Behold, it's a bad adaptation because it didn't ditch shit we didn't like!

And that flaw is nowhere more conspicuous than in its word-for-word reproductions of The Sandman’s casual violence against queer people and women. These are plot-inessential background elements that easily could have been softened or diminished for a 2020 adaptation.

Take the character of Judy, a doomed lesbian woman on the outs with her girlfriend, who appears in one issue only. Did we need to keep the detail that the first queer couple in the story is physically abusive? Did we need the multiple fleeting, florid references to the brutalization of queer, underage, male sex workers? Did we need to create an audioscape of a man “nervously” raping the muse Calliope? Or to painstakingly, without edits, retell the plot-inessential one-shot story “Facade” — the moral of which can be read as “Suicide isn’t tragic if you’re freakish enough”? And could we have taken a second look, perhaps, at the suggestion that “it” is just as appropriate a pronoun as “he,” “she,” or “they” for Dream’s genderfluid sibling, Desire?