AK, Glad to know there is a pagan somewhere who really dislikes Thess's fictional character. Also happy to hear that you now have a better family than the one you started with.
OK. I'm here. I'm back. Even though I didn't have any time to post this week, I may have been thinking about Vol. V more than any other volume in the series.
First, just unfiltered thoughts, then responses to the brilliant stuff you guys have been turning over above.
As an artist who is also interested in gender/race/class issues, this book is a minefield. And I've been navigating it over and over mentally, trying to see if I can put my feet in Gaiman's footprints. And I'm also trying to read it with other eyes (how would it feel to read this volume as a man? As a black woman? As a transsexual? As a pagan? As a meteorologist?).
Gaiman has created a lot of marginalized minority characters here, which is always tricky territory for the white male author. And as a white female artist this scares me. I've seen the disastrous results of the privileged speaking for the oppressed -- and in a lot of ways the stories in the previous volumes were violent warnings AGAINST doing exactly that.
But although we cannot steal others' stories, it's not right to say we can't write about others. Imagining others' perspectives is the beginning of compassion and the heart of good fiction. Do white people get to only write about white people? Do queer folks only get to write about their experience as queer folks? No. (Reading criticism of Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God changed my life a little: a black woman writing any story she wants to, without being totally bound by cultural context, that is the beginning of freedom.) Imagination is liberation. Imagination is what helps us cross those boundaries and see others not as Others, but as Us. We should be free to dream and free to tell stories full of characters of every kind.
But only when it's done without the theft and violence of stealing others' stories.
So here we have a cast of all women -- in a sense, women in every different possible shade of female-ness. Barbie is the "normal," the comic book character female we expect to see. And yet she is unconscious for most of the story, she's out of the picture. She's surrounded by a cadre of other women who deviate in some way from the comic-book norm: a lesbian, a pregnant lesbian who just had an encounter with a man, a trans woman, an older woman (possibly post-menopausal), and an ancient and powerful witch whose body doesn't follow the rules of femaleness the way the others' bodies do. In a way, Gaiman has circled the wagons around every possible variant of femininity. And he's a man.
And the characters are real. There's pressure when you write a minority character to make them perfect. And that's connected to a real pressure on people of color and people who deviate from the White Educated Male archetype: "You have to be twice as good to get half as much." Here Gaiman utterly ignores that pressure. He allows his characters to make dumb mistakes -- like minority characters shouldn't, in a book, but like real people do. The specific mistakes they make even defy the stereotypes about them. Hazel is a lesbian but doesn't know anything about sex and gets knocked up through a lack of basic reproductive knowledge. Wanda is afraid to go all the way through with her sex change even though she is a woman in every other way. Even Barbie, pretty as she is, is a broken version of Barbie, a post-Ken impoverished depressed mess.
And then there's Maisie. Poor, female, black, homeless, and possibly a little mentally ill, hard to tell. And Gaiman kills her to save Barbie. That is the authorial crime of all crimes. And yet it could happen. It could be a real story. It does happen, often, that people so disadvantaged meet abrupt and sad and senseless ends in real life, while privileged people go on. Because that is the somewhat sickening world we live in. And Gaiman does not spare her, nor does he spare Wanda, these characters who embody the most oppressed groups in the western world.
And this has been bugging me for weeks.
My guitarist Seth Boyer helped me work it out one long night in Montana over pho. We were talking about this impossible balance as a creator of art: I don't want to steal stories. I don't want to write blindly from a place of privilege. But I still want to tell stories in which all my characters are real, individual, flawed, and where their destinies are their destinies, and sometimes awful things happen to undeserving people. How on earth to balance that?
Then Seth pointed out that Gaiman does something very important in his work here: these characters are not the only gender-divergent characters we've met. We already know from these stories a score of other queer folk of every stripe. We have also met a lot of black characters from varying backgrounds, and we'll meet more. (I do feel the series is a bit whitewashed racially, but for the time when it was written, and for a white British male, I'm still happy to see what And there are a number of hobos; Maisie is not our only poor homeless eccentric, either. In fact, as I think through the books, I wonder whether there are more women than men -- or at least as many -- and if sexual orientations besides cis/het aren't represented at a real-world percentage, or perhaps even higher. Through hundreds of stories we are presented with a lot of characters without privilege, not just these few.
When an oppressed character is alone, they are far more subject to tokenism.
You have one black female character? She is likely to be a shell to express what the author wants to express about ALL black women or even all black people or all women. One gay character? So much more likely to be a caricature of what it means to be gay.
But if our black woman or gay man is one of many characters, then they are free from the weight of carrying an entire demographic on their backs, and they can behave like real people. With personality flaws and meaningful choices and backgrounds and destinies. Sometimes dark destinies.
If Maisie, Wanda, Hazel, and Foxglove were the only one representing their group, I think we would be in deep deep water -- but they're not. Gaiman gives us several different characters from each group instead of a single one, so the people populating his book aren't just ciphers for larger social discussions.
And a lot of them meet sad ends. But who in Gaiman's stories doesn't? Only a couple of people in this whole series win out and wind up happy -- what, three percent? Five percent? Everybody in Sandmanland winds up dead or deeply disturbed or a disembodied head. It's not like Maisie and Wanda are our only tragic deaths.
He treats his characters so much like real people it hurts.
Oh boy. I'm a little shakey now. This is a very serious artistic question to negotiate as someone who wants to write characters and wants to do right by them. I'll post this and then come back to more specific thoughts.
I don't have a sense of Wanda dying to save Barbie; rather, I have a sense of Wanda dying because Neil wanted to tell the story of Barbie going to Wanda's funeral. Maisie's death was a bit more arbitrary, but I'll get back to that in a bit.
It's interesting to note the first interaction between Wanda and Maisie ("Yuhgoddanysparechange?" "I gave at the office already. Bug off and die."). Barbie is more sympathetic, but she's not the jaded New Yorker that Wanda is. Still, the effect of that bit at the beginning is to make the blonde white cis woman look good, arguably at the expense of Wanda and Maisie. Later, though, Wanda rescues Maisie from the storm. Perhaps there's a difference between seeing a person in a genuine emergency vs. yet another panhandler. Of course, that rescue leads to Maisie's death, but Wanda had no way of knowing.
Setting aside the author for the moment, both Wanda and Maisie died as a result of the storm, which was a consequence of Thessaly's magic. It's worth noting that Morpheus grants Barbie's wish that those who joined her in the Dreaming be returned safe; it's similarly worth noting that the other occupants of the building died. The building collapsed at the end of chapter five, and Barbie chooses her boon early in chapter six, leading Morpheus to respond, "You specified safe and sound in your boon. Thus it will take a little time before I can send you all back." Is the story being told out of sequence, or did Morpheus have to arrange for Barbie in particular to be spared when the building collapsed? In the latter case, it's possible that the death of Maisie was part of Barbie's boon, though she hadn't realized it. Thessaly, Hazel, and Foxglove weren't bodily in the building at the time, so they presumably weren't endangered by the building. Perhaps the reason Thessaly was so reckless ("Lunatic," Wanda calls her as the three disappear, "Loony-tune." Moon-imagery.) was that she knew she wouldn't be around when the local damage happened.
Just wanted to say HELL YES to this comment of Marian's: "He (Neil Gaiman) treats his characters so much like real people it hurts." I feel like I was thinking this, at some point, but hadn't quite put it into words.
And I just wanted to say that I'm assuming I'm not the ONLY pagan to be rather offended at Thessaly's actions, I feel like it's probably a common sentiment...but then again, it's such a diverse bunch of folks that that word encompasses, who knows? I do have a question though: can anyone think of an example of pagans or witches that are portrayed positively in this series? I mean, so far, at least. I hadn't really stopped to think about it, because in all honesty, the characters are portrayed as so REAL (as Marian said) with all their flaws intact, that it didn't occur to me to be upset about the fact that most are shown negatively. The only examples I can think of, right now, are the group that traps Morpheus in volume 1 (obviously greedy and short sighted), a few references to folks that may have been previously neo-pagan (but have implied they didn't have any real power and were going through a phase, like Foxglove's comment)...and then we have Thessaly, that uses her power in impressively irresponsible ways, for what seem like rather childish reasons, and doesn't seem bothered by upsetting the balance of nature (which is really the opposite of what most witches believe in, which is WHY it's so impressive). I do feel like I'm forgetting someone though, so let me know if you folks can think of any more examples.
Like I said, all characters are portrayed as very real, so I don't feel like the series is trying to say bad things about witches or pagans in general...but then again, it is nice to see better examples of oneself in the media. Eh, just a thought.
My first reaction was that no one is portrayed positively in this book, but that isn't really true - so why was that my reaction?
I think the amazing thing that Gaiman does is to paint everyone as individuals, as others have commented, so I was thinking about the ways he does that.
Maybe it's by the little moment of trivia or banality that he uses to introduce people. Delivering a package or answering a phone call, or brushing their hair, we see them as normal people before we get to know them.
Kind of had me thinking about the intros for the twilight zone - "I present to you a writer, a writer in need of ideas, looking for inspiration. He's about to get everything he ever wanted....in the Twilight Zone."
Gaiman's also throws in little statements for any of his characters that belong to groups, all the way back to the first story. "After tonight, I'd like to see Aleister and his friends try to make fun of me" And in V, we have lines like "I don't dream", and Wanda talking about how she can't make coffee, but can make a souffle. Statements that say "I'm part of a group of people, but I'm also not like them either".
I know people that can't make coffee, and people that can make souffles, but I have never seen those two groups mix.
The art plays into this as well, be it the way an apartment looks, or what someone is wearing, even down to the choice of t-shirt.
When I give someone a gift - the most important thing to me is that it's something that matters to the receiver. Like an album that fits in with their tastes, or something to fix that old clock on the wall. While I don't know if I could give all of Gaiman's characters the perfect gift, I do think I could get them something they would really like if I pulled their name in the office pool.
(Sorry for going quiet there for a couple days, I'm catching up after having been away for the weekend.)
Marian, you make a great point about the diversity of characters in SANDMAN. But at the same time, that can't be the only way to avoid tokenism. I think this volume—with its one trans* woman, one black woman, one lesbian couple—would fare well even standing apart from the rest of the series.
A lot of that is tied into how real the characters feel. They have inner lives, and therefore are harder to fill with the author's or our own preconceptions.
I saw a piece of writing advice I liked recently. It said the best stories have simple plots with complex characters.
So, this doesn't occur in this volume, but it's relevant to topics we're discussing so I might as well mention it: I always cringe whenever Desire is referred to (by the narration or the other Endless) as "it." I know English has limited options for gender-neutral pronouns—I'm personally a partisan for the singular "they"—but "it" is so dehumanizing (or an equivalent word that applies to someone not strictly human).
I'm sorry to have to reopen this, but I can't let it stand unaddressed: Reo, you don't get to assume the mantle of "hard science" unless the science is actually on your side. The model that reduces sexuality and gender to "XX = female = woman, XY = male = man" is kind of like models of gravity before relativity: a fair approximation of most people's day-to-day experience, but woefully incomplete and unable to account for observed exceptions to the rule. The full "hard science" picture of sex and gender incorporates genetics, hormones, development, psychology, sociology, and more, and has to account for the grey areas.
This is the first time I've read Book V, but for some reason when I read it I was overcome with such sadness. Even after reading the first four books with their terrifying and emotional scenes/characters it was this one that left me kind of wrung out. Also, I felt like I've seen/read this book before as many of the scenes felt familiar. I can only assume that years ago I leafed through the book at a bookstore but didn't buy it.
I think this volume really shines a light on the question of nature vs. identity. Many hate the Cuckoo because it is terrorizing Barbie. We identify it as evil because we have sympathy for Barbie and these great characters. But really it's acting out its nature. Hence Morpheus' comment at the end. It's like the spider eating a particularly beautiful butterfly. We look on with disgust because we think the butterfly is beautiful and the spider took that away from us.
In the end I think I was mostly sad for Thessaly's story. This woman who has been alive for a very long time. Her family is gone, the world when she was in her Spring years has come and gone. She KNOWS much, but she still hasn't gained enough wisdom to be able to tell a joke. Whole philosophies/theologies are based on the practices that she and her colleagues/family created or learned from older individuals, and yet she is arrogant enough to think that they don't matter as they do not follow the Old way. She is disconnected from the world and she doesn't care because she is Thessaly. She cannot allow herself to grow or change and that saddens me.
This is a reoccurring theme in Gaiman's work. It's particularly visible in American Gods. The idea that we live in a world where we take what we want to form our belief systems/perceptions/ideas without really understanding where or how they originated.
Some more thoughts, or half-thoughts, or expansions of thoughts:
Marian, I appreciate this observation: "It does happen, often, that people so disadvantaged meet abrupt and sad and senseless ends in real life, while privileged people go on. Because that is the somewhat sickening world we live in." I read a great deal of that into the end of the story. SANDMAN constantly blurs the line between dream and reality. Wanda, who earlier in the book had walls up to protect herself from a world that didn't accept her, now shelters the very woman she told to "bug off and die." Maisie, a complete stranger, accepts Wanda's gender identity without question or judgment. It's like a dream-world happy ending… and it comes crashing down at the same time Barbie's dream world is unmade.
Privileged authors writing underprivileged characters is definitely tricky territory. (Although, to be honest, I have a hard time seeing it as "stealing stories" per se when it goes wrong. Misappropriation of faces, perhaps, or the telling of false stories… I suppose it depends on each circumstance.) It's absolutely possible and necessary, both for the reasons you listed and to contribute to equal representation in media (the other half of the equation being equal representation among creators). "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in volume III illustrated the power of the latter: the faerie folk were enthralled to see themselves represented truthfully in fiction.
You say you don't want to write blindly from a place of privilege. As far as I can figure it, you can't escape your privilege, and you mustn't not write, so the best you can do is write not blindly. (I know, easy to say. But as we've established, writing is work. :P)
Regarding tokenism, I was struggling to work my head around how to have a minority character represent their own person while still being true to the minority experience. There are stories, of course, wherein the race or gender of a character is inconsequential and freely interchangeable. But there are other stories, such as this one, wherein a character's circumstances shape their reaction to the world. My wife (who sadly hasn't had time to read along with us) had a good answer (paraphrasing): The minority experience is environmental, a particular face of the world that they see. The environment is shared, but individual characters react to it in personal ways.
All artists start by stealing ideas from one another. It's part of the process: Imitate, Innovate, Invent.
2 quotes from Picasso: 1) Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. 2) To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
Commentary on 1) When I try to make a perfect copy of someone else's work (song, painting, poem, story, knitting, whatever), I usually gum it up but my spin and stink is all over it. It goes wrong, but in a beautiful new way. The art is sometimes in keeping an honest eye open (or an open mind honest) to find those mistakes and take 'em to the next logical step(s) in the sequence. And if it is done well, it's a bank robbery where the thief gets away clean.
On 2) Doing the same thing over and over... to me that is hell. An artist trapped in his/her own habits unable to break out and find the next subject. Andy Warhol explored this in his soup cans and pix of Marilyn. But if you look at them closely, each one is a little different. But at first glance they looked exactly the same. Yet, why is the pix special? Could each soup can represent a meal? Each one is unique but we take it for granted. Could each pix of Marilyn represent a different woman trying to look beautiful? Or is each pix is an attempt by Marilyn to look beautiful each day? Even if an artist is stuck on some plateau for a while, it just might be the necessary chrysalis for the caterpillar. Will a butterfly emerge?
*****
Last week a friend was telling me about her daughter who is between boyfriends and how the daughter was stalking a boy who works at their local convenience store. And how the daughter puts on makeup to go get her gas pumped there and the name the daughter has for her car: "Little Red". And how this boy and her are in the process of setting up their first date. The daughter was looking for a boy who is not a sports-head because she has had enough of those: she wants a guy who will dance with her and open her doors (the car door, the door at the mall, etc).
I realized my friend was giving me the words to a song. So I started writing stuff down. And it's all from this daughter's POV but the same words could apply to a transvestite guy's thoughts about some date he wants to go out on with a guy too. Not what I intended but whatever. Just looking for a song about hope and love. Let the chips fall where they may.
Here we have an ancient being, once attacked, now on a single-focused pursuit of vengeance.....
And now she is talking to Morpheus. I'm struck by how gentle he is in this scene, almost compassionate. He allows options, he allows choice - this is not the Morpheus of 100 years ago.
I've had these pages playing out in my mind for weeks now, and then I read an article about Harley Quinn. One of the elements it focused on, the idea of the counter-part to the Joker. That some characters are defined by their mysteriousness, and that by learning about who they are, you destroy the character. But if you take another character, and define her, you can show aspects of the first by the interactions with the second, all while maintaining that veil.
So too, we learn of how Morpheus has changed, by seeing how he reacts to the actions of others, or how certain characters affect his moods or deeds.
Very good insights, each of you -- I like the idea that creating a character is so much more than what they say and do, but also the space they live in, the objects they surround themselves with, their surprising skills and surprising failures (I mean who can't make coffee?).
Becky, I was thinking more on what you said about Paganism, and that led me to think about religion in this series in general again -- a subject I'm surprised hasn't come up more. My immediate thought was that the most powerful characters in the entire series are in fact witches, the Hecatae, and they recur and recur and recur. I love their femininity and their -- well, their embodiment of the idea of "witch." And that's merely to say "woman who has power and is therefore dangerous."
What interests me most is that I think there's a funny intersection of paganism and femininity here. The Hecatae and Thessaly are incredibly powerful, but when the various men dabble in witchcraft, they wind up looking like fools even in their successes. The schoolboys who try to summon demons are not even noticed in hell, and Burgess has no idea what he's doing and no control generally over the Dark Arts. They're not worthy to shine Thessaly's shoes when it comes to witchcraft.
And Thessaly is problematic, it's true. But she doesn't seem malevolent, just careless. She's seen millions of mortals come and go, why should she care overmuch about them? Her sheer agency is intimidating as hell. She knows what she wants and she goes and does it / gets it. And if you were thousands of years old, you probably wouldn't see much of an issue with a minor weather disturbance because of your methods, and you wouldn't care much about pleasing the short-lived powerless mortals around you.
The intersection of female-ness and power is so fascinating in these books. And I love it because we have so *many* women and so many kinds of women and so many different *ways* they can be powerful, from Delirium to the Hecatae to Thessaly to Death to Astarte to Calliope to the Furies to the Bacchante to Johanna. And what I love is that for none of them does power mean an easy existence. It just makes them more interesting. And it's far too rare in literature, especially in comics.
Lazy authors write a "strong woman" by either basing her power in her sexuality (the vamp) or divorcing her from her sex completely and making her effectively a man (the Amazon). Gaiman seldom falls into either of these traps. His women are powerful in so many ways, from so many sources, and with so many different personalities -- and they all interact with their own powers differently. Their wrestling is real.
Thessaly's confidence actually appeals to me, even if she is a little cold.
Gaiman's not perfect, he does still make a few mistakes that bother me. And with multiple reads I'm starting to see how young he was as an author when he worked on Sandman. But what I want to learn, as you were mentioning, @svithrir, is how he can never escape his privilege, yet he writes not-blindly about the Others in his worlds. That not-blindness is what I want to pursue.
My other thought, Becky: Thessaly is not specifically Pagan or Wiccan in the sense we would understand it at all, is she? Her values don't seem to align at all with what I understand to be the values of my friends who are present-day witches and warlocks.
She is something else entirely, I think. When Morpheus says "Thessalian" I think he is referring to the kind of witch she is, and there are numerous web references to a very specific kind of witchcraft from a specific time and place.
@svithrir I do love the Reverse Oz scenario -- tin man, cowardly lion, scarecrow are all sort of alluded to and riffed on, and even the flying monkeys and Wicked Witch. And @Reo_1963, I actually do agree with the idea of a competitive game, which the cuckoo, in a sense, wins by destroying the skerry -- the volume is, after all, "A Game of You." The prize of winning the game is the Cuckoo's freedom.
Morpheus doesn't much figure into this volume at all. He's sort of background, a clockwork universe god this time around. And I too am bothered when he lets the Cuckoo go.
He's right to, it's in the Cuckoo's nature, and nature is cruel. Things devour other things. But it still bothers me. The collateral damage is written off.
What the Cuckoo says about how children dream (stupidly sexist as it is) does resonate with me, because it seems like social gender norms reinforce it and give children such dreams at a very early age. Girls dream of being orphaned, made servants or slaves in the house of a cruel overseer, and variations on the Cinderella myth were what that my sister and I used to pretend for hours. We played Servants or even Slaves and enjoyed our own sense of persecution and entrapment. So funny to think back on it now. We played other things too, of course -- I wanted to be a cowboy, and I used to whip things with a length of rope. (I didn't want to be a cowgirl, because they wore skirts and never did anything interesting. Nope, only a cowboy.) But when I pretended to be a girl, I was usually somehow trapped or wandering or displaced or marooned or abandoned and had to figure out how to cope.
I know that's not every child's play, but it was what that statement made me reflect on.
And I like what it says about Barbie; she used to dream in broad fantasy Tolkein/Lewis strokes, she used to dream that her life with Ken was not her life. But lately she doesn't dream at all. Because now her life isn't that life anymore. She is marooned, she is abandoned, that adventure scenario is now real. She doesn't need dreams of displacement anymore like she did as the smiley happy Kenwife.
Whoops, re-referencing the comic, I just now got Judy's line in Foxglove's nightmare: "Hold on. I got something in my eye…" *shudder* Shifting gears…
Ah, does the Cuckoo win? Well, hah, yes, I suppose… I guess what I should ask is, if it's a game, does Barbie lose? She's the one who earns the boon, after all. It's important to the denizens of the dream that the Hierogram and the Porpentine remain intact, but all Barbie knows is that her mission is to get one to the other. If it is a game, then the pieces would have an interest in keeping it going as long as possible, wouldn't they? Had the Cuckoo not interfered, would Barbie have done any different with the Porpentine? Just what kind of game is it?
The demise of the Skerry sort of reminds me of the very very tiny tragedy of finishing a good book. It's over. In a way, it's dead. But it was never really real, and it always had to end.
What's funny about this ending is that in proper High Fantasy, which Gaiman is referencing left and right, the villain would never win in the way the Cuckoo wins. There would be an eleventh hour save and the kingdom would be won for Goodness and Justice and Love and stuff.
But here the bad guy wins. And in a way the consequences are SO severe: a world ends, in a literal riff on The Last Battle from C.S. Lewis' Narnia. But at the same time, the consequences are meaningless: a dream world filled with imaginary people is finished, and it's time for a new dream.
This reminds me of how I feel every time I close the cover of a great book, like 100 Years of Solitude (which I read every year, no matter how busy I am) or Rumo by Walter Moers.
I think the "Game of You" is about what the Cuckoo is doing, but in the larger picture it's about identity. It's about knowing who one is. And it's the trickiest game of all.
The question of free will and consequences is most affecting to me personally. If the cuckoo is acting according to her nature, and therefore shouldn't be punished, then should anyone ever be punished? What does it mean to take responsibility for my actions, if whatever I do is ultimately according to my own nature? If being 'good' isn't natural for me, why should I aim to be a better person than I am naturally?
Apart from the personal questions, it's interesting that in some ways each of the characters in the real world act 'unnaturally' according to mainstream society's definition, but are each acting according to their own nature too... And yet some die senselessly, some don't seem to face any consequences.
It's a little too much like real life, in that karma is either non-existent, or at least slow to act... fairness doesn't really enter the picture.
I have thought about that a lot, nerd -- are bad people, then, even awful people, just acting according to their nature? Or are they making the wrong choice?
I think I am starting to think about it less as a binary (there is free will OR there isn't) and more as a spectrum. Perhaps we are *LIKELY* to behave according to our nature. Maybe it's like being in a river and needing to go downstream -- it's the direction we're swept by our tendencies and our genes and our upbringing.
But I do believe that we can choose to swim upstream. Maybe we'll never make as much progress as someone who finds it "natural" to behave responsibly/kindly/punctually/whatever.
I know for myself that I have a default set of behaviors, and I'm comfortable in them, and relaxed, and I have an ok life. But I'm old enough now to know that when I ride on default, when I flow downstream according to my nature, there are sometimes ways that hurts others or tramples their freedoms or hopes. Or it's just rude.
I mean, I'm no Richard Madoc, but I have my vices. Being on time for things has always been a massive struggle. I am forever late and behind and overdue. But I know I can swim upstream and force myself to be punctual, out of respect for others -- or out of fear of the consequences for myself. I can fight my nature.
But do I? Only sometimes.
I think that's different than predestination though. let's call it pre-inclination.
These books have had me thinking about that so much.
Take Richard Madoc, for example. It's in his cowardly selfish nature to do what he does -- and to displace himself from it, to deny the wrong of it. But you can't tell me that that he couldn't have walked away. He could have. But it would have been like swimming against the current of his cowardliness.
The cuckoo -- I have a feeling it's not quite a person or a being, more of a function of the dream world, like the Corinthian or one of Morpheus' nightmares.
Morpheus treats these creatures differently than he treats mortals who make choices. Sometimes (not consistently) he punishes mortals who made bad choices, who failed to be better than their nature. Like Madoc and Burgess and the Collectors. But the Corinthian and the Cuckoo, these Morpheus has created, and they are not nice, but they are his. When he unmakes the Corinthian it is not a punishment, it is because he created him badly. I have a feeling that if the cuckoo truly got out of control, its end might be similar.
Wow, your post brought out a ton that was on my mind!
"It's a little too much like real life, in that karma is either non-existent, or at least slow to act... fairness doesn't really enter the picture."
I agree, the thing that makes these stories so disturbing is that you feel no sense of reassurance that things will "work out OK" or turn out fair. Too real. A little chilling.
Nature is a tricky thing to talk about. What do we even mean by "nature"? (If I took nothing else away from my Philosophy of Human Nature course, I learned to always be clear about the definitions of the terms you use.)
Perhaps because the story gives us an encyclopedia description of Cuculus canorus, I read the Cuckoo as being like the Scorpion of the old fable: an animal lacking what we're familiar with as agency or reasoning, despite its human-like appearance (these are fairy tales, after all). The two differ in that the Cuckoo's acting according to its "nature" serves its well-being, whereas the Scorpion's works against it, but both are animals doing what animals do.
In that sense, the Cuckoo provides a strong contrast to the human characters. It's relatively easy to talk about an animal acting according to its "nature," however we might define that. People are much, much more complicated. Where does Morpheus fall on that scale? And if you were to pose him that question, how would he answer?
Desire is interesting to think of in that context, acting according to its nature, and Delirium and Destiny -- they seem to act according to their "Natures" in a way that seems a little less choosey than Death and Dream and Destruction. They are entities a little bit trapped (if that's the right word) by their functions and their realms.
But then it might be in Death, Dream, & Destruction's natures to make more complex-seeming choices. And Morpheus seems no less trapped, it's just that he chalks it up to his duties or responsibility (to hearken back to discussions about vol. 9 and 10).
I think we're using the word "nature" differently. I'm thinking in more universal terms, like "human nature." You seem to be referring to something more akin to an individual's disposition. It's an important distinction, I think, if we're to decide at what level the Cuckoo's nature—and responsibility therefor—is a valid comparison. (I think it's more relevant to the universal than the individual, but you may disagree. As for what is human nature, and how does it relate to the disposition of the individual? That's way more than I'm prepared to get into here, haha.)
It's hard to say with the Endless, exactly how constrained they are by their functions. But they show plenty of agency, so I put them all in the "it's complicated" end of the pool with us. (Except maybe Destiny. He's a weirdo.)
But would Morpheus agree? He does often take refuge in his duties, and as we see in other volumes (and, as you note, discuss elsewhere) he sometimes has issues with responsibility. Morpheus is the one who brings up the Cuckoo's nature in the first place. I'm inclined to think, to some extent, he might *like* to compare himself to the Cuckoo, able to use "nature" as an excuse to avoid judgment. (Of course, what he might like to do, and what he would do, and what he could get away with doing, are all very different.)
I'm astounded at how the Endless can be so "it's complicated." They are so damn real. Yes, they have agency, but their agency is so much like ours -- restrained by our limitations or our habits or our dispositions. And they experience that too. Damn you Gaiman. You're so good.
I agree. The Endless can be so "it's complicated" but it seems that sometimes that's an excuse to hide behind rather than a reason for a limit. Morpheus can act outside of his "rules," with consequences for doing so, of course, but the point is that he can. He's not bound by them in the sense of them being inescapable. The Endless are "it's complicated" because they choose to be so. When they decide to abandon that position then everything is easy,providing they accept the fact that actions have consequences. In a sort of related but not completely way, this is one of the things I've been noticing about "Once Upon A Time." For Disney TV it's interestingly dark. What I've been noticing is the difference between "good" and "evil" on the show. "Good," from the very start, takes action but is ignorant of the consequences, the possible consequences or even that all (each) actions have consequences. The "good" characters go ahead and act without thinking of the fallout to themselves or, especially, others. "Evil" on the other hand, never forgets that everything has a price and that all actions have consequences and they usually consider the consequences before taking an action. Interesting "Good" is less concerned with the big picture than "Evil," but there it is. "Evil is willing to do the unsavory things understanding the outcome could be problematic but having weighed the alternatives. "Good" does not think this far ahead.
There's a history of good not heeding consequences, in terms of always do the right thing, let the chips fall where they may - what matters is adherence to principles. But that's offset by the idea of prudence, accepting that you may have to accept the merely good as opposed to the best (I'm thinking of prudence here)
Don't know the show and whether the above is relevant
I'm not convinced we are that complicated. Yes we can weigh long term good and bad, but are our decisions ever more or less than our inborn personality and experiences allow them to be? That's what I wonder when I question the idea of free will. Is there really a separate me that contributes weight & willpower to one possible choice vs another? if I decide one way could I ever really have chosen differently, even if current circumstances and history were the same?
Destiny (not just capitalized as the start of a sentance) would say that it's already written and that this is the way it was ordained to happen but I wonder if Destiny is a cheat. Who gets to look ahead into Destiny's book? If no one but Destiny gets to look in Destiny's book, and certainly not look ahead to the end of the affair, then who's to say that the book isn't written as events unfold and the ending is the ending that happens, rather than the one that's pre-ordained.
I once worked with/for a man who said that he always wins at pool because he calls his shots after he'd made them. He had his second visit from Morpheus' older sister quite a while ago. I don't think he called that shot.
So, are our fates determined or do we have free will? I'm trained in psychoanalysis & help patients (as well as myself) wrestle with that very question. Our biology makes some claim on us but what about "nurture." One of the great debates in the soft sciences. Nature vs Nurture. Perhaps it has to do with our awareness of what isn't biology and can therefore, maybe, be changed. I have to believe that people can change their nature, perform alchemy, be reborn not as someone different but as someone who does things differently & with awareness instead of acting out of unconcious patterns.
The Cuckoo is given a path because of her nature perhaps because Morpheus wants a pass because of his. Fair exchange.
Colleen Doran (one of the artists) was asked some questions about "A Game of you". She posted a short response here: http://colleendoran.tumblr.com/post/105564983384/a-game-of-you (I don't want to summarize it because I think it's important to take the whole thing in context.)
Comments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Centurione_Bracelli
AK, Glad to know there is a pagan somewhere who really dislikes Thess's fictional character.
Also happy to hear that you now have a better family than the one you started with.
First, just unfiltered thoughts, then responses to the brilliant stuff you guys have been turning over above.
As an artist who is also interested in gender/race/class issues, this book is a minefield. And I've been navigating it over and over mentally, trying to see if I can put my feet in Gaiman's footprints. And I'm also trying to read it with other eyes (how would it feel to read this volume as a man? As a black woman? As a transsexual? As a pagan? As a meteorologist?).
Gaiman
has created a lot of marginalized minority characters here, which is
always tricky territory for the white male author. And as a white female artist this scares me. I've seen the disastrous results of the privileged speaking for the oppressed -- and in a lot of ways the stories in the previous volumes were violent warnings AGAINST doing exactly that.
But although we cannot steal others' stories, it's not right to say we can't write about others. Imagining others' perspectives is the beginning of compassion and the heart of good fiction. Do white people get to only write about white people? Do queer folks only get to write about their experience as queer folks? No. (Reading criticism of Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God changed my life a little: a black woman writing any story she wants to, without being totally bound by cultural context, that is the beginning of freedom.) Imagination is liberation. Imagination is what helps us cross those boundaries and see others not as Others, but as Us. We should be free to dream and free to tell stories full of characters of every kind.
But only when it's done without the theft and violence of stealing others' stories.
So here we have a cast of all women -- in a sense, women in every different possible shade of female-ness. Barbie is the "normal," the comic book character female we expect to see. And yet she is unconscious for most of the story, she's out of the picture. She's surrounded by a cadre of other women who deviate in some way from the comic-book norm: a lesbian, a pregnant lesbian who just had an encounter with a man, a trans woman, an older woman (possibly post-menopausal), and an ancient and powerful witch whose body doesn't follow the rules of femaleness the way the others' bodies do. In a way, Gaiman has circled the wagons around every possible variant of femininity. And he's a man.
And the characters are real. There's pressure when you write a minority character to make them perfect. And that's connected to a real pressure on people of color and people who deviate from the White Educated Male archetype: "You have to be twice as good to get half as much." Here Gaiman utterly ignores that pressure. He allows his characters to make dumb mistakes -- like minority characters shouldn't, in a book, but like real people do. The specific mistakes they make even defy the stereotypes about them. Hazel is a lesbian but doesn't know anything about sex and gets knocked up through a lack of basic reproductive knowledge. Wanda is afraid to go all the way through with her sex change even though she is a woman in every other way. Even Barbie, pretty as she is, is a broken version of Barbie, a post-Ken impoverished depressed mess.
And then there's Maisie. Poor, female, black, homeless, and possibly a little mentally ill, hard to tell. And Gaiman kills her to save Barbie. That is the authorial crime of all crimes. And yet it could happen. It could be a real story. It does happen, often, that people so disadvantaged meet abrupt and sad and senseless ends in real life, while privileged people go on. Because that is the somewhat sickening world we live in. And Gaiman does not spare her, nor does he spare Wanda, these characters who embody the most oppressed groups in the western world.
And this has been bugging me for weeks.
My guitarist Seth Boyer helped me work it out one long night in Montana over pho. We were talking about this impossible balance as a creator of art: I don't want to steal stories. I don't want to write blindly from a place of privilege. But I still want to tell stories in which all my characters are real, individual, flawed, and where their destinies are their destinies, and sometimes awful things happen to undeserving people. How on earth to balance that?
Then Seth pointed out that Gaiman does something very important in his work here: these characters are not the only gender-divergent characters we've met. We already know from these stories a score of other queer folk of every stripe. We have also met a lot of black characters from varying backgrounds, and we'll meet more. (I do feel the series is a bit whitewashed racially, but for the time when it was written, and for a white British male, I'm still happy to see what And there are a number of hobos; Maisie is not our only poor homeless eccentric, either. In fact, as I think through the books, I wonder whether there are more women than men -- or at least as many -- and if sexual orientations besides cis/het aren't represented at a real-world percentage, or perhaps even higher. Through hundreds of stories we are presented with a lot of characters without privilege, not just these few.
When an oppressed character is alone, they are far more subject to tokenism.
You have one black female character? She is likely to be a shell to express what the author wants to express about ALL black women or even all black people or all women. One gay character? So much more likely to be a caricature of what it means to be gay.
But if our black woman or gay man is one of many characters, then they are free from the weight of carrying an entire demographic on their backs, and they can behave like real people. With personality flaws and meaningful choices and backgrounds and destinies. Sometimes dark destinies.
If Maisie, Wanda, Hazel, and Foxglove were the only one representing their group, I think we would be in deep deep water -- but they're not. Gaiman gives us several different
characters from each group instead of a single one, so the people
populating his book aren't just ciphers for larger social discussions.
And a lot of them meet sad ends. But who in Gaiman's stories doesn't? Only a couple of people in this whole series win out and wind up happy -- what, three percent? Five percent? Everybody in Sandmanland winds up dead or deeply disturbed or a disembodied head. It's not like Maisie and Wanda are our only tragic deaths.
He
treats his characters so much like real people it hurts.
Oh boy. I'm a little shakey now. This is a very serious artistic question to negotiate as someone who wants to write characters and wants to do right by them. I'll post this and then come back to more specific thoughts.
It's interesting to note the first interaction between Wanda and Maisie ("Yuhgoddanysparechange?" "I gave at the office already. Bug off and die."). Barbie is more sympathetic, but she's not the jaded New Yorker that Wanda is. Still, the effect of that bit at the beginning is to make the blonde white cis woman look good, arguably at the expense of Wanda and Maisie. Later, though, Wanda rescues Maisie from the storm. Perhaps there's a difference between seeing a person in a genuine emergency vs. yet another panhandler. Of course, that rescue leads to Maisie's death, but Wanda had no way of knowing.
Setting aside the author for the moment, both Wanda and Maisie died as a result of the storm, which was a consequence of Thessaly's magic. It's worth noting that Morpheus grants Barbie's wish that those who joined her in the Dreaming be returned safe; it's similarly worth noting that the other occupants of the building died. The building collapsed at the end of chapter five, and Barbie chooses her boon early in chapter six, leading Morpheus to respond, "You specified safe and sound in your boon. Thus it will take a little time before I can send you all back." Is the story being told out of sequence, or did Morpheus have to arrange for Barbie in particular to be spared when the building collapsed? In the latter case, it's possible that the death of Maisie was part of Barbie's boon, though she hadn't realized it. Thessaly, Hazel, and Foxglove weren't bodily in the building at the time, so they presumably weren't endangered by the building. Perhaps the reason Thessaly was so reckless ("Lunatic," Wanda calls her as the three disappear, "Loony-tune." Moon-imagery.) was that she knew she wouldn't be around when the local damage happened.
Maybe it's by the little moment of trivia or banality that he uses to introduce people. Delivering a package or answering a phone call, or brushing their hair, we see them as normal people before we get to know them.
Marian, you make a great point about the diversity of characters in SANDMAN. But at the same time, that can't be the only way to avoid tokenism. I think this volume—with its one trans* woman, one black woman, one lesbian couple—would fare well even standing apart from the rest of the series.
A lot of that is tied into how real the characters feel. They have inner lives, and therefore are harder to fill with the author's or our own preconceptions.
I saw a piece of writing advice I liked recently. It said the best stories have simple plots with complex characters.
So, this doesn't occur in this volume, but it's relevant to topics we're discussing so I might as well mention it: I always cringe whenever Desire is referred to (by the narration or the other Endless) as "it." I know English has limited options for gender-neutral pronouns—I'm personally a partisan for the singular "they"—but "it" is so dehumanizing (or an equivalent word that applies to someone not strictly human).
I'm sorry to have to reopen this, but I can't let it stand unaddressed: Reo, you don't get to assume the mantle of "hard science" unless the science is actually on your side. The model that reduces sexuality and gender to "XX = female = woman, XY = male = man" is kind of like models of gravity before relativity: a fair approximation of most people's day-to-day experience, but woefully incomplete and unable to account for observed exceptions to the rule. The full "hard science" picture of sex and gender incorporates genetics, hormones, development, psychology, sociology, and more, and has to account for the grey areas.
I think this volume really shines a light on the question of nature vs. identity. Many hate the Cuckoo because it is terrorizing Barbie. We identify it as evil because we have sympathy for Barbie and these great characters. But really it's acting out its nature. Hence Morpheus' comment at the end. It's like the spider eating a particularly beautiful butterfly. We look on with disgust because we think the butterfly is beautiful and the spider took that away from us.
In the end I think I was mostly sad for Thessaly's story. This woman who has been alive for a very long time. Her family is gone, the world when she was in her Spring years has come and gone. She KNOWS much, but she still hasn't gained enough wisdom to be able to tell a joke. Whole philosophies/theologies are based on the practices that she and her colleagues/family created or learned from older individuals, and yet she is arrogant enough to think that they don't matter as they do not follow the Old way. She is disconnected from the world and she doesn't care because she is Thessaly. She cannot allow herself to grow or change and that saddens me.
This is a reoccurring theme in Gaiman's work. It's particularly visible in American Gods. The idea that we live in a world where we take what we want to form our belief systems/perceptions/ideas without really understanding where or how they originated.
2 quotes from Picasso:
1) Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
2) To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
Commentary on 1) When I try to make a perfect copy of someone else's work (song, painting, poem, story, knitting, whatever), I usually gum it up but my spin and stink is all over it. It goes wrong, but in a beautiful new way. The art is sometimes in keeping an honest eye open (or an open mind honest)
to find those mistakes and take 'em to the next logical step(s) in the sequence.
And if it is done well, it's a bank robbery where the thief gets away clean.
On 2) Doing the same thing over and over... to me that is hell. An artist trapped in his/her own habits
unable to break out and find the next subject.
Andy Warhol explored this in his soup cans and pix of Marilyn. But if you look at them closely, each one is a little different. But at first glance they looked exactly the same. Yet, why is the pix special? Could each soup can represent a meal? Each one is unique but we take it for granted. Could each pix of Marilyn represent a different woman trying to look beautiful? Or is each pix is an attempt by Marilyn to look beautiful each day?
Even if an artist is stuck on some plateau for a while, it just might be the necessary chrysalis for the caterpillar.
Will a butterfly emerge?
*****
Last week a friend was telling me about her daughter who is between boyfriends and how the daughter was stalking a boy who works at their local convenience store. And how the daughter puts on makeup to go get her gas pumped there and the name the daughter has for her car: "Little Red". And how this boy and her are in the process of setting up their first date. The daughter was looking for a boy who is not a sports-head because she has had enough of those: she wants a guy who will dance with her and open her doors (the car door, the door at the mall, etc).
I realized my friend was giving me the words to a song. So I started writing stuff down. And it's all from this daughter's POV but the same words could apply to a transvestite guy's thoughts about some date he wants to go out on with a guy too. Not what I intended but whatever. Just looking for a song about hope and love. Let the chips fall where they may.
I've had these pages playing out in my mind for weeks now, and then I read an article about Harley Quinn. One of the elements it focused on, the idea of the counter-part to the Joker. That some characters are defined by their mysteriousness, and that by learning about who they are, you destroy the character. But if you take another character, and define her, you can show aspects of the first by the interactions with the second, all while maintaining that veil.
Becky, I was thinking more on what you said about Paganism, and that led me to think about religion in this series in general again -- a subject I'm surprised hasn't come up more. My immediate thought was that the most powerful characters in the entire series are in fact witches, the Hecatae, and they recur and recur and recur. I love their femininity and their -- well, their embodiment of the idea of "witch." And that's merely to say "woman who has power and is therefore dangerous."
What interests me most is that I think there's a funny intersection of paganism and femininity here. The Hecatae and Thessaly are incredibly powerful, but when the various men dabble in witchcraft, they wind up looking like fools even in their successes. The schoolboys who try to summon demons are not even noticed in hell, and Burgess has no idea what he's doing and no control generally over the Dark Arts. They're not worthy to shine Thessaly's shoes when it comes to witchcraft.
And Thessaly is problematic, it's true. But she doesn't seem malevolent, just careless. She's seen millions of mortals come and go, why should she care overmuch about them? Her sheer agency is intimidating as hell. She knows what she wants and she goes and does it / gets it. And if you were thousands of years old, you probably wouldn't see much of an issue with a minor weather disturbance because of your methods, and you wouldn't care much about pleasing the short-lived powerless mortals around you.
The intersection of female-ness and power is so fascinating in these books. And I love it because we have so *many* women and so many kinds of women and so many different *ways* they can be powerful, from Delirium to the Hecatae to Thessaly to Death to Astarte to Calliope to the Furies to the Bacchante to Johanna. And what I love is that for none of them does power mean an easy existence. It just makes them more interesting. And it's far too rare in literature, especially in comics.
Lazy authors write a "strong woman" by either basing her power in her sexuality (the vamp) or divorcing her from her sex completely and making her effectively a man (the Amazon). Gaiman seldom falls into either of these traps. His women are powerful in so many ways, from so many sources, and with so many different personalities -- and they all interact with their own powers differently. Their wrestling is real.
Thessaly's confidence actually appeals to me, even if she is a little cold.
Gaiman's not perfect, he does still make a few mistakes that bother me. And with multiple reads I'm starting to see how young he was as an author when he worked on Sandman. But what I want to learn, as you were mentioning, @svithrir, is how he can never escape his privilege, yet he writes not-blindly about the Others in his worlds. That not-blindness is what I want to pursue.
She is something else entirely, I think. When Morpheus says "Thessalian" I think he is referring to the kind of witch she is, and there are numerous web references to a very specific kind of witchcraft from a specific time and place.
Morpheus doesn't much figure into this volume at all. He's sort of background, a clockwork universe god this time around. And I too am bothered when he lets the Cuckoo go.
He's right to, it's in the Cuckoo's nature, and nature is cruel. Things devour other things. But it still bothers me. The collateral damage is written off.
What the Cuckoo says about how children dream (stupidly sexist as it is) does resonate with me, because it seems like social gender norms reinforce it and give children such dreams at a very early age. Girls dream of being orphaned, made servants or slaves in the house of a cruel overseer, and variations on the Cinderella myth were what that my sister and I used to pretend for hours. We played Servants or even Slaves and enjoyed our own sense of persecution and entrapment. So funny to think back on it now. We played other things too, of course -- I wanted to be a cowboy, and I used to whip things with a length of rope. (I didn't want to be a cowgirl, because they wore skirts and never did anything interesting. Nope, only a cowboy.) But when I pretended to be a girl, I was usually somehow trapped or wandering or displaced or marooned or abandoned and had to figure out how to cope.
I know that's not every child's play, but it was what that statement made me reflect on.
And I like what it says about Barbie; she used to dream in broad fantasy Tolkein/Lewis strokes, she used to dream that her life with Ken was not her life. But lately she doesn't dream at all. Because now her life isn't that life anymore. She is marooned, she is abandoned, that adventure scenario is now real. She doesn't need dreams of displacement anymore like she did as the smiley happy Kenwife.
Ah, does the Cuckoo win? Well, hah, yes, I suppose… I guess what I should ask is, if it's a game, does Barbie lose? She's the one who earns the boon, after all. It's important to the denizens of the dream that the Hierogram and the Porpentine remain intact, but all Barbie knows is that her mission is to get one to the other. If it is a game, then the pieces would have an interest in keeping it going as long as possible, wouldn't they? Had the Cuckoo not interfered, would Barbie have done any different with the Porpentine? Just what kind of game is it?
What's funny about this ending is that in proper High Fantasy, which Gaiman is referencing left and right, the villain would never win in the way the Cuckoo wins. There would be an eleventh hour save and the kingdom would be won for Goodness and Justice and Love and stuff.
But here the bad guy wins. And in a way the consequences are SO severe: a world ends, in a literal riff on The Last Battle from C.S. Lewis' Narnia. But at the same time, the consequences are meaningless: a dream world filled with imaginary people is finished, and it's time for a new dream.
This reminds me of how I feel every time I close the cover of a great book, like 100 Years of Solitude (which I read every year, no matter how busy I am) or Rumo by Walter Moers.
I think the "Game of You" is about what the Cuckoo is doing, but in the larger picture it's about identity. It's about knowing who one is. And it's the trickiest game of all.
Apart from the personal questions, it's interesting that in some ways each of the characters in the real world act 'unnaturally' according to mainstream society's definition, but are each acting according to their own nature too... And yet some die senselessly, some don't seem to face any consequences.
It's a little too much like real life, in that karma is either non-existent, or at least slow to act... fairness doesn't really enter the picture.
I think I am starting to think about it less as a binary (there is free will OR there isn't) and more as a spectrum. Perhaps we are *LIKELY* to behave according to our nature. Maybe it's like being in a river and needing to go downstream -- it's the direction we're swept by our tendencies and our genes and our upbringing.
But I do believe that we can choose to swim upstream. Maybe we'll never make as much progress as someone who finds it "natural" to behave responsibly/kindly/punctually/whatever.
I know for myself that I have a default set of behaviors, and I'm comfortable in them, and relaxed, and I have an ok life. But I'm old enough now to know that when I ride on default, when I flow downstream according to my nature, there are sometimes ways that hurts others or tramples their freedoms or hopes. Or it's just rude.
I mean, I'm no Richard Madoc, but I have my vices. Being on time for things has always been a massive struggle. I am forever late and behind and overdue. But I know I can swim upstream and force myself to be punctual, out of respect for others -- or out of fear of the consequences for myself. I can fight my nature.
But do I? Only sometimes.
I think that's different than predestination though. let's call it pre-inclination.
These books have had me thinking about that so much.
Take Richard Madoc, for example. It's in his cowardly selfish nature to do what he does -- and to displace himself from it, to deny the wrong of it. But you can't tell me that that he couldn't have walked away. He could have. But it would have been like swimming against the current of his cowardliness.
The cuckoo -- I have a feeling it's not quite a person or a being, more of a function of the dream world, like the Corinthian or one of Morpheus' nightmares.
Morpheus treats these creatures differently than he treats mortals who make choices. Sometimes (not consistently) he punishes mortals who made bad choices, who failed to be better than their nature. Like Madoc and Burgess and the Collectors. But the Corinthian and the Cuckoo, these Morpheus has created, and they are not nice, but they are his. When he unmakes the Corinthian it is not a punishment, it is because he created him badly. I have a feeling that if the cuckoo truly got out of control, its end might be similar.
Wow, your post brought out a ton that was on my mind!
"It's a little too much like real life, in that karma is either
non-existent, or at least slow to act... fairness doesn't really enter
the picture."
I agree, the thing that makes these stories so disturbing is that you feel no sense of reassurance that things will "work out OK" or turn out fair. Too real. A little chilling.
Perhaps because the story gives us an encyclopedia description of Cuculus canorus, I read the Cuckoo as being like the Scorpion of the old fable: an animal lacking what we're familiar with as agency or reasoning, despite its human-like appearance (these are fairy tales, after all). The two differ in that the Cuckoo's acting according to its "nature" serves its well-being, whereas the Scorpion's works against it, but both are animals doing what animals do.
In that sense, the Cuckoo provides a strong contrast to the human characters. It's relatively easy to talk about an animal acting according to its "nature," however we might define that. People are much, much more complicated. Where does Morpheus fall on that scale? And if you were to pose him that question, how would he answer?
But then it might be in Death, Dream, & Destruction's natures to make more complex-seeming choices. And Morpheus seems no less trapped, it's just that he chalks it up to his duties or responsibility (to hearken back to discussions about vol. 9 and 10).
It's hard to say with the Endless, exactly how constrained they are by their functions. But they show plenty of agency, so I put them all in the "it's complicated" end of the pool with us. (Except maybe Destiny. He's a weirdo.)
But would Morpheus agree? He does often take refuge in his duties, and as we see in other volumes (and, as you note, discuss elsewhere) he sometimes has issues with responsibility. Morpheus is the one who brings up the Cuckoo's nature in the first place. I'm inclined to think, to some extent, he might *like* to compare himself to the Cuckoo, able to use "nature" as an excuse to avoid judgment. (Of course, what he might like to do, and what he would do, and what he could get away with doing, are all very different.)
In a sort of related but not completely way, this is one of the things I've been noticing about "Once Upon A Time." For Disney TV it's interestingly dark. What I've been noticing is the difference between "good" and "evil" on the show. "Good," from the very start, takes action but is ignorant of the consequences, the possible consequences or even that all (each) actions have consequences. The "good" characters go ahead and act without thinking of the fallout to themselves or, especially, others. "Evil" on the other hand, never forgets that everything has a price and that all actions have consequences and they usually consider the consequences before taking an action. Interesting "Good" is less concerned with the big picture than "Evil," but there it is. "Evil is willing to do the unsavory things understanding the outcome could be problematic but having weighed the alternatives. "Good" does not think this far ahead.
Don't know the show and whether the above is relevant
I'm not convinced we are that complicated. Yes we can weigh long term good and bad, but are our decisions ever more or less than our inborn personality and experiences allow them to be? That's what I wonder when I question the idea of free will. Is there really a separate me that contributes weight & willpower to one possible choice vs another? if I decide one way could I ever really have chosen differently, even if current circumstances and history were the same?
And does it matter either way?
I once worked with/for a man who said that he always wins at pool because he calls his shots after he'd made them. He had his second visit from Morpheus' older sister quite a while ago. I don't think he called that shot.
So, are our fates determined or do we have free will? I'm trained in psychoanalysis & help patients (as well as myself) wrestle with that very question. Our biology makes some claim on us but what about "nurture." One of the great debates in the soft sciences. Nature vs Nurture. Perhaps it has to do with our awareness of what isn't biology and can therefore, maybe, be changed. I have to believe that people can change their nature, perform alchemy, be reborn not as someone different but as someone who does things differently & with awareness instead of acting out of unconcious patterns.
The Cuckoo is given a path because of her nature perhaps because Morpheus wants a pass because of his. Fair exchange.