I had a really hard time with this story when it first came out. (Which would have been in 1991-92 according to the copyright dates on my comics, and, wow, I was...younger then.) On the one hand, it seemed obvious by that point in the series that Death was the closest thing to a Gaiman POV character the comic had, and it was obvious where she stood. On the other, Gaiman's giving the opposite opinion, not just to any character, but to the gods themselves. All of them, if we're to take George at his word. And definitely to at least one pretty powerful female deity.
Years later, I read the interview with Gaiman in Hy Bender's Sandman Companion, where Gaiman says:
"Regarding the contentious page 19, where George comments that neither Thess nor the moon believe gender to be elective, lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that's an opinion the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death does too. To my mind, that's all that matters."
After completing the series as a whole, it was a lot less easy to read the triple goddess as the authorial POV character, too, but none of the first readers had that context.
And, okay, but gods and what they can do with their opinions aside, there's Wanda's death.
And then I've got to go back to Samuel R. Delany's intro to the trade paperback (read somewhere in the years between the comic and the Bender book), where he talks about that, along with the death of the single character of color in the whole story:
"It seems to me, as I was saying, that the key to this particular fantasy world is precisely that it is a fantasy world where the natural forces, stated and unstated, whether of myth or of chance, enforce the dominant ideology we've got around us today, no matter what...Making the supernatural forces in the tale enforcers in the dominant ideology is what makes it a fantasy--and a rather nasty one at that. And it remains just a nasty fantasy unless, in our reading of it, we can find some irony, something that subverts it, something that resists that fantasy, an array of details that turns that simple acceptance of ideology into a problem--problematizes it."
And you can find that. On the other hand, I've read it again recently and it still seems entirely too easy to read in such a way that it plays in to some of the very things it's attempting to criticize.
I mean, later in that same Bender interview, Gaiman explains that he kills Wanda because hers was the only death that made the story a tragedy. But she still dies. And dies a rather pointless death in the cause of advancing Barbie's plotline and emotional development. As does Masie Hill, the aforementioned black woman who gets tangled up in Our Heroes' story.
Wow. It's been almost 17 years now, and I'm still struggling with this one.
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Years later, I read the interview with Gaiman in Hy Bender's Sandman Companion, where Gaiman says:
After completing the series as a whole, it was a lot less easy to read the triple goddess as the authorial POV character, too, but none of the first readers had that context.
And, okay, but gods and what they can do with their opinions aside, there's Wanda's death.
And then I've got to go back to Samuel R. Delany's intro to the trade paperback (read somewhere in the years between the comic and the Bender book), where he talks about that, along with the death of the single character of color in the whole story:
And you can find that. On the other hand, I've read it again recently and it still seems entirely too easy to read in such a way that it plays in to some of the very things it's attempting to criticize.
I mean, later in that same Bender interview, Gaiman explains that he kills Wanda because hers was the only death that made the story a tragedy. But she still dies. And dies a rather pointless death in the cause of advancing Barbie's plotline and emotional development. As does Masie Hill, the aforementioned black woman who gets tangled up in Our Heroes' story.
Wow. It's been almost 17 years now, and I'm still struggling with this one.