I was never a mega fan but I really appreciated much of his work and these revelations are a shock. What shakes me is how carefully constructed his public image was - I totally bought into it. I liked to listen to his views on writing and creativity.
I tend to think what people are struggling with, in this case, is more than “separate the art from the artist”. They’re struggling with trying to reconcile the gentle and genial public persona from what may actually lie beneath.
I agree. The sad thing is it’s so easy to see how much of it was a lie now, but for all those years it was easy just to see it as writing. Morpheus’s sins were always there, but it was easy to believe they were just the stuff of fiction. We wanted to believe that.
I’ve been trying to parse out what about this article rubs me up the wrong way.
I’ll preface this with: Neil Gaiman won’t ever see a penny off me again, I believe victims and I am a SA survivor myself. So it should be pretty clear where I stand on that.
With that out of the road: The whole parasocial nonsense surrounding Gaiman for years was always nauseating. It’s unwise to put people on pedestals, and they’re not our friends because they seem “nice” on Tumblr are probably good takeaways. Maybe I’m lucky I’m just not prone to idolising people, don’t know. But I *do* love the Sandman, and have done so for a very long time. That never deterred me from seeing where it is problematic—and I could already see this as a very young woman in the 90s. So I’m honestly just scratching my head when so many people only now wake up to its misogyny (and racism). My guess is they’ve never really engaged with these questions before because they’re either white, male, or both.
Anyway, *because* the Sandman is a work of fiction, it is open to interpretation. You are of course welcome to your own, and much of the Sandman *is* ambiguous. But here’s the rub:
You also write things in your article that are just plain wrong (as in: directly contradicted by the text). And you present these things as facts. Which makes me think: If you truly read the Sandman as many times as you proclaim you did, how did you come to the conclusion that Morpheus “physically abused Alianora”? He “strikes her”?? He gave her the skerry to make good on that??? Can you show me the textual evidence?
No, you can’t, because there is none whatsoever. If you refer to that line about her scar between Lucien and Morpheus in The Kindly Ones, I’ll just say, “Read it again please, this time truly all of it in context, that includes Overture. He did not strike her, she received the scar defending the Dreaming. And yes, he was cold towards her when their relationship had run its course, and she suffered because she couldn’t get away to her own plane anymore because she had stayed in the Dreaming too long at that point. *That’s* why he gave her the skerry—so she could exist in peace, away from him. It’s really that simple. And it’s beyond me how someone who proclaims he has loved the Sandman for so long gets those very simple facts wrong.
Your retelling of his dynamics with his other lovers is also mostly questionable, or at least framed in a way not really supported by the text—neither with Calliope nor with Thessaly. Thessaly, in particular, sought him out in dreams first. “Love-bombed her into staying”? Where? They began to talk. He invited her to stay and was very nervous about it (these were Thessaly’s exact words, I’m not making them up). She agreed. She felt neglected when he resumed his duties, made a scene to which he didn’t react the way she wanted him to, and left. He was, however, clearly still infatuated with her (maybe reread the start of Brief Lives). Their love and communication was very immature—both of them reminded me of teenagers who are unable to communicate and only think about their own feelings.
So in short: Their affair hinted at miscommunication, being somewhat emotionally immature and generally being a terrible match. What it didn’t hint at: emotional abuse. She wasn’t even sure she loved him—she reflected his feelings back at him (there’s a nice sun/moon metaphor in that issue) because he loved her, and when “the light of his love” was off her, she didn’t feel the same way. Again, not making it up, her actual words.
And I also recommend rereading Calliope’s speech at the Wake, which also shows that he never “emotionally abused” her in the way it’s framed here. I won’t repeat how she describes their relationship, you can read it yourself, but the main takeaways are: He was a considerate lover who made sure she always came first (potentially quite literally ;p), and *she* didn’t want to live with *him* because she valued her independence. They had already begun to drift apart when she fell pregnant, even more over the years, but ultimately only fell out permanently over his treatment of Orpheus.
No, the pattern you supposedly spotted isn’t one of abuse. It is one of not being able to hold down relationships and becoming distant over time because he is Dream—the personification of unreality. Relationships that are real will always be a problem for him for that very reason—he can only do romance with pink goggles, but as soon as reality sets in, he struggles (that’s why the true love he ultimately feels for and finally extends to his son breaks him—because it’s REAL). He is a concept, with all that entails. I’m not sure why I’m even spelling that out, but here we go.
Nada is the outlier, not the rule. And even with her, while you are mostly correct, you omitted the not unimportant detail that he didn’t simply condemn her after she said no to his advances. He condemned her after she committed suicide. You might think her rebuffing him in death is the same, but contextually it really isn’t. Because this is a story about hope (which she lost because she felt responsible for the death of her people). About the power of dreams and story. About making your own hell (that take *is* potentially problematic in this context, but it pretty much depends on our own beliefs around the matter, and also if we take what’s said in Season of Mists at face value or as a narrative invitation to explore and question it). But I guess deeper literary analysis truly is dead these days…
None of this means Morpheus didn’t maltreat Nada in the most horrific ways imaginable, because he absolutely did. But more importantly: He gets punished for it. I really don’t want to go deeper into that though, this is becoming long enough as it is. But I never thought it was suggested anywhere he was above his sins. If anything, the opposite.
Your conclusions are your own, but people who know the source material as well as you proclaim you do might (and will) come to different conclusions. I just really think surface reading in hindsight (aka “reading into stuff”) isn’t helpful.
The most baffling take for me has to be how you relate to Madoc—that you think the narrative suggests he is supposed to be seen in a “sympathetic” light. With all due respect: If you see it that way, or ever saw it that way, maybe it says more about you and your frame of reference than about the story?
Which brings me to something another commenter already wrote: If you reframe the way you think about certain aspects of the Sandman only now, maybe you never thought about it very deeply in the first place? It *always* had racist and misogynist undertones. Not seeing them is a blind spot particularly common in white men, if I dare say so.
But none of this means that people can’t find meaning in other aspects of the Sandman, or that they now all of a sudden have to change the way they think about it, or that authorial intent always overlaps with authorial condonement, or that everything is a self-insert. All of these are very slippery slopes.
It is a work of fiction.
If what you have learned about Gaiman taints his works for you, I get it. Just disengage, for a while or forever. But the story hasn’t changed. *It was always exactly what it is now.* Since the news broke, certain corners of the internet feel a near obsessive need to reframe all his works in hindsight, in an attempt to go, “We should have known,” or, “We can never engage with it again lest we lose our moral purity.” That is precariously close to victim-blaming and self-flagellation. Because if we should have seen it, why didn’t we prevent it, right?
The answer is: Because we couldn’t.
These things can’t be known, and they also can’t be retrospectively inserted. While there never can be a true separation between artist and art, the assumption that *everything* is a self-insert or shows what the author truly thinks is quite frankly ridiculous (speaking as a writer myself now). We’re honestly only one step away from burning books again because they are of “questionable morals and ethics.”
And I’m not saying you’re doing any of this, but many people are in the process of it, to the degree that all they seem to do clobbering together “evidence” about seeing him in his stories. It’s a totally maladjusted way of dealing with it that does NOTHING to help victims but everything to keep themselves trapped in a loop of sadness, anger and centering themselves: “Oh, look at me, *I’m* doing the right thing by distancing myself from all his works while simultaneously spending all day angrily shouting about this predator so the world doesn’t forget”. Or, “Woe is me, I’m so disappointed, how will I ever cope with losing my comfort characters?” You know what:
How about centering the victims instead and let the stories be stories?
If we truly want to help victims, we need to stop centering ourselves. The way we relate to a story is really the smallest problem in this whole mess. So if people are feeling helpless and/or angry: Maybe donating to a women’s shelter (or helping out in one), not being a dick towards the women (or anyone for that matter) in our own lives and tearing down enabling structures in real life is a much better way to bring on change than navel-gazing or finger-pointing.
I know this turned out super-long, and some of this is only tangentially related to your post, but it *is* related to the way a lot of people have begun to frame works by flawed people, and that is problematic in itself.
You know, there was a part of me that was like, “Don’t reply to this person,” because you kind of got insulting to me personally and I usually just go off on people like that. However, I’ve given it some time.
To begin with, I’ve only read Overture once, so I completely forgot that Alianora was in it. However, I’ve read The Kindly Ones like a thousand times and that story heavily implies that Morpheus struck her after he was scarred the same way she was by the Kindly Ones. So, having basically forgot about Overture (which other than the amazing art I’m not really a huge fan of; it feels like one of those prequels that we didn’t at all need and answered questions - like the parents of the Endless - that more interesting unanswered), I went with my original interpretation of that scene, which was Morpheus struck her. I will remove those parts of the post. As for the rest of it, well, those are my interpretations of the text. You’re welcome to disagree. However, I don’t think that pointing out that Morpheus was abusive in a variety of ways over the course of the series and his life is incorrect.
Now, as for my “parasocial” relationship with Neil Gaiman, I’m not some kind of Tumblr kid who followed his posts. He was an author I looked up to and his work was important to my life. I can’t speak for everyone with neurodivergent ass, but I feel like it isn’t abnormal to look up to artists of all kinds, especially if their work have some kind of effect on your life. Apparently, you’ve never felt that way, so bravo. You are a better person than I.
I did my best to not make a “woe is me, the person I liked is terrible” post, but part of this Substack is talking about my personal relationship with fiction, something that I didn’t really get to do at other places I wrote. So, that’s what I did. Was I successful on that count? You obviously don’t think so. I apologize. I wasn’t trying to write as much about my feelings on the whole thing, I was trying to show that many of the things Gaiman wrote in The Sandman were very problematic and are even more so knowing what we know about him as a person now. I didn’t do it as “look at me, I’m one of the good ones”, I did it because I don’t see anyone else talking about it (and I pitched it to several big comic sites but the pitch was either completely ignore or, in the case of Popverse.com, immediately rejected seconds after I sent it in, much sooner than anyone could have read the pitch; make of that what you will) and it’s a conversation we need to have. As for writing about the victims, I’m not a journalist. I can’t get in touch with them and interview them. I could maybe just repeat what the podcast said, but what good would that do? I felt that maybe writing about his work in a way that wasn’t fawning over its genius or downplaying the more problematic aspects was the best thing I could do.
Part of me wants to write something snarky here because that’s usually how I do with this sort of thing. However, instead, I’ll say thank you for reading.
Man, I was out of energy for tearing apart arguments Sandman paints Morpheus as noble, his abuses of power as necessary and inevitable, and his assertion he can't change as something the narrative endorses long, long before any of the allegations against Gaiman. Mixing them up for some cracked "Gaiman wrote a comic about an abuser so he could disguise his abuse and get more groupies to abuse" ramble is just... I'm not sure I have words for it other than plain and simple idiotic.
If you're only NOW seeing Sandman's patterns of abuse, and deciding the story is told with favor towards them, then I'm pretty sure you were always looking at the comic wrong, and are just looking at it from a different blurred angle.
I was never a mega fan but I really appreciated much of his work and these revelations are a shock. What shakes me is how carefully constructed his public image was - I totally bought into it. I liked to listen to his views on writing and creativity.
I tend to think what people are struggling with, in this case, is more than “separate the art from the artist”. They’re struggling with trying to reconcile the gentle and genial public persona from what may actually lie beneath.
I agree. The sad thing is it’s so easy to see how much of it was a lie now, but for all those years it was easy just to see it as writing. Morpheus’s sins were always there, but it was easy to believe they were just the stuff of fiction. We wanted to believe that.
We can’t anymore.
Exactly. It hope that this will make me more discerning about public personas in future.
I’ve been trying to parse out what about this article rubs me up the wrong way.
I’ll preface this with: Neil Gaiman won’t ever see a penny off me again, I believe victims and I am a SA survivor myself. So it should be pretty clear where I stand on that.
With that out of the road: The whole parasocial nonsense surrounding Gaiman for years was always nauseating. It’s unwise to put people on pedestals, and they’re not our friends because they seem “nice” on Tumblr are probably good takeaways. Maybe I’m lucky I’m just not prone to idolising people, don’t know. But I *do* love the Sandman, and have done so for a very long time. That never deterred me from seeing where it is problematic—and I could already see this as a very young woman in the 90s. So I’m honestly just scratching my head when so many people only now wake up to its misogyny (and racism). My guess is they’ve never really engaged with these questions before because they’re either white, male, or both.
Anyway, *because* the Sandman is a work of fiction, it is open to interpretation. You are of course welcome to your own, and much of the Sandman *is* ambiguous. But here’s the rub:
You also write things in your article that are just plain wrong (as in: directly contradicted by the text). And you present these things as facts. Which makes me think: If you truly read the Sandman as many times as you proclaim you did, how did you come to the conclusion that Morpheus “physically abused Alianora”? He “strikes her”?? He gave her the skerry to make good on that??? Can you show me the textual evidence?
No, you can’t, because there is none whatsoever. If you refer to that line about her scar between Lucien and Morpheus in The Kindly Ones, I’ll just say, “Read it again please, this time truly all of it in context, that includes Overture. He did not strike her, she received the scar defending the Dreaming. And yes, he was cold towards her when their relationship had run its course, and she suffered because she couldn’t get away to her own plane anymore because she had stayed in the Dreaming too long at that point. *That’s* why he gave her the skerry—so she could exist in peace, away from him. It’s really that simple. And it’s beyond me how someone who proclaims he has loved the Sandman for so long gets those very simple facts wrong.
Your retelling of his dynamics with his other lovers is also mostly questionable, or at least framed in a way not really supported by the text—neither with Calliope nor with Thessaly. Thessaly, in particular, sought him out in dreams first. “Love-bombed her into staying”? Where? They began to talk. He invited her to stay and was very nervous about it (these were Thessaly’s exact words, I’m not making them up). She agreed. She felt neglected when he resumed his duties, made a scene to which he didn’t react the way she wanted him to, and left. He was, however, clearly still infatuated with her (maybe reread the start of Brief Lives). Their love and communication was very immature—both of them reminded me of teenagers who are unable to communicate and only think about their own feelings.
So in short: Their affair hinted at miscommunication, being somewhat emotionally immature and generally being a terrible match. What it didn’t hint at: emotional abuse. She wasn’t even sure she loved him—she reflected his feelings back at him (there’s a nice sun/moon metaphor in that issue) because he loved her, and when “the light of his love” was off her, she didn’t feel the same way. Again, not making it up, her actual words.
And I also recommend rereading Calliope’s speech at the Wake, which also shows that he never “emotionally abused” her in the way it’s framed here. I won’t repeat how she describes their relationship, you can read it yourself, but the main takeaways are: He was a considerate lover who made sure she always came first (potentially quite literally ;p), and *she* didn’t want to live with *him* because she valued her independence. They had already begun to drift apart when she fell pregnant, even more over the years, but ultimately only fell out permanently over his treatment of Orpheus.
No, the pattern you supposedly spotted isn’t one of abuse. It is one of not being able to hold down relationships and becoming distant over time because he is Dream—the personification of unreality. Relationships that are real will always be a problem for him for that very reason—he can only do romance with pink goggles, but as soon as reality sets in, he struggles (that’s why the true love he ultimately feels for and finally extends to his son breaks him—because it’s REAL). He is a concept, with all that entails. I’m not sure why I’m even spelling that out, but here we go.
Nada is the outlier, not the rule. And even with her, while you are mostly correct, you omitted the not unimportant detail that he didn’t simply condemn her after she said no to his advances. He condemned her after she committed suicide. You might think her rebuffing him in death is the same, but contextually it really isn’t. Because this is a story about hope (which she lost because she felt responsible for the death of her people). About the power of dreams and story. About making your own hell (that take *is* potentially problematic in this context, but it pretty much depends on our own beliefs around the matter, and also if we take what’s said in Season of Mists at face value or as a narrative invitation to explore and question it). But I guess deeper literary analysis truly is dead these days…
None of this means Morpheus didn’t maltreat Nada in the most horrific ways imaginable, because he absolutely did. But more importantly: He gets punished for it. I really don’t want to go deeper into that though, this is becoming long enough as it is. But I never thought it was suggested anywhere he was above his sins. If anything, the opposite.
Your conclusions are your own, but people who know the source material as well as you proclaim you do might (and will) come to different conclusions. I just really think surface reading in hindsight (aka “reading into stuff”) isn’t helpful.
The most baffling take for me has to be how you relate to Madoc—that you think the narrative suggests he is supposed to be seen in a “sympathetic” light. With all due respect: If you see it that way, or ever saw it that way, maybe it says more about you and your frame of reference than about the story?
Which brings me to something another commenter already wrote: If you reframe the way you think about certain aspects of the Sandman only now, maybe you never thought about it very deeply in the first place? It *always* had racist and misogynist undertones. Not seeing them is a blind spot particularly common in white men, if I dare say so.
But none of this means that people can’t find meaning in other aspects of the Sandman, or that they now all of a sudden have to change the way they think about it, or that authorial intent always overlaps with authorial condonement, or that everything is a self-insert. All of these are very slippery slopes.
It is a work of fiction.
If what you have learned about Gaiman taints his works for you, I get it. Just disengage, for a while or forever. But the story hasn’t changed. *It was always exactly what it is now.* Since the news broke, certain corners of the internet feel a near obsessive need to reframe all his works in hindsight, in an attempt to go, “We should have known,” or, “We can never engage with it again lest we lose our moral purity.” That is precariously close to victim-blaming and self-flagellation. Because if we should have seen it, why didn’t we prevent it, right?
The answer is: Because we couldn’t.
These things can’t be known, and they also can’t be retrospectively inserted. While there never can be a true separation between artist and art, the assumption that *everything* is a self-insert or shows what the author truly thinks is quite frankly ridiculous (speaking as a writer myself now). We’re honestly only one step away from burning books again because they are of “questionable morals and ethics.”
And I’m not saying you’re doing any of this, but many people are in the process of it, to the degree that all they seem to do clobbering together “evidence” about seeing him in his stories. It’s a totally maladjusted way of dealing with it that does NOTHING to help victims but everything to keep themselves trapped in a loop of sadness, anger and centering themselves: “Oh, look at me, *I’m* doing the right thing by distancing myself from all his works while simultaneously spending all day angrily shouting about this predator so the world doesn’t forget”. Or, “Woe is me, I’m so disappointed, how will I ever cope with losing my comfort characters?” You know what:
How about centering the victims instead and let the stories be stories?
If we truly want to help victims, we need to stop centering ourselves. The way we relate to a story is really the smallest problem in this whole mess. So if people are feeling helpless and/or angry: Maybe donating to a women’s shelter (or helping out in one), not being a dick towards the women (or anyone for that matter) in our own lives and tearing down enabling structures in real life is a much better way to bring on change than navel-gazing or finger-pointing.
I know this turned out super-long, and some of this is only tangentially related to your post, but it *is* related to the way a lot of people have begun to frame works by flawed people, and that is problematic in itself.
You know, there was a part of me that was like, “Don’t reply to this person,” because you kind of got insulting to me personally and I usually just go off on people like that. However, I’ve given it some time.
To begin with, I’ve only read Overture once, so I completely forgot that Alianora was in it. However, I’ve read The Kindly Ones like a thousand times and that story heavily implies that Morpheus struck her after he was scarred the same way she was by the Kindly Ones. So, having basically forgot about Overture (which other than the amazing art I’m not really a huge fan of; it feels like one of those prequels that we didn’t at all need and answered questions - like the parents of the Endless - that more interesting unanswered), I went with my original interpretation of that scene, which was Morpheus struck her. I will remove those parts of the post. As for the rest of it, well, those are my interpretations of the text. You’re welcome to disagree. However, I don’t think that pointing out that Morpheus was abusive in a variety of ways over the course of the series and his life is incorrect.
Now, as for my “parasocial” relationship with Neil Gaiman, I’m not some kind of Tumblr kid who followed his posts. He was an author I looked up to and his work was important to my life. I can’t speak for everyone with neurodivergent ass, but I feel like it isn’t abnormal to look up to artists of all kinds, especially if their work have some kind of effect on your life. Apparently, you’ve never felt that way, so bravo. You are a better person than I.
I did my best to not make a “woe is me, the person I liked is terrible” post, but part of this Substack is talking about my personal relationship with fiction, something that I didn’t really get to do at other places I wrote. So, that’s what I did. Was I successful on that count? You obviously don’t think so. I apologize. I wasn’t trying to write as much about my feelings on the whole thing, I was trying to show that many of the things Gaiman wrote in The Sandman were very problematic and are even more so knowing what we know about him as a person now. I didn’t do it as “look at me, I’m one of the good ones”, I did it because I don’t see anyone else talking about it (and I pitched it to several big comic sites but the pitch was either completely ignore or, in the case of Popverse.com, immediately rejected seconds after I sent it in, much sooner than anyone could have read the pitch; make of that what you will) and it’s a conversation we need to have. As for writing about the victims, I’m not a journalist. I can’t get in touch with them and interview them. I could maybe just repeat what the podcast said, but what good would that do? I felt that maybe writing about his work in a way that wasn’t fawning over its genius or downplaying the more problematic aspects was the best thing I could do.
Part of me wants to write something snarky here because that’s usually how I do with this sort of thing. However, instead, I’ll say thank you for reading.
Man, I was out of energy for tearing apart arguments Sandman paints Morpheus as noble, his abuses of power as necessary and inevitable, and his assertion he can't change as something the narrative endorses long, long before any of the allegations against Gaiman. Mixing them up for some cracked "Gaiman wrote a comic about an abuser so he could disguise his abuse and get more groupies to abuse" ramble is just... I'm not sure I have words for it other than plain and simple idiotic.
If you're only NOW seeing Sandman's patterns of abuse, and deciding the story is told with favor towards them, then I'm pretty sure you were always looking at the comic wrong, and are just looking at it from a different blurred angle.