The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You (1993)

Flying through this series! This one was really interesting as it had a number of female characters leading the story, exploring the idea of childhood imagination. ( )

Barbie cannot dream, but one night she dreams and cannot wake up. Her neighbors task themselves to find her in the dream world, but it is a highly dangerous land between the living and the imaginary. It's a complicated volume, and I won't do it justice by talking about it. But it was worth the read, even if a few parts made me a bit squicky inside. ( )

The last remaining loyal inhabitants of the Land try to call back their princess, who is dreaming on Earth.

I enjoyed the story much more in this one. It had a strong Narnia feel to it, particularly reminiscent of "Prince Caspian" and "The Last Battle". I did get a bit teary-eyed at the end with the last sighting of Wanda ( )

Man, my reviews of this series are all over the place. My memories of it being universally wonderful are wrong.

So. This is the story of Barbie, who we met in one of the earlier volumes, after she broke up with Ken and stopped dreaming. Her dreams continued on without her...Martin Tenbones et al. still trying to find princess Barbie to destroy the Cuckoo. Martin Tenbones shows up in real life to bring her back, to continue their righteous journey, and Barbie's friends (and one witch who just wants revenge on the Cuckoo for trying to hurt her) all go into the Dreaming to try and rescue her. The story is interesting, there's a bunch of queer people, so that's nice.

Why I gave this story 2 stars is because of the transphobia that apparently never occurred to me when I read it before. It feels like she was supposed to be empowering, a good example of a trans* character, but it just ended up failing. Wanda seems like a great person, and she constantly fights against anyone who would call her a man or points out her "thingie" (uugh). She also DIES at the end, the only one of the group of friends who has to die. Great. At her funeral, her family insists that her name is Alvin and that she was a boy and blah blah. Barbie uses Wanda's favourite lipstick to cross out Alvin and write Wanda on her tombstone. Which is great, and we're supposed to agree with Wanda and think that her family is wrong to reject her etc., but so much of her story is cringe-inducing. The worst part is that the lady moon magic doesn't work for her because "gender isn't something you can pick and choose as far as the gods are concerned". So fuck alllllllllll of that noise. It just perpetuates the idea that trans* women aren't real women, and it's being validated by no less than THE GODS of this universe. The moon goddesses are TERFs. And it's not made better by how angrily Wanda rejects the notion, because it's built in to the universe now. ( )

I hate to disagree with Neil Gaiman but the moon recognizes and loves all trans women. ( )