all.

I guess this is kind of a preview of what I might write in the Kindly Ones Essay, but one thing that really trips me up is the fairy tale about the cruel man who abuses his wife and daughters until they finally turn on him and kill him--the tale told by the three old ladies (who are implied to be channeling the Kindly Ones themselves) to Rose.

Given the three daughters who tear him apart, and the fact that the short stories have heavy symbolic significance to the plot (see Fear of Falling, for example), I wonder if this is supposed to parallel Dream's fate. Like, we're supposed to cheer on his death at the hand of women because he's been a cruel misogynistic ass his whole life. I guess the big difference is that Dream is repentant and attempting to make amends, while the man in the fairytale never gives second thought to what he does, but still.

I'd say that maybe the intent was that we're supposed to see misogyny as an unforgivable sin, but then that doesn't explain how Miss TERF gets away scot-free and not even really condemned by the narrative. We know Neil Gaiman certainly supports trans rights, even back then, since he's very insistent that Wanda is a woman and deserves to be treated as such.

God I'd sure hope that Dream was just on a bad rebound with Thessaly; I still wonder if we're meant to think he really WAS cruel and TERFy like her, and thus, going with the fairy tale parallel, supposed to cheer for his death.

Going with the insensitivity towards mental health, maybe we were intended to see all of him as a hopeless irredeemable mess. Too cruel to redeem, too ill to be cured. Not even those-beyond-gods can make up for past wrongdoings. Just throw him out for the good of society.

A sort of, "You readers are silly for wanting to "fix" him, don't you know what happens when you try to fix a man in real life?" situation.

It's all horrifically cold--almost American Conservative Christian levels of cold, actually, which is perhaps the only hope I have that it wasn't the true intent, as I doubt "what Gaiman likes" and "what conservative Americans like" overlap much.

I also wonder if intent changed over time. The 1999 official analysis book went so far as to claim that Morpheus abused Calliope in a similar manner to how Richard Madoc had abused her; however at the wake Calliope herself speaks of Morpheus fondly. Gaiman has officially stated that he wrote the series as he went along, so perhaps he himself even waffled on whether or not Morpheus was a villain protagonist or a flawed neutral character. This is also why I'm loathe to cite the official analyses whenever I analyze the books.

Uhhh hope that all made sense? Like I said I have a LOT to say about The Kindly Ones, and like 90% is a mix of rage and negativity lol.

So, if you don't mind, I was thinking about that asshole who was rude on your Thessaly post by insisting that Morpheus is meant to be a bad person. I'm curious if you could expand on why you think he's not. I keep going back and forth on my own rereads, especially since the Thessaly relationship and The Kindly Ones writing seem to try and push in a "he IS a bad person" direction. I can't tell if my arguments that "he's just flawed and mentally ill" are fangirl goggles or legit interpretation.

Hey! I don't mind. So when I first got that comment, initially I thought the response was genuine, because it's been a while since anyone has responded to one of my posts in a bad faith way. I frantically tried to wrap my brain around the idea that I had missed something somewhere and that I was supposed to view Morpheus as a "bad person" because even after The Kindly Ones that has never been my interpretation. I then realised the response was just a bad faith troll from an asshole and felt relief that I wasn't wrong.

But I suppose it's all up to interpretation.

The issue is really with what you consider makes a person inherently good or inherently bad. It reminds me of that line in Good Omens:

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

Because I genuinely think this line has inspired a LOT of Neil Gaiman's characters, whether human or not.

I also get a bit wary nowadays when certain sections of fandoms start labelling characters, especially protagonists as "bad" because that causes a slipperly slope into accusations of "if you like this character YOU PERSONALLY are a BAD PERSON" (Example: OFMD fandom and the forever bizarre reaction to the character of Izzy Hands).

Dream is not bad. He is not good either. He is entirely neutral. He may occassionally do things that may be considered bad, depending on your perspective, but he also does a lot of good things as well. How do we weigh him on a scale of judgement? Are we to act as his judge and jury for every decision he makes in the comics? I suppose we could do, if we wished to, such is the fun of analysis, but I think the end result would again depend on the perspective and morals of the individual reader.

But I will at least give my own interpretation. I'm putting on my Anubis hat and weighing Dream's heart against my trusty feather. Let's see how he does. Under a cut as its long.

I personally think that for a character to be labelled as "bad" their actions and motivations must cause harm, whether to individuals or larger groups, without them showing any care or concern for those they hurt, in their pursuit to achieve their goals.

For example, Lucifer in The Sandman is still a "bad" character even though there is a LOT of "Sympathy for the Devil" type of perspective in The Sandman. Ultimately Lucifer is still selfishly motivated. He doesn't care about the souls or creatures that reside in Hell, and he certainly doesn't care about humanity. When he kicks everyone out of Hell in Season of Mists it causes havoc on Earth, and leads to the death of at least one child that we know of. It is implied that he does far more damage than is explicitly shown.

Thessaly, as previously mentioned, is definitely a bad character. She is entirely motivated by her own selfishness. She doesn't give a shit who she hurts, or the damage she causes in her persuit for revenge in Game of You. She is cruel and malicious and yes, also a TERF. She does not show any empathy or consideration for any character at any point, and honestly, even her little speech in The Wake comes across as crocodile tears.

Desire is a more complex character but still falls on the "bad" side of the scale because Desire also shows very little regard for others when playing their games or implementing their schemes. Desire is going to do whatever they want regardless of who might get hurt because like Thessaly, Desire doesn't give a fuck about your feelings. Desire is cruel. This is stated textually. Desire's motivations are also usually selfish. The only time I found Desire remotely redeemable was in Overture. Desire saved the universe. Though it is made clear that the only reason they saved the universe was because they wanted to keep living in it. It's worth noting that even though Desire is very much "bad" I absolutely adore them and consider them one of my favourite Sandman characters.

Now to Dream. Unlike the above mentioned characters, Dream's motivations are rarely selfish. Even in The Kindly Ones, I believe even if you interpret the whole thing as Dream's own elaborate suicide plan (which is only one limited interpretation) I don't believe he ever meant for as many people to get hurt as they did, it's just that he found himself in an impossible situation where things escalated to a point of no return. Also, since most casualties were Dream's creations, arguably he probably assumed that either he, or his successor, would simply recreate them once the situation was back under control.

Dream is a lawful neutral character. He has his rules and he must abide by them because "I contain the entire collective unconscious, without my rules it would consume me. Humanity would be consumed." (I know this is Netflix!Dream talking but I'm still gonna use it cos its such a good line).

The big difference between Dream and the above characters, is simple. Dream cares. He cares about everyone. He cares about literally everyone - the entire collective unconscious of the universe and he is so bursting to the brim with care and love for them that he is buckling under the weight of all that care. It is what is destroying him and it is WHY he is so depressed and so susceptable to making bad decisions on a small scale.

Every motivation of Dream's is for the greater good. When he sees what John Dee did with his ruby, he is almost crippled by the guilt of it. He blames himself for giving the ruby so much power that it could corrupt a mortal that much. He is easily swayed by Constantine to give Rachel a peaceful death, even though at first he doesn't think about it, it's not like he laughs it off and walks away - like any of the above mentioned characters would do. He listens to Constantine and agrees to show that compassion.

When he realises he once again has to kill a Vortex - something that is part of his duty as Dream of the Endless, something that is very much carved in stone as one of his rules, he still hesitates, even though he knew what happened last time and all the pain he suffered because of it. A fundamentally bad character who does not care would not have hesitated in killing Rose Walker.

In Brief Lives, whilst his initial motivations were selfish, he realised that his trip with Delirium to find Destruction was causing harm to others. When he realised that people were dying because of their quest, he put an end to it. He hurt Delirium in doing so, unintentionally, but his reasons for stopping weren't because he was bored, or because he had given up on finding Thessaly, it was because people were getting hurt and he didn't want to be responsible for that anymore.

When you look at Dream's actions on a wider scale, he is a good character. It is only on a more personal level that his flaws start to show through.

Where Dream's behaviour gets bad, it is usually because he has been hurt, and when he is hurt, he acts like a petty child throwing a tantrum. It is when his cruel side comes out, and its when he is most like Desire.

Nada is the most obvious casualty of this side of Dream. She rejected him, he threw a tantrum, and condemned her to Hell for hurting him.

Calliope tells Dream that she believed the "old you would have left me here to rot." We don't know how true this is, even in the comics, but the idea that there once was a version of Dream who might have discovered his ex wife was being frequently raped and abused whilst imprisoned and bound to evil mortal men and refused to help her simply because she left him is horrifying, but as I said, we don't know if it is or ever was true.

Ultimately, on the small scale, all it takes is for someone to tell Dream that he is in the wrong for him to relent and accept his misgivings. Constantine called him out on Rachel, so he did what he was asked to do. Calliope didn't even HAVE to ask for him to free her in the comics, he just showed up and saved her without question. When Death told him what he did to Nada was "shitty", he immediately put plans in place to make it right, even though doing so was risky and put him and the Dreaming in danger.

Even the situation with Orpheus, whilst seemingly harsh on Dream's side, his son told him to his face "you are no longer my father" and so Dream, hurt and with wounded pride, walked away from his son and refused to look back - but he still arranged for the priests to take care of him.

His choice of Thessaly as a lover is messed up, but he was messed up at the time. My view as mentioned in my previous post is that she was a rebound. They make it clear in the comic that he never approved of her murderous ways (and I have no doubt that he would also dissaprove of her transphobia, even if not mentioned explicitly).

In The Kindly Ones I don't view the situation as Dream being a bad person. I view it as everyone else being bad. Dream is caught in a huge cloud of depression and shitty circumstance and he is unable to free himself from that situation, and even when others can sense his desperation and pain, no one actually helps him. Dream's biggest flaw in The Kindly Ones, in my opinion, is not asking for help.

Because he is prideful, because even after all he has been through, he could not shake off that pride. It went full circle, he was back in his glass cage refusing to ask for help. Only this time, the glass cage was his realm, his subjects, his role as Dream of the Endless, and he could not change himself enough to free himself without making the drastic worst case decision.

My hatred of The Kindly Ones as a story, is not because I think it does a disservice to Dream, but because it does a disservice to every other character involved. By the end of that particular story, I hated every character who WASN'T Dream. Because I desperately wanted one of them, ANY of them, to actually help him. To see past his stubborn pride and hold him in their arms and shake him until he saw sense. Because the message in that story seemed to me to be that people are inherently selfish and so wrapped up in their own lives that they won't help you when you need it most. That there isn't even a point in asking for help. So what's the point?

But then I am fully aware that my feelings are complicated and partly projecting onto the characters and the story and well, that's all not really relevant to the point of this post except to ask you all to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

So back to your original question. I don't think Dream is a bad person. He is flawed, he is a character who when pushed to the limit will do drastic stupid things, but then wouldn't we all if pushed to our absolute limit? He is extremely depressed and buckling under the weight of the collective unconscious. All that unchecked emotion carried within him, and it is literally killing him.

So when weighing his heart against the feather of judgement, I think I can forgive him some bad behaviour towards some ex lovers in the grand scheme of all he has done. As flawed characters go, he's hardly the worst, and the feather is still heavier than his heart.

[bludpudding]

I keep seeing people saying the corinthian and the cat king should meet and as much as I agree I think the more important topic of discussion is who tops

[thefallenangel2008]

Alright , I just wanna say that... DEATH KNOWS ABOUT EDWIN AND CHARLES' BUSINESS AND THE FACT THAT THEY'RE RUNNING AWAY FROM HER BECAUSE MY GIRL AIN'T STUPID, SHE'S THE SECOND OLDEST OF THE ENDLESS AND IS OLDER THAN THE UNIVERSE ITSELF. IF SHE'S STUPID THEN WHAT AM I???

[colleendoran]

OK, so you are looking at a comic I did back in 1990 that changed my life in so many ways. Not the way you’re thinking of.

It taught me some very important lessons about the comics business, fame, and more importantly, how fame doesn’t rub off. And how having reasonable expectations will keep you centered and on the right path.

Many people don’t internalize this lesson. And now that our industry is no longer just Fandom Culture but is now Celebrity Culture, we see more and more creators with incredibly unrealistic expectations getting into comics, expecting the sun and moon to rise out of whatever they do, and being disappointed and frustrated when they don't.

I got occasional mainstream comics work in the early 1980’s, but I was still looking for my big break years later, especially since a major gig I was working on got shelved forever. I cannot even begin to tell you just how much being out of the eyes of the market for YEARS at a time while you work on a gig - and then the gig never coming out - can absolutely sink your brand.

Nowadays we have social media. Back then, you had no way to be seen if your work wasn’t being published. People forgot about you in about 15 minutes.

So when I got a gig working on Amazing Spider-Man, you bet I was thrilled. And even more thrilled when the darned thing sold like crazy. This issue of Amazing Spider-Man outsold previous Todd MacFarlane issues. And I knew Marvel was looking for a new artist. Huzzah! I outsold Todd! Maybe the new artist should be me!

You can imagine how pleased and excited I was to go to conventions and sign copies of a book that hundreds of thousands of fans bought. It was fun getting my first big lines of fans. I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to push my other works to them as well.

But few Spider-Man fans were interested in my other books. They could not possibly care less about Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld, that’s for sure.

The Spider-Man glow was gone in no time. And Marvel picked Erik Larsen to be the regular artist.

I might as well have never worked on Spider-Man for all the long term good it did. Were it not for that one brief shining moment of royalty check (which was darned good,) it had no effect on my prospects.

While I got more work at Marvel, I was scrambling to make a living and took on too much, doing sub-par art that didn’t please anyone.

I realized pretty quickly that Spider-Man’s fans weren’t my fans. I might as well have been a spark plug on that issue. Fans lined up, got me to sign a book, and forgot about me the next day. 

(Yeah I know some people say they love that comic, but I often hear from people who tell me how much they hated my art back then and how much they grew to love it later. Thank you, I’ll take it.)

Anyway, it was all a very tough lesson. But I appreciate that I learned it early before I got to the point where I could never learn it.

Fame isn’t transitive. It doesn’t rub off.

The public needs more than your proximity to something they know to transfer their attention to you and your work.

A lot of people got a taste of this in the early 1990’s. For a while, self-publishing was The Big Thing. I self published A Distant Soil and did well for some years, at one point making more than I could in mainstream comics, until the market crashed in 1996. A lot of creators thought if they just went to Image Comics, they’d all be millionaires.

That didn’t happen for almost all of them.

An old frenemy saw how well I was doing self publishing and assumed that if they just transferred their mainstream comics fan base to their creator owned work, they’d get rich.

But that didn’t happen. Their self-published work sold a fraction of what mine did. Their project died in the red. I never got my art back, including work from an unpublished future issue of the project. I remember being with this creator at a show and enduring their fury at how fans weren’t paying attention to them and their project. 

How could this happen? They were a star mainstream creator!

The mainstream cred did not transfer to the other work. The fans wanted the famous characters, not the indie project they were trying to push.

There was no point in explaining this either. I’d learned this lesson myself, but this person never learned it.

Most people never learn it.

How is it that I work on Famous This or with Famous Person and why am I not famous Too?

Because fame isn’t transitive.

I’ve worked on projects that got a lot (and I mean a lot) of buzz, but there are projects that didn’t necessarily set the world on fire that did more for me as an artist and for my finances than “big” projects did. 

Reign of the Zodiac and The Book of Lost Souls, both early/mid 2000’s comics with mediocre sales set me on a solid financial footing because they are two of the few regular monthly gigs I’ve done in all my years working in comics. That monthly paycheck paid more than the projects I’d done before them. The financial and emotional stability was beyond price. I loved everything about those projects. 

Except for their premature demise.

The one and only famous project that had a major transformative afterglow effect re: me and my work was Sandman. I met Neil Gaiman years before I worked on Sandman, before he was famous. I only worked on two issues. Many other artists were far more important to the project than me, of course. Then I went for nearly twenty years solid without working with Neil at all except on a pinup and short story adaptation of Troll Bridge that almost no one remembers. 

I started working with Neil again when he saw some art I did for a book for Tori Amos back in 2008. Tori Amos fans didn’t flock to my side when they saw it, yet another example of how Famous People Fame Doesn’t Rub Off. But I lavished time and attention on the project, did the art on spec with a completely new style and process, and showed it to Neil. I asked Neil if he’d take a chance at working with me again after lo, these many years and let me have a go again at adapting the story Troll Bridge that I’d botched in 1998. Neil said yes.

After The Book of Lost Souls got killed back in 2006, I could barely get arrested in comics and I wasn’t sure I had a future. I was shocked that Neil said yes. 

That Tori Amos job reestablished my working relationship with Neil and brought me to Dark Horse Comics, a publisher which had shown little prior interest in my stuff.

It took me years to complete Troll Bridge and during that time, Peter David contacted me to ask if I’d work on Stan Lee’s autobiography. That came out of the blue, and boy did I appreciate it. It sold like crazy, which was unexpected, really.

So I went from Not Being Able to Get Arrested in Comics in 2008, doing 1$ sketch cards and working for page rates I worked for in 1986, to Not Being Able to Remember What I am Doing Because I have Too Much To Do in 2022. I mean literally couldn’t remember I did a pinup for a gig back in February, and I not only forgot about it, I didn’t know it was published last June.

It looks like I had a super fast and fun run up if you’re just looking at my highlight reel. But it wasn’t. I’ve had peaks and valleys, (a few very fine peaks, the best being around 1993 and the other now), and sometimes the “big time” projects I thought would make my career held me back worse than the “small time” ones. “Big time” projects got shelved or came and went, quickly forgotten, and I said no to other projects while I was busy, and the one that got away ended up getting made into a multi-million dollar film franchise that would have set me up for life.

Ow.

If just being next to a famous person or working on a famous project was a guarantor of success, than I’d have been hugely successful every day of my adult life. 

That is not how it works.

Even the famous people are not as all that as you think, otherwise you wouldn’t see so many actors with haunted looks on their faces at conventions.

I met Neil before he was famous, but it took over thirty years for me to establish a solid working relationship with him.

Thirty. 

Years.

I’ve worked with famous wrestlers, actors, musicians, politicians, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and on almost every single major licensed character there is. And I’m not super-famous or rich. I mean, I never wanted to be famous in the first place, but I’m not completely unknown in my field, and I’m not poor (anymore). Still, seriously, folks. I’m not going to movie premieres and living in Hollywood. 

I actually get asked about that, and I think it’s so funny.

I was watching some recent art auctions, and I was absolutely shocked to see original pages by an Eisner-nominated creator go for rock bottom prices, mainstream interiors at around $50 per page. I could not believe it. This artist is over 40 years old. I wonder if things will turn around for them.

Time will tell.

In the end, it’s not all about the people you’re standing next to. Or the character. Or the company. Or the award. And it's certainly not all about you.

Fans are here for you one minute, and forget about you tomorrow. Then you get $50 for your Eisner nominated art.

Art either takes off or it doesn’t. You either take off or you don’t. 

And then you can fly too close to the sun and fall.

Worse yet…you just fade and no one even notices that you crashed beautifully into the surf.

If people knew what the magic formula was, they’d be selling it and everyone would have what they want out of their art life.

But there is no magic formula. There just isn’t.

Everyone wants to be special to someone. Especially artists. Everything you create is special to you.

But it is extremely rare that what you create is as special to others as it is to you. Sometimes artists are just like everyone else. 

Here and gone.

Fame and success is not transitive. And they're not forever.

That’s the lesson.

I'm working on Good Omens right now. The Kickstarter pre-sign up news is here. No, it's not an icky newsletter, it will just let you know when the Kickstarter launches.

I have a Patreon. I'm funding the final volume of my space opera A DISTANT SOIL with it, but I won't be working on it again until Good Omens is complete. I have one of the most active and productive Patreons on the site.

I'm also on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Not too much though, they are distraction pits.

Make art because you love it. Because the rest...well, good luck. If it happens for you...it happens. And I hope it does.

[beeinatuxedo]

Just some GITM server stuff

All characters belong to @/venomous-qwille

[masscared-star]

nude.

[lenreli]

Day 30 - Bakery

[AO3]

“This is where you work now?” A deep, familiar voice says and Hob resists the urge to jump and swear, feeling Dream’s presence nearby as he focuses that the mixing bowls and utensils are clean and in their place for the day shift of the bakery. Even in space, and the fact that capitalism is no longer a thing, and yet things like bakeries persist to bring people fresh bread and desserts is comforting. Sighing, he turns around to see Dream, standing in place as blue eyes flick around. 

“Yep,” he smiles, which melts into a frown as Dream looks him up and down, the plain black shirt and pants and apron, the steel-toed boots looked at critically. Dream has a particular expression on his face. “What?” 

Dream tilts his head, stepping closer as Hob leans against the stainless steel countertop. “Aren’t you meant to be covered in flour or batter?”

Hob groans, scratching his forehead. “Actually, me being so clean after a full shift of kneading bread and making cakes means I’m at least decent at this job,” he huffs. “My teacher’s when I went to get into this industry drilled it into my head,” he pouts, crossing his arms. Sure, the messy baker with flour on their face and clothes is cute in fiction, but not true to real life, especially in a professional capacity. Home-style, maybe.

Dream frowns and gives him a once-over again, eyes like a brand. “You have flour on your shoes.”

“I always end up with something on my shoes,” Hob sighs and rolls his eyes, stepping forward so he can put his arms around Dream’s waist, “nothing a splash of water won’t fix.” 

“And how much longer do you plan to live on this station?” Dream asks, looking around the bakery critically, a small window showing Mars outside, as well as the Milky Way. 

“Until they make an all-black space station for my partner, of course,” he drawls, grinning as Dream glares at him, lips pinched. “Are you here to take me home?” He asks, looking around the bakery as he makes sure that everything is in place, and he mopped and cleaned the place nicely for the next shift. 

Dream hmphs, hands coming up to frame his face as Dream pulls him into a kiss, eyes melting from a blue to black and stars, a stroke of the Milky Way being shown as Dream pulls away ― and pushes him down onto his bed. Hob hadn’t even noticed, mind only focusing on Dream’s lips and tongue as they kissed. “Surely you will not object to your clothes getting dirty now,” Dream purrs, slithering into his lap. 

“That’s what the laundry is for,” he croaks, his hands going up and under Dream’s shirt, scraping pale skin as they kiss more, deep and indulgent as Dream grabs onto his jaw, black nails digging into his beard. The spark of arousal is there, slow and soft as they kiss ― and then Dream grounds down onto him, making him wheeze into Dream’s mouth as his cock gets rapidly interested in the proceedings. “Dream,” he whines as Dream pushes him flat onto the bed. 

Above him, Dream smirks, one hand taking off Hob’s shirt while the other unbuttons his pants, cupping his dick roughly, and Hob shivers as a finger presses against his balls, stroking them. “It will be a delight,” Dream whispers, voice hooking deep inside his guts, cock twitching as Dream bites at his collarbone. Hob whimpers, clutching at Dream’s hair desperately as Dream nips down his chest, tongue swirling around his nipples, then down― “to mess up such a man, so good at his job.”

Hob shivers, gasping and closing as a pink mouth reaches his cock, eyes full of the Milky Way staring up at him as Dream swallows him. Hob can only pant and moan Dream’s name as Dream sucks him to a maddening orgasm.

[landwriter]

PSA: The Death of Translation has been translated into Chinese! Go give it love, or read my rambling essay and then go give it love:

翻譯之死 by @thirrith

How do you translate a story where meaning hinges not only on the words themselves, but the meaning made by the reader's knowledge of their obscurity? Where misspellings aren't misspellings at all, but memories? Where sentiment is drawn from syntax differences? Well you start by being absolutely fucking brilliant!

I was so lucky to be able to hang around in the document while Eth worked on this. The level of creativity and diligence that has gone into this is mind-blowing. It is such a gift, and the process was incredible. It doesn't matter if you can't read Chinese - if you liked the fundamental premise of The Death of Translation, if you like language at all, you need to know how this was done:

Eth's translation is in Traditional Chinese characters with the addition of Classical Chinese and Cantonese to translate the Middle English. Classical Chinese - also known as Literary Chinese - isn't representative of how Chinese used to be spoken in the vernacular, which is why Eth chose it specifically for the written portions of Middle English...and those lines spoken by Dream, naturally.

Hob's Middle English lines are in Cantonese, which has the benefit of being older than and still at least a little intelligible to readers who only know Mandarin. Middle Chinese can't be used the way Middle English is used in the Sandman fandom (delightfully and gratuitously), because unlike the alphabetic characters of English, where words can be sounded out and phonetic spellings will exist in written record - a huge part of understanding how a language once sounded - logographic characters don't directly specify phonology. And even if they did, Middle Chinese spans from the 5th-12th centuries AD - making it contemporary of not Middle but Old English, and covered an area several orders larger than the parts of a small island where Middle English was spoken for about three hundred years - it's nowhere near as homogeneous(ish) or accessible(ish) as Middle English; Cantonese, despite being a different language, serves the same effect.

And then, the grocery list! This is where writing systems go ham. In English, it contains abbreviations, the medial s (ſ), archaic spellings/misspellings, and fancy old ampersands (one of the only logograms in the English writing system, I think, originally Latin's et and evolving over time into the shape of & - in Jane Austen's Persuasion you will find this aural history of 'et' instead of 'and', where &c is used to mean et cetera).

Eth used Cantonese, Simplified Chinese characters (a 20th century addition, faster to write, that Hob definitely would've embraced), variant character forms (which typically have a visual resemblance to each other), and 通假字, homophone characters that were conventionally used interchangeably with one another in Classical Chinese:

English and Chinese have such different writing systems and histories, and Eth has used all the compounding effects of that (upon things like phonology, modern-day intelligibility, writing system changes) to the absolute fullest effect and made choices that add invaluable implicit meaning to the story and characterization.

(As if that's not enough, the translation also features hot-linked footnotes that provide context for cultural references?! Literally everything a reader could ask for.)

And this is all super clever and fascinating if you're a big language fan like me, but the soft artichoke heart of my wonder can really be summed up best by this fact:

For many years I've loved the Jack Gilbert poem 'The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart', enough to put the first lines at the beginning of the fic:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko we write, and the words Get it wrong.

And for just as many years, I assumed Michiko was a place name, or some classical reference to art or literature beyond my plebby ken - until I saw Eth's note in the translation document.

Michiko, in fact, was the name of his wife.

The whole thing is such a testament to translation: the true deliberate practice of it, not just figurative language imagining a fictional character and his long-lived idiolect. And Eth's translation has only underlined my conviction that there is, sometimes, I feel, deeper work of understanding done - greater art made - and lovelier agonies to be had - in carrying words across languages than there is in putting the words down in the first place, in a first language.

[so-i-grudgingly-joined-this-site]

We Need to Talk about Death of the Endless

 Yep, I’m back at it again with my third “and yet another thing!” about Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman thus far.  In this case, it concerns one of the most fan-favorite characters in the series: the protagonist’s older sister, Death of the Endless.

[Essay as well as link to the google drive version under the cut]

            Since she’s such a favorite, I’ve noticed a tendency among fans—including myself—to automatically trust anything she says as “true” in canon.  Not only is she one of the Endless, the beings above even gods, she’s Endless that embodies death, perhaps the most fundamental function of all of them (yes, I’d argue even beyond Destiny).  On top of that, she’s also the nicest and most personable of the seven.  Part of the reason the audience likes her so much is because she’s so friendly compared to her siblings.  She seems like someone you’d want to hang out with, if that didn’t necessarily mean dying. 

She’s purposely made that niceness part of her function in-universe.  She admits that she used to be as fickle and cruel as her siblings, but later had the realization that it’s much better and easier to work with humanity when you’re a friendly face and a helping hand towards people having literally their worst (and last) day on Earth.  We want to trust her, and she wants us to trust her in turn.

            But she’s as fallible as anyone else.

            A major theme in The Sandman is the lack of perfection among supernatural figures.  There’s no perfect divinity here; the most powerful fundamental forces in the universe are embodied by a severely dysfunctional family with a tendency toward almost pathetic levels of immaturity.  And Death, as much as we all love her, is a part of that family.  Being the most put-together and friendly member of that family doesn’t make her actually perfect.

            Why is this important?  Well, I already touched on this in my first essay, but I believe a significant reason readers interpret the ending of the series as simultaneously a tragedy and a suicide (in a really awkward way, as I explained) is because Death herself suggests it is such.  I also recently saw a post (I have unfortunately lost the link) that suggested that Death’s reaction to Flower-Dream’s death in Overture and her reaction to Dream going off to Hell in Season of Mists were also evidence that she knew Morpheus’ death was inevitable and imminent and that he was suicidal.  Which, indeed, that could be the case.  But one line from “The Sound of Her Wings” keeps bugging me:

            “Look at you! Sitting here, moping.  It isn’t like you.”

            Supposedly, Death is the closest of the siblings to Dream.  And yet, she somehow decides that Morpheus being irrationally mopey is out of character?

            When I first read that issue, I assumed that maybe Dream wasn’t always this angsty, but of course the rest of the series bears out that, yes, Morpheus was always Like That.  Arguably, he used to be worse.

            Part of the reason the Endless aren’t close as family is because of the rule that they aren’t supposed to interfere with each other.  Apparently that even includes positive interference; at the very least, that’s the only explanation for why Death didn’t save Dream from Burgess’s fishbowl.  Well, the only explanation that doesn’t make her seem like a complete asshole.  It was obvious that Dream’s imprisonment was having negative impacts on humanity, and the deaths that occurred in the Burgess household meant that she had to have been there and known where her brother was.  So, either she must abide by the rules, or she’s a jerk, and I have to say I’d prefer the rules explanation.  But if non-interference extends to even positive events, then one can assume that, outside of scheduled family dinners that are likely related to the function of the universe, the family members don’t actually see each other much and subsequently don’t know each other that well.

            So maybe Death really doesn’t know her brother as well as she would like—or as much as we, the readers, would like to assume she does.  Maybe she really didn’t know he was struggling.  And even if her supernatural station as embodiment of death meant that she knew he was going to die, that doesn’t mean she automatically knows how, or why.  I’d previously explained how her encounter with Element Girl showed why she might have assumed that Morpheus planned suicide, but I think that story also shows that she doesn’t know whether death is inevitable or how someone will die either.  She spends most of that issue trying to dissuade Raine from suicide; she wouldn’t bother if everything was all just fated.

            (And shhhh yes, I know that the line from “The Sound of Her Wings” might just be a leftover from early writing where Gaiman didn’t know how the characters or story would be yet, but let’s ignore that and look at the text as complete and intentional for the purposes of this analysis…)

            So yes, Death is lovely and kind and one of the most—possibly the most—personable of the Endless… but that doesn’t make her perfect or omniscient.  We can’t necessarily take her word as “true” any more than anyone else’s.  To assume so would be to forget one of the core themes of the whole work.

@serenityspiral @duckland @roguelov @notallsandmen @ambercoloredfox @onehundredandeleventropicalfish

[bobbole]

The Corinthian, recreated, owes his life to Daniel (for it's solely for the purpose of finding and protecting Daniel that he's alive agin) just as Daniel is brought to safety thanks to the Corinthian (so he owes his salvation to the Nightmare). There is something extraordinarily beautiful in the relationship of these two creatures so deeply bound by life (of each other) and by death (of Morpheus).

From this point of view, how different is the "journey" of the second Corinthian from the first. The First takes advantage of his creator's absence to escape and attempt to shape the world according to his personal vision (in the TV show, this escape, this betrayal, is then further extremized by the far more active role that the Corinthian has in all this). The Second's "journey" is not an escape, but rather a search, a rescue mission that at times even takes on the aspect of a "police" investigation. The action is therefore not one of distancing but of approaching.

And if the First, faced with the dramatic final confrontation with his creator, tries in a last, desperate impulse to strike (injure, kill) Morpheus, the Second physically places himself between Death and Daniel, with the aim of protecting him even at the cost of his life.

This is not slavish loyalty: in the chaos of a personality frayed by the weighty memories of the past (that's all I have, says the Corinthian), Daniel is the only fixed point, the raison d'être from which everything starts.

[gotta-bail-my-quails]

gotdam being in bed really does make my brain work better

[bludpudding]

shrek and sandman are the same to me in the sense that they’re both stories fueled by reimagining old tales with the intent to serve as satirical commentary on the state of the modern world

[raspberryjellybrains]

sorry in advance for becoming a persona blog. every day I stray further from the light of god.

[opiumvampire]

my friend’s boyfriend’s ex-goth mom keeps trying to offload her old accessories onto her (and by extension me) and today I was gifted what I have lovingly been calling the “Gerard Way Exposed For Plagiarism Shirt”

(featuring Annie)