Sandman Master Post and Intro

Hi, I’m so glad you’re here! This started out as a small blog but has developed a horrifying (^jk) life of its own over the past two years, so it was about time I organised the links and tags to all my Sandman stuff for you to make it easier to find your way around.

[For quick reference:]

Ordered by topics (recommended):

Death—Zu Orzu

I hadn’t seen this one before. Almost looks like a sister piece for this:

Dream and Desire—Ryan Kelly

The podcast isn’t completely paywalled and Tortoise Media isn’t owned by Boris Johnson (please people, check your sources!)

Ok, this is the last I’ll say about this:

PLEASE don’t reblog everything unchecked. PLEASE do your own research before you reblog stuff unquestioned. Don’t rely on other people’s often questionable “summaries”. The unsubstantiated crap I’ve seen on here today is honestly starting to get embarrassing, and people reblog it without as much as checking if it’s true. I’ve listened to the thing in its entirety, and I still don’t blog about it and won’t. My guess is that the majority of people who reblog haven’t listened at all and just rely on what other people write. That’s how you create echo chambers that align with your own bias, and that’s also how you spread misinformation. And we have plenty of that by now.

The latest thing I’ve read is that Boris Johnson (former UK PM) owns Tortoise Media. No, he doesn’t (in fact, they’ve dragged him several times. The fact that his sister, who he doesn’t get along with btw, was involved in this particular report doesn’t change that one bit. She used to be Conservative, then changed to the LibDems and is now Independent. Her other views are a different topic). And it’s all very easy to find out and takes barely a minute.

The person who spreads that misinformation also writes that the “Conservative Party is further to the right than the Tories”. Dude, the Tories and the Conservatives are the SAME PARTY! 🤦🏻‍♀️ And people reblog it and vehemently agree. I’m sometimes just despairing on here.

Btw, the podcast is not paywalled (I read this constantly on here). It’s only behind a paywall on Tortoise’s own page, but you can freely listen to it on e.g. Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms. With free transcripts to read. There:

Peddling of misinformation helps no one.

Dream—Ron Mendiola

Death—Mindy Lee

I’m running a Sandman blog. As such, I feel I can’t not say anything, but I’ll make this short (for me):

I believe victims. I’m a psychotherapist and work with them almost every day. My trust in the legal system on these matters is therefore also limited and a complicated affair. Having said this, I will withhold further commentary as the situation unfolds, because it’s too complex.

I also believe that stories have meaning to us that goes beyond their creators, and that meaning doesn’t suddenly fall away because of their creators’ actions, although it can, and that’s also okay.

Our feelings are allowed to be complicated, and no one deserves any type of harassment because they still love a story while simultaneously grappling with feelings of anger, disgust or simply sadness towards or about its creator. Neither does anyone deserve any hard feelings because they decide they don’t want to engage anymore. Our feelings are our own, and we don’t have to justify them to anyone.

Fandoms exist because of story and community. And those stories and communities don’t suddenly stop existing, so I hope we can remember to treat each other with respect and empathy moving on from here.

The Kindly Ones—Jill Thompson Movie Concept Art

I normally don’t post these milestones, but I do today because this reminds me of good things and community on a day that shocked me a bit, so thank you to everyone who’s been around since 2022.

Dream and the Hecateae—Josef Rubinstein

Jeez, S2 news come out, and everyone and their mother puts their fanfic that has NOTHING to do with S2, or the series in the slightest, under the Netflix and S2 tags. While that might give you a bit more exposure, it doesn’t encourage me to read your stuff. It actually makes it less likely I’ll even look at it because I’m not in a fic mood if I look for news.

Don’t get me wrong, I love fanfic and write it myself. I don’t mind reading it in general, hence won’t block the fic tags, but do we really need to shove it into completely unrelated tags?

I get that fic writers often have a hard time to be seen, especially if they don’t write for the flavour of the month (ask me how I know), but consciously wrong-tagging for exposure is not gonna solve that problem because it’s aiming at the wrong crowd. It’s like advertising your sparkling wine to people who only drink beer, but trying to make them believe it’s beer. Which is annoying, right? Do we really want that when we’re already struggling to get taken seriously by certain corners of fandom anyway?

Casting the net a bit wider with different iterations of character tags, even ones that maybe aren’t 100% on, I get to a degree (e.g. because some people are still not clear on the difference between OC and reader tags). But if we looked for fic, we wouldn’t be in a very specific news tag…

Dream and Bast—ayanimeya

Finally official cast announcements for Sandman S2!

(…even if we knew/intuited a few of these)

And: