Despair – there’s the “Our Sister is Dead” story from the Necropolis issue, and the Despair we know has an internal monologue at one point about how insecure she is trying to live up to the first Despair, who she remembers as a “great lady.”
Anyway, as to cmkellar’s theory, I can’t see it being Lucifer. In the quoted dialogue, he does recall swearing to destroy Morpheus, but that scene isn’t triumphant or even guilty. More resigned – he didn’t destory him actively, and he’s, if not grieving, then sort of unhappy that he’s dead, just like you would be to learn about the passing of some guy you knew even if you weren’t friends. The thing with Desire is similar, although he/she certainly had a more active role in Dream’s passing.
So far as I recall, only Despair has ever died before Morpheus did. I like the reference to the Catholic Trinity to describe the difference/sameness of Morpheus and Daniel. I think Daniel has all of Morpheus’ memories and knowledge, but perhaps a more human point of view. I really wish Gaiman had written that first meeting with the rest of the family.
Also, Orpheus and Rose’s Mother are the only children of the Endless we are told of. Though Morpheus and Desire at least have often had mortal lovers. (Does Thessaly/Larissa count as mortal?)
Interesting theory about Lucifer, but I have to agree with Morpheus himself being the prime mover of his own demise. Always subconsciously, but still there. I suspect Lucifer was both unhappy at someone else taking out Morpheus and relieved a bit that he didn’t have to do it himself eventually. I think he had gained some respect and understanding of Morpheus once he got out of the ‘running hell’ business. “Bloody good sunsets” and all that.
Does anybody remember off hand the name of the old man who refuses to leave Hell? He’s a Dark Ages (or thereabouts) warlord known for his brutality and I’ve wondered if he was (an obscure) historical figure or if he was strictly Gaiman’s creation.
Not about Sandman, but in *American Gods * Czernobog, a real deity (in the sense deities are real obviously) about whom very little is known, has his company stop in a field in Kansas where a cult had once performed some rituals to him. I always wondered if this was purely imagination or if there had once been a Russian occult ring in Kansas (it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve read if it were true).
Breschau of Livonia. Livonia is real and somewhere near the Baltic, but Breschau is fictional. Lucifer says in the book that no one – no one – remembers him today, so he can’t be someone real, because that would mean that someone would have to know of him.
We don’t see any connection between Loki and Puck until the Kindly Ones. Before that story, they are no more connected to one another than to Lucifer, who himself has had dealings with Morpheus.
And it may well be possible that Lucifer never met with Loki in person. I quote from Sandman # 69, page 8: “The master manipulator (Loki is depicted) realizes how ultimately – how strangely, how elegantly – he too had been manipulated.” Lucifer may well have been the prime mover behind the plot without revealing himself to his pawns. And additionally, is Morpheus a manipulative type? Not that I recall from the series. He’s pretty much honest and forthright. He uses power, not trickery. Lucifer, on the other hand, is practically by definition a manipulator.
Yet strangely, the kidnapping of Daniel happens when Lyta Hall is in Lucifer’s club - Lucifer was in a unique position to let someone know that for the first time in years, Daniel was not well-protected. I’d find it hard to believe he does not know who is in his club, and practically everything about them (see: “Sit down, you’re rocking the boat”)
Cliffy:
I didn’t read it that way. It sounded to me like he had engineered it but found revenge to be hollow. He doesn’t seem to be unhappy either, just very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. Lucifer has a serious problem with ennui (e.g., abandoning the nightclub), and though he felt he needed to follow through on his threat, he takes no pleasure or passion in it anymore.
Look, maybe I’m wrong. Only Neil Gaiman knows for sure (are there any recorded interviews in which he’d been asked this question?). But that’s how I understood the significance of Lucifer’s appearances in “The Kindly Ones.”
Hope I didn’t screw up the attributes on that.
That’s what a good story does. it leaves enough open to interpretation to make people think and in some cases, discuss.
When you ask Don McLean what ‘American Pie’ means, he just smiles.
If Lucifer had dealings with Loki or Puck, we would have seen that. The person they had in common with Lucifer, is Morpheus. So if the person they had in common manipulated them into acting on Lucifer’s desire to destroy Morpheus, that person would be… Morpheus.
Loki does realize that he’s been manipulated. It would make no sense to tell us, the readers, that Loki has been manipulated unless we had some context to make sense of who manipulated him. From what we see, there’s no reason to think that Thor or Nuala, say, manipulated him. Odin surely does so within the text, but Loki’s later team-up with Puck makes no sense if Odin was behind it – Loki is angry at being manipulated, and strikes out at the person who did so. And, after all, Morpheus says that the involvement of Loki was not unexpected by him. Loki and Puck burning away Daniel’s mortality all points to something that Morpheus set up.
… The real question, of course, is how Loki and Puck set the Furies on Morpheus, as Puck claims.
And Morpheus is extremely manipulative. We see it throughout the series. He does not expose Loki’s deception to Odin until after Odin has left, so that he can maneuver Loki into being in his debt. He uses Rose Walker as his stalking horse to find the wayward dreams and nightmares. He sets up situations such as the Dream of A Thousand Cats, where he’s manipulating cats into dreaming in unison as he’d suggested.
It’s not so much what waiting to accost Loki did to either Loki or Odin, but what it did to Susanoo – the guest who was ostensibly his reason for intervening at all. By waiting until Odin had taken away the unwillingly-disguised Susanoo, Morpheus arranged Loki being indebted to him. Had he revealed to Odin that he had the wrong “Loki” (i.e., that it was really Susanoo), then Loki would have escaped without being indebted to Dream.
And all it took was for Morpheus to allow his guest to be taken away, chained up, to have venom dripped onto his face for a while in place of Loki.
Yes. Which is why he used her as his stalking horse. He says so, to Lucien, when he gets the report on which dreams/nightmares are missing. He points out the dream vortex, says “Perhaps one of our problems may prove a solution to the other”, and next we see him peeking out of Unity’s dollhouse, watching them.
He planned for the dream vortex to draw in the missing dreams/nightmares. Which she did. However, that plan perforce involved letting someone he knew was a young girl draw Brute and Glob and the Corinthian to her.
For all that he showed up to save her from the Corinthian at the end, it doesn’t change that he was using her all along.
p.s., hope I’m not coming across as browbeating or shrill or anything here; it’s fun dissecting this stuff.
I’ll have to re-read those stories to remind myself of just how Morpheus was acting then.
Regardless, I still think the Kindly Ones plot was Lucifer’s revenge. I think his comments are hints of it. In addition, if he isn’t, then while it’s nice that he owns a night club, his presence is practically irrelevant to the story if he’s not somehow connected to the overall plot. He doesn’t directly engage Lyta Hall in the scenes where she’s at his club, and his telling Delirium about the sorry fate of her brother doesn’t lead to any significant action on her part toward him. He’s doesn’t really comment enough throughout the story to be considered a Greek Chorus.
Now that I think of it, another interesting suspect is Puck himself, creating chaos just for the sake of creating chaos, as it’s his nature. Loki ends up upset at himself for allowing himself to be manipulated into the position where he got caught and his supposed equal partner got off scot-free. And it’s definitely Puck who goads Nuala into dragging Dream out of the Dreaming, a necessary element of Dream’s demise that Loki knew nothing about.
Hmmm, interesting! Puck, you say. That does kind of fit. Also, extra angst for Loki at being outsmarted by his ‘partner’ that (I thought) he treated like a sidekick. Plus he gets away scot free. Back to faerie. Better not let big sister suspect. Still, Morpheus was getting tired of being dream.
Lucifer’s role in the story was the same as Destruction’s: do demonstrate to Morpheus that an alternate out exists for him. Lucifer gave up his stewardship of Hell, just as Morpheus could have given up his rulership of the Dreaming. Likewise, Destruction gave up nothing, but just decided to stop doing his job; Morpheus, too, could have taken that route.
Puck… I dunno. He does indeed get off scott free, but he’s called out as a braggart – I suspect he’s exaggerating his role in Morpheus’ downfall (because it amuses him to). It would certainly be in his character to have dropped the dime on Loki to the Corinthian, though. But Morpheus remains the only connection that could have hooked them up in the first place.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that the Puck turned out to be the better Trickster-figure; he didn’t end up bound beneath the earth with venom dripping into his face, after all.
If I were going to write Sandman fan fiction I’d do a story about Freud, who of course did much research into and theorizing about dreams as well as Oedipal theory all while entertaining a lifelong obsession with Egyptian and other ancient cultures and with Hebrew history (his Moses and Monotheism book being a result of this). I think it’d be neat to see him interact with Dream, or to see his own dreams- he’s Moses and the Israelites hate him with Hitler as the Pharaoh and his mother naked putting him in the Nile perhaps. Unfortunately the last few years of his life would have been when Dream was under arrest in England.
Abraham Lincoln would also be an interesting one to deal with due to his recurring dreams about viewing his own dead body and about being a passenger in an oarless boat.
Any historical characters you’d like to see injected into any future Sandman works? (I think Gaiman says he’s finished with the character but I doubt he is.)
I was trying to think of some of the ones who have been characters:
Emperor Norton I
Robespierre
William Shakespeare (and also Ben Johnson)
Augustus Caesar/Octavian and his greatuncle Big Julie
I thought of another question. Why did Thessaly/Larissa find and protect Lyta? She was obviously very conflicted about it. Was she just getting back at Dream for not asking her to stay with him once she had decided to leave? Did she make a deal to gain ‘a few hundred more years of life’? Was she also being manipulated by Lucifer, Puck/Loki or Dream? I think she was still in love with Dream, but not enough to stay with him. (Evidenced by her dream in ‘The Wake’.) I feel there are no doubt things I’m missing.
No mystery there. From Sandman # 65, page 20, panel 5:
“I made a…deal…with the three. I bought a little more life – maybe a couple of thousand years. Every little bit helps – and they agreed to forget some old scores…”
and obviously, her half of the bargain it finding and protecting Lyta Hall from Morpheus.
Ah, sometimes I think I’m losing my mind. Thanks cmkeller! I remembered the bit about extending her life, but forgot it was by making the deal with the three.
She’s really a piece of work. She sure complained a lot about how much the taxi cost, how much the black kid cost, how much the camp bed cost. She really is very self centered and cranky. Still sore about not getting to kill the cuckoo, too, I expect.
Yes, he did. For him to have freed Susanoo from the place under the earth with the dripping serpent venom, he had to be there first.
Had Morpheus revealed Loki’s deception to Odin before Odin left the Dreaming, then Susanoo would never have been falsely imprisoned and later freed, in the first place.
So Morpheus mentioning how his hospitality toward Susanoo has been violated by Loki… not so much the main reason for his acting. Had that been the main reason, he’d’ve taken action before Susanoo got hauled off under Loki’s guise.
You are probably right, Lightray, but I want to believe that Dream swapped Susanoo with the dream of Loki before Susanoo was actually under the snake. When Odin and Thor took Loki back tot he pit, it took them some time to get there. I want to believe Dream isn’t such an asshole as to have let Susanoo get the venom, so my view of the events is probably flawed. ::Bad historian, no biscuit::