The Sandman: Netflix users divided over JK Rowling reference - Viewers aren’t sure how to take it

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Netflix users have been left divided over a JK Rowling reference in The Sandman.

On Friday (19 August), two weeks after the Neil Gaiman adaptation was released, two bonus episodes were added to the streaming service, causing excitement among fans of the show

In the second part, which was written by Catherine Smyth-McMullen, the Harry Potter author is referenced in a scene occurring during the book launch of fictional writing [sic] Richard Madoc (Arthur Darvill).

The scene, set in August 2020, reveals that “every major studio wants a piece” of Madoc, with the author set to work with ‘whoever lets him write and direct” the film adaptation of his novel.

One character then says: “They won’t even let Jo Rowling write and direct,” to which the other replies: “Jo Rowling needs a new agent. Tell her to call me.”

In recent years, Rowling has made headlines for sharing her views on transgender rights. She was first met with a backlash in June 2020 after calling out an article’s use of the phrase “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” she wrote, adding: “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

The scene was set two months after the controversy, which led to her being criticised as “anti-trans” and “transphobic”.

Some viewers read the reference to Rowling needing “a new agent” as a dig at Rowling.

“OOOOOOH MY GOD THE DIG AT JK ROWLING, I’M HOWLING,” one of the many tweets read, with another reading: “Not Neil Gaiman shading Jo Rowling on Sandman.”

However, others called out the show for the reference; some believed it to merely be a nod to the author’s success, while others felt the mention of Rowling detracted from their enjoyment of the series.

98dfbf05ab110510dfad2ee2f61e5a4a721c469b.png

Tom Sturridge in ‘The Sandman’
(Netflix)

“New Sandman episode passingly mentions JK Rowling in a positive light,” one fan wrote, adding: “They did not need to do that lol, holy s***.”

Rowling has recently found herself involved in a high-profile argument with author Joanne Harris after claiming she didn’t support her when she received death threats over her views on transgender people.

The author’s accusations centred around Chocolat writer Harris’s position as head of the Society of Authors union and Rowling’s controversial opinions on trans politics, and came after British-Indian author Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New York on Friday (12 August).

Article Link (the Independent)
Archive
 
Click to expand...
Imagine letting the author of a children's fantasy series about wizards going to wizard school live in your head rent free
 
Grub said:
Imagine letting the author of a children's fantasy series about wizards going to wizard school live in your head rent free
Click to expand...
We won’t stand for terf ideology! We’re the generation of rebels who grew up on Harry Potter and Hunger Games, who rebuke the system ran by orange Voldemorts and President Snows that’s inherently opposed to us!1!
1661103183074.jpeg
 
As I recall, there was a similar reaction on Twitter last year because of a scene in Doctor Who where the title character recited Harry Potter to herself.

screencapture-twitter-search-2022-08-21-18_27_42_.png
 
Has anyone read the book this is based off and can tell me if it's as pozzed as the show is?

I started watching it the other day and I kept watching just out of pure fascination, having never seen something so pozzed before. Literally every other character is black. The devil is a a woman. And there are more homosexual couplings than heterosexual ones. There's even a drag show musical number (yes, I watched that far. I'm not proud).

So is the source material equally pozzed or did Netflix just butcher it?
 
Somchai said:
Has anyone read the book this is based off and can tell me if it's as pozzed as the show is?

I started watching it the other day and I kept watching just out of pure fascination, having never seen something so pozzed before. Literally every other character is black. The devil is a a woman. And there are more homosexual couplings than heterosexual ones. There's even a drag show musical number (yes, I watched that far. I'm not proud).

So is the source material equally pozzed or did Netflix just butcher it?
Click to expand...

I'd say that it was progressive for its time, so whether you want to determine that is pozzed or not is up to you. I personally think that it wasn't anywhere near as bad in terms of pushing agendas. Gaiman's work was more 'big idea' (nature of life and death, etc.) and far less progressive BS.

But there have been wholesale changes made with the Netflix Brush.

For example, this is what the character Death looked like in the comic:


1661104330699.png


Who was inspired by Cinnamon Hadley:

1661104363538.png
 
Somchai said:
Has anyone read the book this is based off and can tell me if it's as pozzed as the show is?

I started watching it the other day and I kept watching just out of pure fascination, having never seen something so pozzed before. Literally every other character is black. The devil is a a woman. And there are more homosexual couplings than heterosexual ones. There's even a drag show musical number (yes, I watched that far. I'm not proud).

So is the source material equally pozzed or did Netflix just butcher it?
Click to expand...
Gaiman is a massive cuck so yes it’s pozzed
 
Imagine getting into a frothing rage just because an author (who has controversial opinions that you can easily ignore if you don't follow her social media accounts) is mentioned in passing.
 
Somchai said:
Has anyone read the book this is based off and can tell me if it's as pozzed as the show is?

I started watching it the other day and I kept watching just out of pure fascination, having never seen something so pozzed before. Literally every other character is black. The devil is a a woman. And there are more homosexual couplings than heterosexual ones. There's even a drag show musical number (yes, I watched that far. I'm not proud).

So is the source material equally pozzed or did Netflix just butcher it?
Click to expand...

As luck would have it, I wrote this post about it just the other day in A&L, so I think this will answer your question. As quoted below:

(But TL;DR the author was very liberal in the early 1990s and likely would have been labelled a progressive, had the term been in use back then, but was considerably less obnoxious about it. Also in the books was a whole bunch of tranny shit that I assume is not in the show yet or else you would have mentioned it.)
DoubleD said:
I would argue it was a bigger departure from established norms to make the Grim Reaper a woman in the original comic than it is to make the same character black in Current Year.

Now it's been a while since I've read The Sandman, but is this not the same series that portrayed Desire as a gender-ambiguous man-woman? Delirium also fits right in with the queer teen girl aesthetic, down to the traumatic backstory. And one of the most memorable storylines involved a highly sympathetic portrayal of a trans woman and the abuse she faced from her rural conservative parents.

And it's easy to forget just how ahead of its time this was for... [checks year] 1991.

1660908625374-1.jpg


Creatives like Gaiman always had a deep agenda to push. The fact that we don't see it, even in hindsight, is a sign of how successful they were in getting other people to accept their ideas. But, with the continued shifting of the Overton Window, yesterdays liberals become today's conservatives if they don't keep wanting to shift the window forwards.

Replace 10 years with 30, and it's pretty much this meme.

1660909256703.jpg


Of course, not everyone thinks the shift has gone far enough. But now that their beloved liberalism has become the status quo, a lot of these people get recontextualised as progressives. Their efforts to change the world, however, remain largely the same.

It could be argued that the race-based progressivism in The Sandman TV series is more in the spirit of the original than, say, faithfully recreating Death's original character design. One could perhaps argue that it doesn't go far enough, like IDK she needs to be more culturally Black, or talk about racism, or have storyline set in the BLM riots. I have not seen it, and I don't particularly intend to, but this does illustrate a fundamental conflict in the adaptation/remaking of older works: do you update the work for Current Year and possibly lose what made it special? Or do you strive for accuracy, only to find that those things no longer make it special? I know that Chato recently criticised Ghostbusters '16 for the second of these two reasons.

All this is to say that progressives have been meddling with our media for longer than most of us have been alive. And realising this (often in the context of shittier, modern-day progressivism) is often what makes me feel these things tarnish the original work.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Well Intentioned said:
I'd say that it was progressive for its time, so whether you want to determine that is pozzed or not is up to you. I personally think that it wasn't anywhere near as bad in terms of pushing agendas. Gaiman's work was more 'big idea' (nature of life and death, etc.) and far less progressive BS.
Click to expand...
But it also wasn't pushing "Kill the faggots and Jews, race war nao" so it still counts as "Pozzed" by KF standards.
 
Well Intentioned said:
I'd say that it was progressive for its time, so whether you want to determine that is pozzed or not is up to you. I personally think that it wasn't anywhere near as bad in terms of pushing agendas. Gaiman's work was more 'big idea' (nature of life and death, etc.) and far less progressive BS.

But there have been wholesale changes made with the Netflix Brush.

For example, this is what the character Death looked like in the comic:


View attachment 3628957

Who was inspired by Cinnamon Hadley:

View attachment 3628959
Click to expand...
It's very possible Gaiman made that change on his own; I've seen it reported that he wanted the female Constantine and not John. To his credit and Netflix, I don't see changing characters like this as being crap. They play it straight, Death in Sandman isn't droning on about how being black makes her job harder or some shit and Johanna Constantine's character isn't dominated by being a woman and it isn't used to make some empty observation.

As long as these changes don't get shoved down my throat with commentary about how life is so hard for them or whatever, I don't really care (in a fantasy/fiction perspective, context is key if this were a historical movie and suddenly Joan of Arc is a Franco Nigerian, than I'm going to be annoyed... unless the movie isn't taking itself seriously).
I like to look at Red from Shawshank as the perfect example that you can be decently liberal with certain characters race/sex and it doesn't hurt anything. Shawshank even plays thr change for a joke with "maybe it's because I'm Irish."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom