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.

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.

industry ep2 was fucking gooooood. im really enjoying this.

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

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.

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.

Some of it ties in to the future and rules of the Endless in general.

Dream can't kill any mortal that isn't a direct threat to the Dreaming. Similarly if an Endless kills another Endless they become free game to all other Endless and they're all replaceable. The idea alone is eternal, whoever is the embodiment of that aspect is not.

After Dream got back the power of the ruby John Dee was no longer a threat to the Dreaming and as such Dream could no longer kill him without repercussions. What wasn't shown in the show was that John Dee was already very much corrupted by the Ruby in the same way that Dream's pouch of sand had on mortals. You could say the character of John Dee was more one dimensional in the comic, but on the other hand it was strange that only the pouch had a corrupting effect to mortals. I liked the actor playing John Dee, but I don't know what is achieved by making him just slightly autistic about lying. The "miserable piece of shit who got warped" box was already ticked in the comic.

Regarding the pouch, in the comic Constantine merely forgets to take it with him. In the show girl boss Constantine's black junkie girlfriend steals it from her. In the comic there are no additional layers removing guilt/blame from Constantine. John Constantine's white fuckbuddy isn't a junkie that steals from him, she merely get's shafted because Constantine is a fuckup. I don't know what's the positive for swapping a black lesbian junkie to make a white girl look better and what it does for representation. Far as I know marginalized people have no issues finding "villain" roles.

that wasnt how i remember the girlfriend in the series.. i thought she wasnt a junkie, and that constantine forgot the pouch there with some other shit when she fled the relationship because lol drama, and then when she went back, she found that the ex had found the pouch and the pouch had drained her in so many words.

Oh I totally mixed that shit. Reading and watching side by side apparently does that. It was unfair of me to said the previous bit about the show.

In the comic the ex-gf was a junkie that emptied Constantine's place when John had a "work" thing for 6 months or so out of town. In the show girl boss Constantine bails the gf after few months to "protect" her and the blameshift is passed to Dream because reasons. Also girl boss Constantine still gets to appear apologetic for her ex-gf's faith without taking any responsibility for causing her death.

Kinda moved on to Lucifer's part as a reasonable excuse for sloppiness. Mostly because in the show most of her screen time felt forced.

There's 4ish Big Bads in the show. Corinthian, John Dee, Desire and Lucifer. In the comic none of them are presented that way in the early episodes. Desire might have been the most prominent, but even she wasn't too underlined as a Big Bad. She does whatever the fuck she wants just because she feels like it.

The weird random monologue Lucifer has in the end of the show never happens in the comic and it would be pretty weird because spoiler reasons. There is a singular line in the comic from Lucifer in the earlier hell scene where he does promise to destroy Dream, but there isn't any seething or grand scheme involved. In the show Lucifer comes of as a poor man's Dr. No. Without spoiling too much, in the comic Lucifer also fulfills his promise in character appropriate way.

Basically the show Lucifer got about 5x the screen time compared to her comic equivalent and the same holds true for the raven playing Patton Oswalt. Regarding voice acting, Mark Hamill also has a major part in the show, but I'm guessing most people wouldn't even know, because he can actually do voice acting.

Other problems that I glanced at came from moving the timeline 30+ years. It gets weird when scenes are a combination of late 80s things with 2020esque things and some things just become bizarre when only 1 element is "contemporary".

Say Unity Kincaid who fell into a coma when she was 12. In the comic 70+ years later it's reasonable that she is presented as an elderly Caucasian grey haired woman. In the show she is supposedly 112+ years old. Also from a wealthy black family in the UK that was able gather their wealth at the turn of the 20th century. The wealth aspect is important because we're supposed to believe Unity's family could provide for her care for 100+ years when she was comatosed. Contrary to the popular belief the UK's welfare state didn't do that at the time and I don't even know if modestly wealthy black families existed in the UK at the end of the 19th century.

Contemporary fantasy tends to work by changing fairly few things and then working forward from that point. The benefit compared to building a fantasy world from scratch is that you don't have explain everything. You can just focus on things that differ from our world. The world of Sandman was 95'% of ours in the late 80s. For a random pedestrian it was 99%. That was how most of the notable horror writers dealt with it. It saves time and often just works better. There's always the task of explaining how rules of this world work that you need to cram in somewhere in the story.

ps. I have been writing more in Finnish in the last year and because of that I have even less idea how compound words, small words or capitalizing things work in any language. In Finnish we mostly combine unnecessary amount of words, jam every small word at the end of them, give zero fucks about pronouns and capitalize barely anything. I have no idea why anyone would capitalize "I" in the middle of the sentence, but you or they are optional. I have even less clue what's the purpose of "a/an" or why the fuck "ice cream" isn't clumped together as a single word. Our word for ice cream roughly translates as icesque (jäätelö), the word for ice is jää and the rest of the letters at the end roughly translate to "sort of like". All of it is just a variation of gelato and that means just frozen.

youve definitely put a spotlight on how they exaggerated lucifer's presence for the sake of... well.. who knows... i only really have 3 thoughts there...

1) when you book gwendoline christie, you make it count

2) gwendoline christie has a really interesting pedigree in certain circles and its entirely possible that she knows gaiman socially (to say the least / put it politely). shes kind of like, the new ann magnuson. eg yeah she was in a big budget tom clancy movie but she was also rumored to produce some bootleg basquiat's after his passing (perhaps they were passed off without her permission, that sort of thing) and of course she was literally the girl david bowie murders and eats in the opening sequence in The Hunger.

so yeah we all know her from GoT but ive heard her roots run a lot deeper in certain groovy cultural cul de sacs.

3) gwendoline christie literally might have said 'ill do it but i want the role fleshed out please' and they would have probably been fine with it because like you said, again, they are moving things around _a lot_ to make this a more engaging (bankable) experience, so again why not?

i wish they had cut 10 minutes of footage of the chick and her brother going on wacky adventures and instead expounded on the laws of the eternals etc. because honestly im fascinated.

https://hyperallergic.com/754186/san...etflix-review/

id like to report a murder.

so to your point gimmick its really sinking in how much more sense that showdown would have made if it was kept between dreaming and the demon.

having him defeat lucifer with 'hope' is reallllllly a bit of a creative low point.

In the source material Rose and Jed have maybe a quarter of their shows "screen time" and it's still considered one of the weakest storylines. In the show Rose's neighbors get minutes they never had, mostly because what they do in their day to day lives just isn't interesting. They get more time in their dreams and that setting itself makes it more interesting.

Basically the whole Rose meets Unity event takes about 3 pages. Rose moves back to US and after finding out where her brother lives she goes on a road trip with Gilbert. They run out of gas and the closest hotel is booked for the Cereal convention. Corinthian picks up Jed on the side of the road after Sandman blew up the house Jed was trapped in. Corinthian has no idea who Jed or Rose are. Corinthian himself is only introduced at the beginning of the story arc and his masterminding activities are isolated to just "inspiring" fellow collectors.

The logic for all of the above coincidences relates to dreams being pulled towards a vortex. There were 4 major arcana (dreams/nightmares) that were unaccounted for after Dream returns and starts corralling his former subjects. Gilbert, Corinthian and duo of nightmares Brute/Glob.

Brute and Glob made their own version of the dreaming that was separated from the real dreaming, inside the mind of Jed where he escaped his abusive foster parents/relatives. This was where Lyta and Hector Hall also existed. Lyta was 6 months pregnant 2 years running and Hector was the superhero Sandman in this illusion. The first candidate for the new Sandman killed himself so Brute/Glob figured that appointing someone that was already dead would be an easy solution. Hector does imaginary superhero shit with the duo of nightmares as his "apprentices". Hall's also take care of Jed in this world and nightmares occasionally torment him. Part of this was a nod to former DC characters that played superheroes under the Sandman moniker.

After Gilbert recognizes Corinthian in the hotel he tells Rose to call Morpheus out load, if anything goes down. In the comic Funland is "attracted" to Rose because she looks younger than she is and during the assault Rose calls out Morpheus. That's how Morpheus gets into the Cereal convention. Jed is in Corinthian's car trunk the whole time, before Gilbert saves him. Gilbert only returns to the dreaming when Morpheus is about to kill Rose.

Why I think any of the changes in the show, related to above, is problematic lies in the reason for combining characters. You combine characters to save time and "character slots". If the end result of combining is, that it takes more time and increases noise in the form of too many fleshed out characters, then you fucked it up. In the last 4 ep's Brute/Glob are transformed into a random nightmare that does what the Hall's did in relation to Jed. Instead of doing something Halls play house and Lyta takes the role of Rose's mother. Jed takes Hector's spot and Hector wastes everyone's time. The Rose's neighbors, whatever the fuck they were doing while I fast-forward through that shit, is just pure filler that isn't entertaining now or in the future.

Audience has a limited amount of "character slots" that they're capable of giving a fuck about in a limited amount of time. Some of it is basic design. The separation of big, small and medium. The impact of contrast. And then more or less every element/fundamental is a variation of the previous. Say edges are either hard, soft or hidden. We fuck with threes because people need more than 2 and 4 to infinity is more or less the same. Contrast is just another word for different. In relation to values (light not moral thingies) everything can be grouped to light, midtone and dark. None of that is to say that you can't add more detail, but the running theme is that you can't let the details obscure the groupings. Simply flagged groups are instantly legible. When you do that even remotely correctly it simplifies the part that has a larger impact in storytelling. Focus/leading the eye. You have to make decisions. In still images the separation of foreground, midground and background does the work for you in outside scenes. Often in interior scenes leading lines do the same and everything in between tends to be just a combination of that and atmospheric perspective.

How any of the above relates to storytelling comes from the basic premise that there's no such thing as 37 leading men in a single show. Adding detail/depth isn't free. You can't get away from the 3 groups because they are relative terms. Time gives you some leeway when it comes to fleshing out multiple characters (detail/depth), but the cost tends to relate to requirement of contrast. Say you can create a new villain of the week, but you need to create some form of separation from all the previous villains of the week. Same thing goes for side characters. Done right you add depth to previous/future events. And you can keep doing that for infinity, as long as there's enough things to make them memorable/unique.

Don't worry, I also forgot what my point was. Likely something about rendering everything with same level of detail just makes everything flat. The actual level of detail doesn't matter at all.

Regarding storytelling arcs matter. Character arcs are how people read progress/degress and that's how feeling of motion/flow works with characters. I think story arcs are bit looser. With story arcs you can get a way with more or in other words you have more tools in your disposal to keep the audience entertained.

Now the scrambling in an effort to tie this with my gripes about the show.

In the show there was only a fast forwarded and squashed version of Dreams character arc. In the comic there's a more impactful personal growth arc. He starts from a lower point and shit takes time. In the comic it's a more personal journey and there are no magical negroes or a raven playing Patton Oswalt teaching him how to be a nicer person in the span of few episodes.

I can't think of any other character arc in the show. There was just a whole lot of added noise to detract from the story. They spent something like an hour detailing flat characters that are not relevant mostly ever and that "upgrade" served to flatten relevant characters. Let's just assume that there's no opportunity cost for screen time, because this wall of text was far too long 5 paragraphs ago.

And then all of the villains. Corinthian in the show does all of the things starting from the first episode. In the comic translated to screen time in the show he gets 30s in ep7, 60s in ep8 and then maybe 10-20mins at the convention. Now, if you want to make Corinthian one of the Big Bads of the season that's fine, but you have to scale the resolution. In the comic the resolution was appropriate for the impact the character had for the story, but in the show using the same resolution is pretty unsatisfying when you've given the character 3-4x amount of time, made it personal (related to protagonist) and have the character stick his fingers in every pie.

Fairly sure there was only one antagonist that roughly had proportional screen time compared to source material. About dozen characters were introduced before their time and I don't see how any of those decisions were beneficial for the story (the current block or previous/future blocks). Out of the other antagonists John Dee was more fleshed out (or had more depth), but I don't see why that's necessary for a character that's portrayed as slightly taller Gollum aiming for world domination after escaping from an asylum for the criminally insane (in the comic). The viewer is essentially brought in at the tail end of John Dee's arc.

For Lucifer's part I can't add too much, but if they intend to follow the source material in S2 then most of her time in S1 becomes problematic. Having Dream defeat her at his weakest point with the help of his comedic sidekick is just a bigger crime against "show don't tell". I don't even know if there is a saying for "telling and then showing the complete opposite". Dream knew him when he was Samael and even then he was the strongest, wisest most beautiful of all the angels. Dream is wary of just meeting him in his own domain for a good reason.

I can understand why someone would see the need for a season long antagonist or an antagonist that ties seasons together, but it would have taken more work to execute properly and I don't think there's a need for it. Dream/Endless creates continuity and even in the Netflix show the standalone episodes were the most memorable (ep5-6).