In horror a subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized. 'Nausea', as a feeling for existence, is not yet a depersonalization; but horror turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out. It is a participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has 'no exits'. It is, if we may say so, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its annihilation.
To kill, like to die, is to seek an escape from being, to go where freedom and negation operate. Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened . . . In the nothingness which a crime creates a being is condensed to the point of suffocation, and draws consciousness out of its 'retreat'. A corpse is horrible; it already bears in itself its own phantom, it presages its return. The haunting spectre, the phantom, constitutes the very element of horror.
I feel like I need to write about a thing that’s not new, but it came to the forefront again with the show, and how some people react to Calliope in S2: There is a pattern of selective compassion in fandom that sadly also mirrors broader societal issues around whose pain we’re willing to acknowledge. While most fans readily extend understanding to Morpheus as a grieving father who finally kills his son out of unconditional love, the same empathetic lens (or even just acknowledgement) is conspicuously absent when examining Calliope’s near parallel experience of maternal love and loss. Everyone was willing to go there after S1 because, well, “romantic feelz” that are still all about Dream in a way. And people were also willing to go there because she was the abused muse. In S2 though? Not so much, and some people are even actively starting to turn on her.
I guess that kind of selective empathy exposes not only fandom’s investment in their blorbo (he’s mine, too! But it’s not about that), but also deeper societal blind spots regarding maternal experience and the humanity of characters who exist outside the protagonist’s immediate sphere.
A Tale of Two Parents
The story of Orpheus, to me, honestly shows where fandom empathy lies. And of course I get it. Dream’s decision to kill Orpheus is an act of profound love. Fandom recognises the agony and guilt of a parent and validates Dream’s choice, even if it hurts and has consequences. Comments consistently frame this moment as evidence of Dream’s capacity for growth and unconditional love. Because it is, and it’s true.
Yet Calliope’s parallel experience receives markedly different treatment. When she warns Orpheus about the approaching Maenads but accepts, in tears, that he wants to remain on the island because he lost his will to live, she too acts from maternal love: respecting her son’s autonomy while knowing it will have devastating consequences. Like Dream, she faces an impossible choice and makes a decision that honours her son’s wishes rather than her own desire to protect him. The metaphorical eternal suffering she endures as a result, the guilt, the grief, and the loss of her son, should logically evoke the same sympathetic response that Dream’s pain does.
But it doesn’t.
The different treatment of Dream and Calliope really shines a light on what I’ll just straightforwardly call the “blorbo effect”: the tendency to extend empathy primarily to our favourite characters while remaining blind to the equally valid experiences of others. Dream’s position as the show’s protagonist grants him a kind of empathetic immunity. His pain is centered, explored, and validated. Calliope’s pain, meanwhile, is pushed to the margins, dismissed, or actively ignored.
And that becomes even worse when I see some discussions about Dream’s and Calliope’s separation. Rather than examining the complex breakdown of their relationship which so clearly predates the Orpheus tragedy (I mean, it’s a mystery to me how some people don’t seem to pick up on that. Have people truly not noticed Calliope’s expressions during the wedding? They weren’t even micro expressions; they were blatantly obvious and she didn’t try to hide them. They didn’t spend time together during the celebrations. They did NOT show up as a couple that felt in any way close), parts of fandom instead blame Calliope for “abandoning” Dream because he didn’t want to put in a word with Hades. That was the final straw, but NOT the reason their relationship failed, and Calliope even said this herself, but people maybe have selective hearing as well, not just selective empathy. The implication that she should have remained with a husband whom she had grown apart from reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of both characters’ arcs. Plus, there’s also a staggering unwillingness to consider Calliope’s perspective as equally valid.
We Just Don’t Like Mothers Very Much, Do We?
Some fans’ struggle to empathise with Calliope speaks to a broader cultural blind spot regarding maternal experience. The demographic reality that much of fandom consists of people who have not experienced motherhood likely contributes to that kind of empathy gap. Without direct experience of maternal love, some fans really seem to struggle to recognise the profound love underlying all of Calliope’s actions. They will recognise the paternal love in Dream though. Strange that…
And this blind spot extends beyond fiction into real-world attitudes towards mothers. I’m going to out myself as one, and society often expects us to be simultaneously self-sacrificing and strong, to protect our children while also preparing them for independence, to love unconditionally while also setting boundaries. When mothers make difficult decisions, they’re often viewed with suspicion rather than understanding.
Prepare Yourselves for Misplaced Blame
I honestly can’t wait to see how fandom will treat Lyta Hall in S2 V2. It could be a test for fandom’s ability to develop more nuanced empathy. Lyta’s actions in The Kindly Ones represent perhaps the most primal expression of maternal love in the whole of The Sandman. Any mother (bar very few) would fight for her child’s life; Lyta’s actions are those of a mother who has been pushed to her limits due to fear and fierce love for Daniel. And that’s not villainous; that’s human.
But I remember discussions about her during S1, and I’m near convinced we’ll get the same selective empathy that I started to notice around Calliope. Lyta’s maternal desperation is viewed through the lens of how it affects Dream rather than understood as a valid response to an impossible situation. To me, that suggests that fandom’s empathy problems extend beyond individual character preferences to a more fundamental refusal (or perhaps inability, because “refusal” would suggest it is a choice, which I fear it isn’t) to recognise the full humanity of anyone who challenges or complicates the protagonist’s narrative.
The Other and the Limits of Empathy
At this point, I always want to recommend to look into the concept of “The Other” by Levinas, which shines a light on recognising the full humanity of those who exist outside our own immediate scope of existence and identification. And Morpheus functions as the “accessible self” for many fans: complex, flawed, but ultimately sympathetic, no matter his war crimes. Calliope and Lyta represent the Other: equally complex, equally deserving of empathy, but positioned outside the comfortable boundaries of protagonist identification.
And these considerations aren’t unique to fandom spaces but reflect broader cultural patterns of empathy distribution. We consistently show more compassion for those who are like us, share our experiences, or occupy central positions we can identify with in the narratives we consume. Those relegated to supporting roles (literally or figuratively) receive far less empathy, regardless of their actual circumstances or the validity of their experiences.
And I think that recognising these patterns could be a first step towards developing more inclusive empathy. Because The Sandman has a really complex moral landscape, tons of perspectives and would therefore offer a lot of opportunity for expanding empathetic understanding beyond protagonist-centered self-identification. But unfortunately, Netflix made it harder for us by choosing to focus entirely on Dream. And yet, it’s still possible to see Calliope’s love for her son, Lyta’s protective fury over the fate of her son, and they also deserve consideration and emotional investment. All of which fans readily give Dream.
Empathy isn’t just a thing you have. It requires conscious and continuous effort to build. It means examining our immediate emotional responses to characters and asking whether those responses are based on the characters’ actual actions and motivations or simply on their position within the narrative hierarchy. It means considering perspectives that might be unfamiliar or uncomfortable, particularly those rooted in experiences we haven’t personally shared.
And fandom’s selective empathy towards parental love and loss reveals both the power and limitations of fan identification. While the deep emotional investment in Dream always generates discussions about trauma, growth, and redemption (and it’s all good stuff. Well, mostly 🤣), the simultaneous dismissal of Calliope’s equally valid experience is just really telling. Especially for a character that got far more positive attention in S1 because, you guessed it, romance™️ (and people will readily identify with that because they can imagine themselves as that love interest. The mother who left her husband and has no part in romantic plot points though? Not so much…)
This isn’t simply about being “fairer” to female characters (although that’s certainly part of it). It’s rather about this:
Empathy isn’t whether we can feel for those who are like us or those ones we like, but whether we can recognise the full humanity of the Other: the mother making impossible choices, the parent fighting for their child, the woman whose pain exists outside the comfortable boundaries of our identification.
And that matters, because our world is divided. And it’s also divided because of our growing inability to understand perspectives different from our own. None of this is just a fandom issue, but fandom is an extension of what’s going on outside of it.
The Sandman Overture asks us to dream of a better world. And that starts with less selective empathy…
A terrible + gripping fear to write, to do anything beyond the bare minimum of survival + living. Even to read. I start + stop or fail to start at all. Surrounded with piles of books. My eyes casting themselves at the waiting words I'm unable to care for. Instead, waiting, always for the next crisis in a world which seems a series of such things.
I cry a little, at random, looking at the trees moving with the wind in the gray expanse outside the window. This fragile universe, my own frail body within it. The agent of everything I am too small to control. A time, once more, where I am caught between the past + the future without the energy for the present. Functioning as a spectre, floating room to room to do this or do that as I think of my friends both dead + alive.
The week has been nothing. I wake. I do my minor tasks, closing loops + opening others. I think + feel too much. + then I try to do either thing a little less as if that was ever the answer.
In the evening one night, I phone my partner who informs me I need to process what has happened. I do not process anything.
It is almost too crude. Or it is too crude. The trauma + my treatment of it. My shirt + jacket still on as my body is acted upon by another. I wrote the details down. This attempt, in my mind, to expel the shame others may take on when the same happens to them, but then I doubt it + myself.
I consider if, through the reckoning, I only make a theatre of pain to be consumed in the same way I was consumed. I call it a lesser event, because, in my experience, it is. + I almost want to laugh at that, the same way I cackled on the street as he told me he wasn't going to walk me to the station after. My mouth moving before my mind as I said, "I wouldn't expect you to."
It all narrows anyway. The left side of my mother's heart weakening + me all these miles away until July unless I'm needed sooner. + I want to roar at that as well, this helplessness, inhabiting my friend's own words; his life to be narrowed in aftermaths, or perhaps it was just a kindness to spare me the uglier reality of my meaning having been some elaborate construction, a hallucination of a closeness, of friendship. I do not think I am beyond such possibilities. I do not think I am immune to the disease of a single hand gilding an absence. But I do pin myself down, like butterfly wings under a microscope, to interrogate the illusions of hope.
There's a room somewhere in my memory where you pluck your hair from my stomach like a monkey grooming another monkey. There's a room in my memory where it all meant exactly what it meant without that meaning needing to dismantle the structures of our lives to exist. The thing I wanted. The thing I never did.
How I did not wish to colonize you, + yet to be a tourist, transient + replaceable, was equally regrettable. + maybe I am too foolish, too romantic in my beliefs around the enduring quality of philia. Amor platonicus. How we could make it whatever it must be. Or the thoughts of Levinas. The self through the other. The other through the self. Or Buber's I + Thou. I + thou. + the respect for the agency in what removes itself from me. So it doesn't matter in the end, does it -- the truth inside our farewells. So farewell. Farewell. Farewell. Farewell.
I was in a rather more poetic mood yesterday, having read some Charles Wright, + the paragraphs I wrote were leagues better + yet too much to imagine finishing now. I think another day. I always think another day. + yet all around me is dying + always has been + I am reduced to waiting.
One day, I wanted to write the history of death that is like a dark path lit with the lanterns of those long gone others. But, in this very hour, I lack the largeness of imagination necessary. I am all plain language. The lives I've saved, + the lives I failed to tear from the void before it took over. The void that breathes in + exhales the human soul as the body goes still. How this teaches one a contradiction of their own power, leaving me, after all the years of grief, as equally as delusional as I am disillusioned.
Feeling myself getting sleepy, I shake my head as if I were a wet dog. It helps very little. All these theories slipping into fragments to fit together another time. Recently, I've been exchanging letters with a moral psychologist on the ethics of ostracization + who we imagine ourselves to be when we assess the rightness + wrongness of any one act.
The day before the assault, the ex-lover tracked me down. Love. Love. The grand romantic love. A changed man or claims of such. The apology. The beauty. The temptation of a better story than the one we'd written. + yet the lover scatters his luck elsewhere, leaving rusty relics for the past, for the woman whose skin he'd dressed me in, who he'd punished me for ever resembling in any shallow manner. Of course she can be so large + mythic with those years of distance between them. + of course, he flattens me into a caricature of jealousy, unwilling or incapable to understand the wound pattern. Her face transposing itself over my own again. + yet I am only full of sorrow for it.
That instinctual explicable tendency to sabotage the field before he's barely taken one step fully upon it, littering the landscape with contempt + suspicion -- a secret patch of scorched grass unto himself as he fantasizes about wildflowers sprouting up from the ash I taste as it lands violent + acrid on my tongue. Himself who pre-authors tragedy, where we must love within a sweeping hall of distorted mirrors. + I know the psychology of such an eros too well to deceive myself.
But oh how I wish to deceive myself. All his short-lived pink-tintedness. The way I am destroyed so thoroughly with its every vanishing. The desire to be loved + seen + the scene in which I am, what, the understudy to his true wanting. Positioning his face in the light of her anticipated regret + improbable return, preened + noble as the lover who understood + could never let go of her whole herness. That I must suffer for her + because of her again + again in my disappointing humanity compared to the trick of recollection.
In more straightforward terms, the avoidant's phantom ex which possesses the present + excuses them of ever fully participating in the demands + risks of a current love. Some devotional taxidermy one can kneel before in the name of depth to evade the living body in front of them. How I will always be at a disadvantage against a ghost that requires nothing as I require something more like the horror show of a relentless courage while his hidden longing habituates itself in corners of the internet for her to find. Even my feelings, raw + gentle in their response, are narrated as uncouth + unmanageable.
It isn't for me however. To change. To do anything about. So little ever is in this parade of being as two lonely days now draw themselves to a close. + I wishing for something. A peace. A pause.
Apart from a concern with showing preference to family, Rav Nahman speaks here on his understanding of what a judge should be, an understanding we find echoed in Mishnah Avot:
That is, a judge aught not to treat any of the litigants differently, not to give advice for how to argue, so is to not pervert the judgement. So we can see Rav Nahman's concern and that of the Mishnah built on the way that Jewish jurisprudence is structured: judges are not to act as lawyers because there are no lawyers, litigants are to speak for themselves:
As Goitein observed, litigants often aired claims in court as sort of trial balloons, in the hope that they would go unchallenged and thus accepted as truths, not unlike the prices declared in a bazaar. In a recent study, Jessica Goldberg observed that lawsuits between Jewish merchants follow a "logic of slow assemblage and negotiation, in which the competing narratives of the litigants are presented, but the court adjourns to acquire further legal opinions, to give litigants continual opportunities to agree to settlements, and to pressure litigants to avoid forcing the court to hand down a final judgement."
Oded Zinger, Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt
Not only do the litigants speak for themselves in talmudic theory, in practice they often reach their own verdicts, too. More than just a consequence of material circumstances, this is part of how the Talmud conceives of the ideal court of justice, as we see in Levinas:
Our Mishnah, the oldest part of our text – that which follows is to deliver the commentary –, teaches us that the Sanhedrin was arranged in a half-circle, "so that its members could see each other". It was, thus, an amphitheatre. It had this particularity that nobody ever saw each others back, always face to face or in profile. Never was the interpersonal connection lost in this assembly. People looked each other in the face. Never, thus, was dialogue interrupted or lost in impersonal dialectic. An assembly of faces rather than an anonymous society.
But it is a half-circle, an open circle. Since the judges' concern is precisely – when they discuss matters brought to their jurisdiction or hand down a verdict – to remain open to the world around them: in the half-circle's opening, according to the commentators, we find the litigants and witnesses. That's also where we find the scribes. An open circle: the judges at the heart of Judaism – its navel and navel of the world – are open to the world, or live in an open world.
Emmanuel Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques
That is, halakhah is not separate from the world, it is part of it, its border easily crossed, the judge is not so much a type of person as it is a role many, if not, ideally, all should be able to take on:
Now, something new, never seen before at a tribunal: before the judges are the "students of Law", those who study Torah, but are not yet judges. The court is not a synagogue, but it is a kind of school. Study of Law and jurisdiction, theory and action, rigor and mercy – all the polarising aspects of the mind belong, in Judaism, to the duality of the court and study house.
ibid.
Here we see the connection: one does not act as a lawyer, because halakhah aught to be the domain of everyone who studies Torah – and the commandment to study Torah applies to almost everyone. Maybe it is also in this light that we can read, as does Leibowitz, Maimonides' opposition to earning money through Torah:
The Sages, peace be upon them, cautioned us regarding this, stating (Avot 4:5, Nedarim 62a): "Do not make the words of Torah into a crown for your own glory, nor into a spade with which to dig and earn a livelihood." They thereby alluded to that which I explained to you above, namely, that one should not establish as the purpose of study that people should honor him nor the acquisition of money. Neither shell he establish the study of the Divine Torah to be for him a source of livelihood.
Maimonides, Introduction to Cheilek, in: Kisvei HaRambam ed. R. Yehuda Meir Keilson
We cannot think the commandment of Torah study as a merely personal one, it is a communal one, and a societal ideal in which everyone studies Torah is incompatible with one where Torah study is the domain of a professionalised class absolving the non-professional of the need to study.
Final Fantasy Turns Its “Monsters” Into Moral Anchors
Final Fantasy has always understood something most fantasy stories miss: the non-human characters are not there just to be mascots, comic relief, or “cool creature design.” Very often, they are the moral center of the story.
Celebrate the outcasts and explore the collection here:
Premium Final Fantasy fine art prints inspired by FF7 Remake & Rebirth, FFXIV, FFX, FF8 and more. Cinematic Limit Break moments, Monochrome
That’s where Emmanuel Levinas becomes such an interesting lens. In his Ethics of the Other, Levinas argues that true ethics begins not when we meet someone familiar, but when we encounter someone radically unlike ourselves. The face of the Other interrupts our ego and places a demand on us before we even understand them. Ethics comes first. Categorizing, judging, and reducing them comes later.
That is exactly why Nanaki, Vivi, Fran, Kimahri, Quina and so many others hit so hard in Final Fantasy. Human empires hunt them, exploit them, experiment on them, exile them, or laugh at them. And yet the games repeatedly make these so-called outsiders the clearest moral anchors in the cast. They are not less human for being alien. They are often more ethically legible than the societies rejecting them.
Founded on “this obstinacy [of the enchained person] to remain who he is, which is to say precisely something, something other than a victim,” spirituals reflect the psychological tension born from the opposition of the reified body and the rebellious breath of life. They open a field of possibility where death is the precursor to the affirmation of life’s absolute superiority. By singing their suffering, the slave refuses to submit to an everyday life that denies their humanity. This suffering expresses itself through a structure of desire whose deepest aspiration responds to a sole expectation: freedom. The slave imagines this freedom in a spontaneous and conscious manner. Their captivity catalyzes an inner strength that is both painful and fortifying. Suffering battles suffering. For the slave, suffering is “the fact of being cornered into life and into being. In this sense, suffering is the impossibility of nothingness.”
Nathalie Etoke, Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition
Suffering is not a moral exercise!!! You are not more moral, more ethical, more artistic, deeper, funnier, smarter, kinder, ect cause of your suffering, you just suffered. Stop playing trauma olympics/intensifying your own suffering in pursuit of moral purity.
