A Game of You
Aug. 4th, 2020 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishBack 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 05:33 pm (UTC)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.