A Game of You

[jazzfish]

Back to Sandman after a couple of months absence.

In which ... you know, this one is really hard to sum up in a pithy sentence. Barbie from The Doll's House (yes) has her recurring childhood dreamscape invaded by the Cuckoo, and she ends up trapped back in the dream, and the other residents of her New York walkup apartment building go into the Dreaming to find her.

Morpheus has been on the sidelines before, in Dream Country. I wasn't a fan then and I'm not one now. Particularly since this story feels so ... futile. Two deaths (of, as Delany points out in his intro, the transwoman and the only character of color), an encounter with the numinous that seems to be forgotten as soon as it's over, and... and what? So an old dream could die, so a beautiful parasite could live? It didn't make an impact on its characters, is I guess what I'm complaining about, it didn't seem to have any point.

And the less said about the story's biological-determinism approach to gender the better. I might -- might -- have been in a better mood about the story if it hadn't ended with Wanda's funeral and her deeply unpleasant family.

On to Fables & Reflections, which I have fonder memories of.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Yeah, I've always been mad at the moon in this one for shutting out Wanda.

[jazzfish]

Hear, hear.

[andrewducker]

Having just read back over it, I don't think it's The Moon shutting her out. It's Thessaly who makes the decision.

And in the end, the last time we see Wanda, with Death, she's definitely a woman.

The point (from my understanding, reading threads many years ago) was the ways in which trans women are frequently shut out from women's spaces. Gaiman is good friends with Roz Kaveney (and edited a couple of books with her) - who is a prominent trans woman in the British science fiction/publishing arena, and my memory is that he's got a lot of the "here are the bad things that happen to them" from her. Death is as close to a friendly authorial voice as we're likely to get here - and if Death sees her as a woman then as far as the Sandman universe is concerned she is one.

(I may be wrong with bits of this, it's been a good decade since I encountered this discussion last.)

[davidgoldfarb]

I was going to reply with these same points: if there's one being in the whole series who is presented wholly positively, it's Death, and she accepts Wanda as a woman. Don't make the mistake of thinking that Thessaly and her gods speak for Gaiman.

[jazzfish]

I responded to andrewducker above (below? stupid threading), but one point that I want to reiterate is that I want to be very clear on the distinction between the /story/ and the author. Explicitly: I have no beef with Gaiman qua Gaiman!

[davidgoldfarb]

Cool. I've read of people who did jump to the conclusion that Neil was actually transphobic, which he very much is not.

[jazzfish]

... that's fair. And Thessaly is absolutely a piece of work.

And I do believe that it's an accurate depiction, but... reality is no excuse. The way it comes off, it looks a lot like the story's saying "trans women are only women when they're dead." Not in the 'real' world, not in the fantasy world.

(I also want to be very clear on the distinction between the /story/ and the author.)

Bah. I'm writing from twenty-five-plus years in the future, and as a cis ally. It rubs me wrong, is all I've got.