No, I think – without spoilers for OVERTURE, just core stuff – that Dream made his choice because he felt he’d failed in his duties, getting captured and then spending most of the 20th century unable to oversee the matters that were his responsibility; that’d explain why the series started where it did, and why he groomed a successor instead of simply leaving the job behind like his brother had.
What really drove Lucifer bananas was he, himself, didn’t know whether he was operating with free will. In Sandman at one point he says something like ‘How much did he [god] know ahead of time?’ He’s doubting that even his attempts at rebellion and establishing himself are pre-ordained.
Carey took that and expanded it to deal with a being with an unresolvable conundrum: wanting free will and never being able to know that he’d achieved it. Even in his final discussion with his creator God is kind of a dick about the entire concept. But Lucifer, like God, is above everything. At one point there’s a bit in Lucifer about ‘a powerful being who looks at the universe and sees nothing but a set of tools’. That’s for sure Lucifer. But it equally applies to God. And it’s also something Lucifer attempts to teach Elaine in her deity-apprentice period.
I think on one of the things that is consistent about the Endless is their need for change: Destruction walked off the job, Delirium used to be Delight, Death used to be cold, grim and scary, and even Despair is on her second incarnation. I think that only Desire and Destiny have been consistently themselves.
Jonathan Chance - Yeah. And God himself knew at that meeting in the café in Carey’s last issue that Lucifer would not want to share consciousness-es. But you wouldn’t need to be omniscient to have guess that Lucifer would find that utterly distasteful.
My favourite scene in Carey’s series is when Lucifer faces off against Destiny. Lucifer plainly and utterly detests Destiny and what he represents, and the feeling appears to be mutual. Lucifer grabs Destiny’s book and burns out the pages. Destiny, with the slightest hint of smugness, notes that the words of what just happened and what happens next are spelt out in the ashes of the pages. Lucifer sees the threat of Fenris written in the ashes and appears shocked. I always felt like Destiny needed a punch in the nose but on this occasion Carey had the character really prove a point. Lucifer had no free will: even his act of trying to destroy predestination was predetermined.
That’s the piece hinting that Lucifer was directly involved. Mike Carey used to spend a lot of time on the Lucifer board at the now long gone DC Comics message board. Carey, like Gaiman himself, always openly maintained that Dream had orchestrated his own death. Someone on the DCMBs pointed this exchange out to him, and you could see in his response this penny-dropping moment, along the lines of, “You know, I’ve never really properly considered that.” Remiel came to visit Lucifer because Lucifer, on this theory, was responsible for the razing of the Dreaming and the hounding of Dream. Remiel knew that Lucifer, having started it, could stop what was happening. But Remiel and Lucifer detest each other so much the purpose of the visit is lost in their bickering. Having given Sandman the key to hell, does that malign influence send someone to their death? There isn’t enough in the text to support that. But I love the idea, especially having regard to Carey’s ruthless take on the character, that if we dug deep enough, Lucifer was behind it. I suppose the hounding to death of Mazikeen would support that theory, since she seems to have become queen of Hell and would hold the key.
This all assumes of course the contentious literary theory that the author himself doesn’t necessarily get it right, in that a text is open to interpretation.
(The other theory I quite like and which Lightraymentions, is Dream seeks figuratively and literally Destruction. In that regard, Dream’s actual murderer is Destruction. Destruction as we see has murderous mechanisms which stop himself from being found. It causes the death of the Lawyer by falling wall, causes the Shaman to hide himself as a bear, causes the suicide of that Babylonian love goddess, another former friend of Destruction’s to run into other dimensions -I can’t remember her name and I don’t have the comic at hand - when her apartment blows up and she sees a hand in it, causes the death by incineration in bed of Dream’s and Delirium’s human guide. Delirium is already destroyed and beyond his hand. Destruction is what he is, and so has the same sort of culpability as the hanged suicide’s rope. In that sense, I doubt Destruction intentionally caused those murders - they just happened because its his inherent nature.)
As I said, Gaiman himself describes Sandman’s story as “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his choice.”
So the question of Lucifer’s culpability in that becomes a question of ‘when did Dream make his choice?’ And that’s pretty vague. His imprisonment contributed, but after following Death around for a day Dream seems over that.
Making things right with Nada surely played a part - and Dream returning to Hell to do that triggered Lucifer’s abdication. So, as far as that, Lucifer did influence Dream toward his own destruction. (I’m of the opinion that by showing he could abidcate, Lucifer also showed Dream how trapped in his duty he was, therefore precipitating Dream’s scheme to die; there’s not much textual support for that, though.)
By the time he gives Orpheus his death, Dream has already set his own eventual death in motion. Really, by the time he agreed to seek Destruction with Delerium, he was committed.
Lucifer was portrayed by both Gaiman and Carey as the most insightful guy around - as long as it wasn’t insight into himself. So if he did influence Dream’s ultimate choice, he could have been very very subtle about it.
Lightray:
He does nothing of the sort. I just re-read the issues to see if I missed such a thing. I didn’t. Neither he nor Puck at any time explicitly say that Dream told them to kidnap Daniel.
We probably need a separate Richard Kadrey thread, but the opening chapter of The Everything Box, where the bedraggled remnant of humanity snarks on the “Angel of Office Supplies” before picking the angel’s pocket of his apocalypse box and scarpering is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long while.
oh dear lord yes people should of read metrophage 30 years guy predicted our current society back in the 80s and were about 2 or 3 steps away from his future … (except he was wrong on Japanese domination of the western economy but then so was the rest of the world)
but I think the names misspelled because on metrophage there was an h in there somewhere
ive always wanted to see metrophage as a movie … but id have to be animated …you’ll understand when ya read the book
only thing is some people nag on is he has a slight trans fetish (which pops in in metro here and there but is pretty much a plot line in "second story girls … another great story of his)
Id love to pick his brain about the current political/social situation…
I miss Gaudium and Serpa. They made for excellent comic relief.
re: Sandman…Yes, he goes through the motions, but he knows he’s going through them. He’s fulfilling his function right up to the end(less).
And yet, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
If he’d decided to put his affairs in order – making amends and setting things up for his successor – so he could end it all, and then met with Lucifer, then it doesn’t really matter what Lucifer did and how much Lucifer knew and so on.
Like, if an achingly responsible but utterly mundane human contemplating suicide (a) chooses to do it, but indirectly; and then (b) does all that stuff I was just saying, about putting his affairs in order and making amends and arranging things so a successor will carry on for him; and also (c) goes about accomplishing his ultimate goal by just pissing off rather a lot of people – a manipulative and well-connected mob boss, say, and maybe a crooked cop who knows a terminally ill crook, plus maybe a muckraking columnist who can tiptoe right up to the edge of libel and rouse the ire of gullible folks in our fair city, or whatever – then it’s irrelevant that one of them can say “I know exactly what I’m doing; I set this in motion; muhahaha.”
There’s no denying though that Lucifer could have stopped it if he had chosen to do so. Lucifer could have incinerated the Furies, without so much as coughing. He could have incinerated Loki, and even little survivalist Puck wouldn’t have made it though if dropped in the heart of a star. Whether Dream would have been happy about that is another thing, of course, and he might just have arranged his suicide in a less public and less subtle way.
Yeah. The crew on the journey into the Mansions of Silence had a good line up, and Gaudium was a good foil to Easterman’s ghost and Mazikeen.
Yeah, in the end, Lucifer and Dream were each going to act according to desire.
Dunno. They told Dream “You cannot even touch us, how can you fight us?”
Now Lucifer could have blown away Fury’s mortal form which was powering things, to be sure. But incinerate The Kindly Ones? Don’t think so. Maybe…remove them several planes so they have to walk all the way back?..something clever like that.
The concept of the embodiment of will in a dispute with the embodiments of vengeance has enormous appeal. But you’re right: Lucifer should be written as cleverer about it. Given Lucifer’s own father cast his son into a hellish afterlife for four billion years, perhaps he could have subverted them to is own interests. God fighting off The Kindly Ones would be worth the admission price.
Lucian says this virtually verbatim during “The Wake”, adding that there was a limit to how much Dream could allow himself to change.
No, Dream didn’t tell them to. His manipulation was far more subtle than that. He merely wound up Loki and let him go. He wound up Lyta as well.
The whole point of the story - and, as already noted, this is something Death says explicitly just before Dream dies - is that he’s manipulating things so subtly so that HE doesn’t realize he’s doing it. And yet if you look at all his actions throughout the series in hindsight it’s clear that every step he makes is done to box himself in - he wants to leave but is bound by his sense of duty and responsibility, so he arranges things so that leaving - by dying - is the only thing he CAN do in accordance with his duties and responsibilities. This is also reinforced in one of the epilogues (in which the new Sandman meets a Chinese sage in the desert): he makes a comment about how we build our own traps and back into them, feigning surprise the whole time.
Back onto Lucifer - it’s been a while but IIRC the whole idea of Lucifer being part of a triumvirate was down to DC continuity - I vaguely recall it being plot points in books like “Hellraiser” and “Swamp Thing”. Gaiman slightly retcons it to indicate that Lucifer wasn’t really forced to share power but merely acceded to the demand to do so because it didn’t really matter one way or another.