I sorta skimmed through the comic episodes that relate to the Netflix show. There was more changes than I remembered. Some are reasonable. I mostly just disagree with ones that are lazy/pointless that create more plot holes and fuck with the world.

I have no issue with condensing characters or removing the show from the DC universe where it was originally tied to. It's something the comic did in later episodes. None of it was really relevant.

Such as originally the character of John Dee was a DC supervillain called Dr. Destiny and the asylum he escaped from was Arkham. Not really important for the story tbh. Now it does change his character when he doesn't kill the lady that picks him up and drives him to the ruby. Originally ride gets more tense as time goes by and in the end a white lady gets shot for her troubles. In the show a random redneck gets killed and an older black lady gets a magical pendant.

Then there's Lucifer. Originally only the interaction in the end with the "dream of heaven" bit happens. Dream beats a lesser demon that had stolen his stuff. Dream never defeats Lucifer and Patton Oswalt has nothing to do with the game. I'm guessing their parts are elevated because of name/face/voice recognition. Awful casting choices still. I'm assuming girl boss Constantine was presented as she was for spin-off reasons.

The comic/show only gets better in the future. The part of the story that's covered isn't the reason why anyone knows the Sandman or Gaiman. The first 5 episodes of the show are roughly the original idea for the comic and vortex stuff is basically the sophomore album. Even the first 5ish ep's are relatively simple get your stuff back quest, but on the side it built a world that could fuck.

Oh and I wouldn't say that the early comics have held too well. Art is all over the place and it didn't really know what it wanted to be. The material needed "upgrading". Half assed port to 2020 and sprinkling gay/melanin all over the place just wasn't the way to do it. It works ok regardless. It's slightly more tolerable when the author is involved in fucking up his own legacy. The LoTR BS is more troublesome.

We are about 6 episodes in. Pretty enjoyable. I have had 0 exposure to the source material. At this point I full accept that most mainstream Hollywood stuff is going to be ridiculously woke with racial character makeup, and just try to judge the actual story. I find as long as the stories themselves dont devolve into some wokeastrophe (like with Wheel of Time) it is tolerable.

My wife on the other hand, it actually bothers her they made so many characters black/gay/ugly (or some combination of the 3). She says it just makes no aesthetic sense to have such a good looking male lead** and then surround him by a bunch of mostly ugly women. It is not even a race thing. I am sure there are plenty of attractive black actresses if they are so obsessed with going black (as opposed to actually having a real diverse cast like in The Witcher).


**Her opinion. I actually googled the actor because I haven't seen him before and I will say the hairstyle he has in the show adds a lot of points. When you see pictures of him with IRL with short brown hair his attractiveness goes down a lot IMO.

what vr system are you using?

Given up on tv while I play through xenoblade 3 and try to get back into vr fitness.

industry ep2 was fucking gooooood. im really enjoying this.

btw something im fairly grateful about; joseph gordon-levitt very nearly ended up co-writing and starring in a sandman movie and it basically fell apart in 2016 because gaiman refused to dumb it down to 90 minutes.

ok finished. thoughts as follows in no particular order;

the series peaked in episode 6. ep 6 was a solid 9 out of 10 stars across the board. and everything from the opening seconds of ep 7 on was an absolute fucking slog. out of the 160'ish minutes of footage in the remainder of the series, id peg about 40 minutes max that fit the first 6 eps.

so regarding the racial makeup of the series... i very much liked the reference dream made in hell to the woman in the cell being part of an ancient tribe of the first humans, i thought that was an excellent bit of world building, and i enjoyed how they morphed dream into the man she saw him as (black). i thought that was clever and nuanced and it sucked me in.

but at some point we need to ask; why is every single spoken word coming from either a black person or a white person? last i checked there were other races. 60% of people on earth are asian.

so yeah sorry but what the fuck? whats the point being made there?

gaiman loves black people like tarantino loves feet. i dont know where else to take this.

im about to tuck into the think-pieces on this weird ass series, wish me luck.

ill have a more involved opinion once i polish off the remaining 2 eps tonight but this rapidly became my principle concern;


does neil gaiman have a black person fetish?

The entire vortex arc was pretty boring. The cereal convention was fun. The source material was episodic and serialized. It was churned out with a pretty tight schedule. So there was plenty weaker material. It didn't really even get to full gear in the parts that are covered in the show.

I have no idea how it has held up. I ended up ordering the first 30ish episodes, Deaths spinoffs and Sandman's origin story collection. That's 1500 pages I'll likely never read unless I start smoking weed again. It's been more than 20 years since I read the first 3. Origin stuff came out 2015 and I never read it.

Ps. It was darker and weirder than the show. I think it originally started as a horror series and slowly evolved towards dark fantasy.

This was from two months ago...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASJb...el=JustSomeGuy

...roughly how I feel about it. The model wasn't Gaiman's friend though, she was the original artists friend. Race swap just changes the story. Bizarro timeline they are in doesn't really help. 1916 was the year when Sandman was imprisoned and by his own words he lived in cage for over a century. So it's supposedly around 2020ish, but they lift entire scenes with costumes/styles and backgrounds from the late 80s. That's just lazy.

The source material never was apolitical or non inclusive. Today it likely seems dated. Something you can expect from contemporary fantasy from 30 years ago.

Sprinkling gay and melanin in an effort to out do it's own past is just the laziest shit I can think of. With roughly zero fucks given on how it impacts even the scene they're creating not to mention continuity.

I didn't mind Desire's casting though since at least the bitch looks like the character and doesn't fuck up the continuity. It's somewhat silly if only reason for that choice was being non binary irl. Fairly sure there's this thing called acting that sorts these things out. For example Fry's characters sexuality doesn't seem too relevant nor do I know how sex works with scenery to begin with.

Death's actress is fine, but there's no contrast with her appearance to her personality and something is lost with the dynamic between Death and Sandman. Her outfit today doesn't mean anything anymore. And then the copout of various characters ability to change their sex/race to suit their environment goes out the window when Endless look the way they look in the comic when they are just among themselves. In the comic the pale white goth girl was Deaths true form and how she was introduced in the first scene with Sandman that's recreated in EP 6. Also why the fuck she looks the way she does in 14th century Britain though?

I don't think the show is just a cash grab. They just went with the laziest possible way to "modernize" the story. In about 20 years we might get the truth of how much it was Gaiman and how much it was Netflix behind this.

It's still something like 8/10 for a show and I don't mind seeing more seasons. But more than a dozen race/gender swaps seems a little excessive.

Then there's the issue of forced diversity from a perspective of a white man. At this point Morpheus is starting to look like a plantation owner. All of his "employees" live in eternal servitude. Everyone except Aunt Jemima had escaped in the beginning. They're being punished for being uppity. He erases one of them for desiring to be something else.

One of the few black men that was swapped gets a white woman pregnant while he's on the lam and get's locked up few days after that. Him being dead the whole time does very little to hinder any of this.

None of the swaps improve the story in any way and all they do is create weird plot holes.

Death in the source material is the only sibling that resembles Morpheus. Mimicking appearance is a very easy visual shorthand for affection. Their parents are quite white obv.

Desire is Rose and Jed Walkers grandfather. Guess they didn't get any features from that side of the family.

Unity was apparently from a wealthy black family that were very common in the first decade of the 20th century Britain.

I just hate girl boss Constantine in general. John knew how to behave around someone that can haunt your dreams for an eternity. People tend to do that when they're not wearing plot armor.

Lucifer isn't remotely believable as ruler of hell.

Oh and for other miscasts wtf is up with the raven that's playing Patton Oswalt.

im starting to fast forward through the rose walker scenes. 2 more eps to go.

aug 24 yall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ux_ipIsNyo

every single person ive heard express disappointment with Sandman had deep exposure to the source material, which i actually dont. so for me its a lovely little feast for the senses. for previous fans its basically something between a lackluster money grab and a vague homage. as is so often the case.

ill finish off the season tonight and report back but yeah, im having fun, shrug. like the world would be abjectly better if there were another 10-20 hours a week of material like this to ingest.

It was ok. I don't i agree with single deviation from the source material they made though. It doesn't really help that Neil Gaiman is always full of shit when it comes to promoting his IP. Somehow he's the least reliable source of his own source material.

Like he doesn't mind mentioning that only reason why he included John Constantine in the original was an established fanbase, but in the adaptation we're supposed to believe he was always going for diversity and only heard afterwards that they had problem with the rights to John Constantine. Like GTFO with that BS.

And then there's the trucker lesbian Lucifer. Originally the character is based on young David Bowie. I'm not exactly getting Ziggy Stardust vibes from tv adaptation. I have no idea why anyone would need to explain that with androgynous characters effeminate men and masculine women are not the same thing.

Death is whatever...

https://www.comicmix.com/wp-content/...1/Cindeath.jpg

...also the depiction was based on an actual person. Not really fan of rewriting history when it involves erasing the dead, because of a shitty fad that's already dying. Now obviously quite a few characters are able to change their physical appearance in this world, but the way they were presented when first introduced is part of the story. They read differently and the chameleon thing sort of flies out of the window when were introduced to ethnically diverse British Isles in the middle ages.

All of it is just so unnecessary. Maybe someone needs to remake Roots with an all Asian cast.