People complaining about a non-binary actor being cast as Desire in Sandman. Did they even read the comics?
Don’t like the ‘woke’ casting of Netflix’s ‘Sandman’ series? Neil Gaiman doesn’t care
The comic was a genre-busting, gender-bending horror-ish fantasia that simply didn’t care about convention. So when self-proclaimed fans objected to the show casting nonbinary and Black actors, how did they think Gaiman would react?
And not surprisingly they’re also complaining about Black actors, both in roles where the race isn’t a key characteristic and in roles where the character doesn’t technically *have* a race (ex. any of the Endless, who aren’t even human, they just appear in a form familiar to whoever is seeing them – I mean, we’ve seen some of them as cats and Martians).
And the idea that Gaiman is somehow capitulating to “wokeness” or progressiveness…again, did they even read the source material that they claim is being sullied?
Sandman was about stories and change. Dream’s main character arc is realizing that he needs to change, but can’t.
And it was groundbreaking in who it included and what stories it told in the medium…30 years ago.
Freezing the form of the story would be kind of weirdly metatextual, but not nearly as awesome as making something that’s groundbreaking *today* could be.