As someone completely uninitiated to the Sandman universe, when it first aired, I had no idea of what to expect, except for these precious gems of reviews-

I knew immediately that if this was something making homophobic people mad, it was something I needed to watch. I might have watched it otherwise too, at some point, but the pure anger that white supremacists were directing towards it, calling it “woke bullshit” to paraphrase, made me want to watch it all the more.

The Sandman would have been a great show either way, the source material and production all but guaranteed it, but I’m glad it was a masterpiece that also had almost all named characters portrayed as queer.

It is testament to how normalised heterosexuality is in media (Western media here, but I wouldn’t be entirely wrong to generalise it for other countries as well) that when the situation is reversed, when most characters are explicitly portrayed to be non-cishet, it causes an uproar.

Barely a few years ago, I couldn’t imagine ever getting an adaptation, or any piece of media really, where the queer characters visibly outnumbered The StraightsTM. It made me happy, but it also made me angry, that it took decades for media to come to a point where queer representations not only exist, but are visibly prominent. We had to scramble for scraps of representations, and now that we are getting what we are more than due, leagues of white supremacists have to barge in with their “I’m not homophobic, but there’s too many gays here”.

A lot of criticism levelled against The Sandman was that the characters’ sexualities and/or gender identities did not serve any purpose to the show, case in point-

(Warning: the pictures contain spoilers for The Sandman)

To this, I could counter with many nuanced arguments, but there’s one that matters the most- we exist and we deserve to be represented, and we deserve varied representations like cis-heterosexual people have had the privilege of getting forever. Queer people (and entities, to be more apt to The Sandman’s universe) exist without their sexualities and gender identities serving some “need” to the plot, having characters arbitrarily be queer isn’t any more “unnecessary” than it would be to have them be cis-heterosexual.

The characters’ sexualities and relationships with each other are not the main focus in The Sandman, there is far too much happening plot-wise for them to sit down and romance each other. It’s refreshing to see. I could detail every individual character’s sexuality and gender identity, and how most of them met their gruesome ends, but I’ll leave that to you to find out yourself in the show. This piece is not about covering every single LGBTQ+ character in The Sandman and breaking down their identity, this is about addressing the absolute lack of shows that feature LGBTQ+ characters prominently, and what happens when some of them do and do it unabashedly, so much so that it makes the bigoted community enraged beyond measure. In all honesty, I would love to see them get angrier with more adaptations.

Given Netflix’s not-so-stellar track record in recent times with renewing series (*looking wistfully at First Kill*), I will hope but won’t have too many expectations of it getting renewed. However, on the off-chance that The Sandman does get the renewal it deserves, I will be the first in line to see more people getting offended over the “woke bullshit” and “unnecessary gayness”.

(Picture Source- Fifth, Sixth, Seventh-here)