#nada sandman

[writing-for-life]

Stills from the Official Trailer and Netflix

(plus trailer again under the cut)

Stills via Sandman News

[arosetolivefor]

Nada and Morpheus The Sandman S2

[gifs-by-renegadesstuff]

Dream & Nada 🤍

THE SANDMAN | 2.01 “Season of Mists”

[dreamyhopes]

I desperately need to know why the set designer chose to put the eye of Sauron in the Nada confrontation scene. This decision has been baffling me for months.

(also, just as a side note: I didn't realize until I was touching up the screen caps, but Dream's shots have a warmer tone to them and Nada's are cool, which is such good environmental characterization it kind of blows my mind)

[mejcinta]

i'm not a good person， i'm barely a person at all. but someday i'll be perfect， and i'll make up for it all.

[sobadbad]

THE SANDMAN 2.05

[nau-nany]

This is so hot I’m malfunctioning

[reyjakestherapist]

In the show version of The Sandman, and maybe in the comics version too I'm not sure (it's been a while...), Dream tells Orpheus that he's not worthy of him. It's surely Dream's admission that he let his son down, but Orpheus is surprised and asks him what happened.

It made me reflect on the fact that Dream/Oneiros' (calling him that way because that's this name that Calliope and Orpheus called him) story and Orpheus' were not just entertwined, they ended up being quite similar...

Orpheus couldn't accept to lose Eurydice. To him, she was the love of his life, and he couldn't bear to live without her. So he rejected all the advice given by his father and uncle to let it go, went to the Underworld to get her back, but lost her again when he showed he didn't trust her enough to follow him; it may not be the right interpretation of the myth but to me, it has always been mostly about trust. It led him to the ill-fated that we know, with the tragic consequences for Dream that we know.

Dream judged his son severely for his act of foolishness, but in the end what did he do? He also kept stubbornly making choices everybody told him were wrong: just like his son, he went to Hell to free Nada against Lucienne and Death's advice (to correct a wrong but also because he loved her), went back home with more problems and no Nada, didn't listen to Lucienne when she said stalking Nada wasn't a good idea and followed Delirium under false pretense with the hope to find Nada, and all of this... Led him to seek Destruction's location and ask his son for it, knowing very well that Orpheus would ask him to kill him in return.

All this to say: I think Morpheus realized only then that he should have understood Orpheus' feelings, cause if he had been at his place he would have probably acted as foolishly as Orpheus did. And so much pain could have been avoided, perhaps, if he had showed more empathy for his pain...

I also keep thinking about what Destruction told Orpheus, after Eurydice died: that he was "a romantic fool, just like his father". That he didn't love Eurydice, but the idea of her. Thousands of years later, Ishtar told Morpheus that Destruction had said exactly the same thing about him: that he never really loved anyone, and that he probably never would. As father, as son, Destruction said.

Then, we've got Nada telling Morpheus that he believes he loves her for sure, but that if he really did love her, he would have never given her the ultimatum him or Hell, he would have never let her rot her there (something I often tweeted between seasons, so I felt very vindicated I must say...). Then she says that what he feels is desire, and not love, which again echoes what Destruction told Orpheus.

In the end, Nada and Destruction were both wrong: Dream COULD love. He loved his son. And Orpheus loved him too, despite everything. That makes their story all the more tragic: they were similar in many ways, they loved each other deeply, and yet it all went south, because of their respective stubbornness and Dream's lack of empathy 😔