#queue crew

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Understanding Our Emotional Investment in Stories

Why Morpheus’ Death Hurts So Much

I’ve been a Sandman fan for decades and definitely had my fair share of crying over that story (despite not wanting it to end differently), so I’m the last person on the planet who doesn’t understand the grief about Morpheus’ death. I’ve also worked as a stage actor and still teach voice production to this very day. To top it all off, I’m a practising and teaching psychotherapist (yeah, don’t ask me about my weird life where I wear different hats on literally every day of the week and then have to reshuffle it all again when the new academic year starts 🙈🤣). So it probably surprises no one that I have a lot of thoughts about the intense emotional reactions we’re seeing in the Sandman fandom at the moment, from all sorts of angles. And I want to make it super clear that I write this not from a place of judgment, but from a place of deep love for stories, storytelling media, the human psyche and how all of these intersect. And maybe also to look at what happens when those connections feel threatened. If that kind of exploration isn’t for you, you think topics like psychological displacement might make you uncomfortable and/or you’d rather process on your own, this is the exit sign…

I think many of us are at the point right now, or have been in the past, when a story we love takes a turn we didn’t expect or want. Sometimes it’s disappointment. Sometimes it’s sadness. But sometimes, it’s something much more intense: rage, depression/despair, or feelings so overwhelming they spill into our interactions with fellow fans and/or our daily lives.

If you’ve noticed particularly strong reactions in our corner of fandom lately, you’re not alone in wondering what’s happening. A lot of people are struggling with very intense emotions around a fictional character/narrative right now.

And that’s because our brains are really quite sophisticated storytelling machines, but they’re also somewhat indiscriminate about what feels “real”. When we become deeply invested in characters and stories, our neural networks fire in ways that mirror real relationships and experiences. The attachment we form to Morpheus, for instance, can activate the same brain regions and hormones involved in our attachments to real people.

So when something happens to a character we love, our brain sometimes processes it similarly to loss or betrayal in our actual lives. The grief is neurologically real, even if its source is fictional.

These, albeit one-sided, emotional connections feel genuine and meaningful to many of us. And they can provide comfort and even models for understanding ourselves and the world. And at the end of the day, that’s the purpose of story.

For some of us, Morpheus represents something very specific: hope for change, the possibility of growth, or perhaps a mirror of our own struggles with identity. And we therefore get invested in the hope that everything will turn out okay for him. Because of course we want to be okay.

So what happens if a character’s arc doesn’t align with our emotional needs or expectations? It can unfortunately feel like personal rejection or emotional abandonment. Or very real hurt.

For some people, stories can serve as fictional spaces where they feel they have more agency than in real life, and you might understand where I’m going with this: It’s a lot of fun to theorise, predict, and imagine outcomes. We invest mental energy in hoping for specific resolutions (the collective sleuthing about every breadcrumb in the lead-up just shows you what I mean 😉). But when the story or adaptation diverges from the narrative we have built in our heads, it can trigger a deep sense of powerlessness that also echoes frustrations from other areas of life.

And that’s particularly acute in adaptation situations, where we feel we “know” how things should go, or we’ve built expectations for the narrative outcome for three years (maybe longer if we’d hoped the show would diverge from the comics—that’s a long time to convince ourselves of a certain outcome). And then those expectations aren’t rewarded.

Projection and Personal Meaning

We inevitably see ourselves in the stories we love, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Sometimes we project our own traumas, hopes, or unresolved conflicts onto characters and their journeys. But when the story resolves in a way that feels counter to our personal healing or growth, it can reopen psychological wounds or challenge our coping mechanisms.

Especially those of us who saw Morpheus somewhat as a metaphor for their own possibility of change, his death can subconsciously feel like a statement about their own capacity for growth.

And his loss can feel just as acute as real-life grief for some people, particularly if they’ve also made experiences with loss in real life. But it’s also a grief that society often doesn’t recognise as valid because “it’s just a story”. And yes, it is just a story, and we should be aware when it starts to affect our mental health and step back if that’s the case. But it’s also important to say: it’s okay to mourn.

And during that process, it can help to consider what the story might represent in us. Sometimes, our intense reactions point to deeper needs or unresolved feelings in our own lives.

Our fellow fans can provide understanding, but we need to be mindful not to project our anger or pain onto others who might have different perspectives. And I’ve seen that happening quite a lot over the past weeks. Just because we don’t agree doesn’t mean we have to be at each others’ throats.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do for ourselves or others when emotions run too high is to step away from discussions, mute tags, or take breaks from online fandom spaces entirely. I mean, I constantly filter tags, follow/unfollow and block/unblock people, but 9/10, it has nothing to do with the person behind the blog but everything with me, and what I don’t want to see at that particular point in time. I remember blocking a lot of people when a certain event affected several fandoms on here. But that wasn’t because I had a problem with those people but rather because I simply couldn’t stomach to see that stuff on my dash anymore, and no tag filtering got a hold of it. So if someone posted a lot about it, they got “muted” (and I often unblocked them again after a while). We owe it to ourselves to curate our fandom experience in a way that makes us feel happy, not constantly exhausted.

And on that note: Mutual support is great, but it can also very quickly turn into an echo chamber that takes on an “us vs them”-dynamic just because we don’t agree about certain points. When that gets entangled with projecting our feelings on people we don’t even know (but we presume they surely can’t have life experience X “like we do”), it gets ugly.

Everyone’s relationship with a story is personal. What feels like betrayal to one person might feel hopeful or otherwise meaningful to another. And that’s okay (as long as communication around it stays respectful).

The Role of Displacement

One of the most significant psychological processes at play in intense fandom reactions (and particularly the ones that don’t always stay respectful) is probably displacement, which is essentially a defense mechanism where emotions from one situation get redirected toward a different, often “safer” target. And stories do provide a psychologically safer place to express difficult emotions than their original, real life sources. It’s often easier to rage about an adaptation (and at someone while hiding behind a screen) than to confront feelings of powerlessness about our job, relationship troubles, or social injustice. Fiction gives us a contained space where we can feel and react without the complex consequences that come with addressing real world problems.

And I’d hazard an educated guess that one of the most common displacement patterns in fandom has to do with control and agency: If someone feels powerless about something in their personal life, they might become intensely angry about narrative choices they can’t change because they trigger the same sense of helplessness. And I’m not talking about a simple, “That made no sense, what were they thinking?” here, but rather anger and disappointment so profound that it basically makes us mentally and emotionally unwell.

But it’s not that alone. If we’re dealing with real-world rejection or loss, we might experience a character’s death as a deep betrayal, and we feel loss and abandonment all over again.

And those of us who experience a lot of unfair treatment in their daily lives might channel that frustration into arguments about what characters “deserve” or how stories “should” resolve. And we have those arguments with people who are in no way responsible for those narrative choices and just see things differently—for reasons that aren’t inherently less valid (that’s why I always want to encourage people to stop generalising what kind of storytelling “we” need in “these times”. There is no “we” in this context, and times have quite frankly always been shit, just in different ways).

In short: If we feel unseen or invalidated in our daily lives, characters we identify (or at least strongly empathise) with suffering, dying or not getting what we feel they deserve can feel like personal attacks on our worth or existence, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. And it takes a lot of reflection and inner work to start noticing when these things are happening, and that they aren’t truly about the story, but about us.

It’s worth gently checking if we might be experiencing displacement when emotional reactions to a certain story feel much more intense than our usual responses to fiction. Or if we find ourselves obsessively thinking about the “narrative injustice”. Or if our anger and grief feel urgent and personal, as if the story choices were deliberately meant to hurt us. Or if we even experience mental and physical symptoms (like insomnia, agitation, or a bout of depression or anxiety brought on by a show or book).

Sometimes, working through the feelings the story brought up can actually help process whatever is bugging us in real life. Other times, addressing the root causes can diminish the intensity of our reactions to fiction. In any case: If it’s particularly severe, it’s absolutely worth talking with either your therapist or a person you trust.

Stories are a gift, but you don’t have to accept it

Ultimately, our capacity to be moved deeply by stories speaks to something beautiful about human nature: our ability to empathise, to find meaning, to care deeply and to invest emotionally in experiences and people beyond our immediate reality (I tangentially wrote about this here as well).

Stories matter because we are meaning-making creatures. The intensity of our reactions (both positive and negative) is often proportional to how much we need the story to represent something important in our own lives, even if that intensity feels disproportionate looked at on its own.

I think it’s possible to hold space for both the genuine pain that story losses can cause while also recognising that seeing things differently, and taking from a story what we need (that includes rejecting a story and moving on before it upsets us too much), are part of what makes fandom a deeply human experience.

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I was so glad when they finally gave us that shot (I was starting to get a bit worried they wouldn’t) because it’s absolutely everywhere in the comics. And I think it’s so, so important, for a million reasons…

😩😢can we talk about how when Daniel meets the family they have a special window in the room for dreams Star ⭐️ I missed it on first viewing

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The Corinthian—Astrozcmbie

[several crops in source link]

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I cannot, ever, look at this picture and simultaneously NOT think about Dream’s Therapist. I’m so sorry. Time to write another one I guess (officially on vacation though, so it might be a while)…

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Dream Studies—YuYu Art

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TL;DR: I don’t think Allan Heinberg understood some parts of the story. Or if I charitably assume he did, he was at least excruciatingly careless and sloppy about certain aspects of bringing this to the screen. In more detail:

Honestly, I think this was my major gripe with S2. It’s done now, and it’s not like I hated it. There’s a lot of really beautiful cinematography, acting, and some of the changes even bettered the source material in my view.

But I also felt that some changes made the narrative incoherent. If people didn’t really focus and scrolled their phones while watching (which Netflix writers have to cater for by their own admission), they might not have noticed. But if you only paid a modicum of attention, you couldn’t help but go, “WTF?” half of the time. It made no sense. And I mean: It was actively contradictory. Not in the sense of “contradictory to create narrative tension”—that’s an actual narrative device, and IMHO, they used that, too, e.g. via hinting at Morpheus’ passive suicidality after his son’s death that was sometimes directly contradicted by what he was doing and what else was going on. I know it’s unimaginable to some, but it is possible (and in suicidal people not even uncommon) to want to live and die at the same time, and actions (or lack thereof) can reflect exactly that tension. It was just a lot more subtly portrayed than in the comics. I’m just not sure if it was helpful for those who always wanted a different ending because some of it naturally created hopes/expectations in that particular segment of the audience, who will have picked up a lot more on the offered hopeful moments than the equally present moments of the other, but that’s a different topic I’ve already addressed. I guess what I’m trying to say here is: I have what you could call an intimate knowledge of (passive) suicidality, both from professional and personal experience. And while I did pick up on those tones in the show, I couldn’t even say if that was a) what they truly wanted to go for and b) even if they did, if it was a good idea to do it like they did because I could have told you in advance that the majority of people would pick up on the hopeful tones much more (also because large parts of fandom were biased towards a different ending for the past three years), which IMHO created emotional whiplash.

But back to the real, obvious blunders like some of those things you’ve already mentioned. They were glaring and abrasive for everyone who just paid a tiny bit of attention (like vast parts of the Nada story and ridiculous amounts of dialogue involving Lucienne, Fiddler’s Green, Morpheus and Daniel). And the only question I could ask myself was:

How?

How did they not notice? Or if they did (which honestly: They’re screenwriters. I can’t believe they didn’t, but maybe I just believe too much in people’s ability to think, and to spot narrative inconsistencies and plot holes), WHY ON EARTH did they not remedy it? What was the thought process here? Or was it a problem about having different writers, and the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing? But isn’t that what a show-runner is for? To keep it all consistent, to lay out the overall vision? And I’ll say something now that I never thought possible even just a month ago:

I don’t think Allan Heinberg entirely understood the story. I always thought he did, but after reading his recent interview with Paste Magazine, I had to come to the conclusion that he maybe just… doesn’t?

Or if he does, maybe he had a different vision about what he wanted to do with Morpheus’ character (and you can love or hate that vision I guess). But if that’s the case I think he didn’t hold the reins tightly enough and was careless. And that quite frankly sucks, no matter how you turn it…

rewatching the end of s2 and damn the writers could NOT commit to anything could they. lucienne talks about dream changing before her eyes but then says he couldn’t change. dream 2.0 says he’s not daniel but then tells lyta he’s still her son despite corinthian earlier talking about how the baby was burned away and that that’s not daniel. he says what was mortal in Daniel was burned away but then lucienne says he’s partly human.

and it’s not even a case of “it’s nuanced! the writers know it’s complicated!” it’s just the writers being completely unable to decide which is true because they want BOTH to be true but the point is that it doesn’t work like that. smh. I really feel like they didn’t understand their own story.

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Okay, I’m a sucker for the starry eyes…

And I also love how that thunderous mood swing basically directly leads into this:

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I’m still trying to process this “blink and you’ll miss it”-moment of…

…Dream inside Azazel (no folks, don’t go there please 🤣). Well played, sir…

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There’s another one that goes into a similar direction (although the thumbnail is honestly cracking me up 🙈🤣)

Exploring Dream’s Psyche

Jungian Archetypes

I know I’ve written about a Jungian take on some aspects of The Sandman before (about The Corinthian and also Fiddler’s Green here, about Gault here), but since we’re currently rereading/rewatching Lost Hearts and this week’s host @sweet-like-cinnamon-5 gave this prompt, I simply have to get back into it:

In both comics and show, Morpheus has to track down the Major Arcana who escaped during his imprisonment: The Corinthian, Fiddler's Green (aka Gilbert), and Gault (Brute & Glob in the comics). What's fascinating is how neatly these three map onto key Jungian archetypes, and in doing so, reveal fractured aspects of Morpheus' own psyche.

To make it very clear: I think Jungian psychology is great for storytelling and how we, as humans, connect via story, but as a practising therapist, I’m not super keen on the principles of psychoanalysis per se. With that out of the road:

Carl Jung believed archetypes were universal, inherited patterns of thought or imagery present in the collective unconscious (sound familiar?)…

The Corinthian: The Shadow

This one feels almost too on the nose, right? The Corinthian, with his penchant for murder and being the embodiment of humanity's darkness, is a classic Shadow archetype. In Jungian terms, the Shadow represents the unknown, repressed, or undesirable aspects of our personality. It's everything we don't want to admit about ourselves—our fears, base instincts, destructive urges, selfishness. More importantly: We often project it onto others (the Corinthian inspires people to be like him, after all).

But the Corinthian also represents something inherent to Morpheus: He is the darkness Dream tried to rigidly control (and perhaps deny). He's the failure of Morpheus' function—a nightmare only meant to reflect darkness in dreams, not being darkness in the waking world. His very existence outside the Dreaming during Dream's absence signifies Morpheus’ own darker potential and its consequences when left unchecked. The Corinthian is the embodiment of fear and predation that Dream intended to keep contained within nightmares.

Throughout the series, we see the Corinthian functioning as Morpheus' dark reflection, indulging in exactly the kind of unchecked power and cruelty that Dream tries to restrain in himself (not always successfully 😬). The Corinthian feeds on eyes (symbols of perception and understanding, “the mirror to the soul”), so I’m often wondering if this also suggests both the darkness Dream sees within himself and a distorted view of himself?

When Morpheus finally confronts, unmakes (and later on remakes—that’s the truly important part) the Corinthian, he's not merely capturing an escaped nightmare. In TKO, he is basically reintegrating his own Shadow, acknowledging these darker impulses as part of himself rather than an external threat: You only become whole by acknowledging your darkness, not by repressing it.

Fiddler's Green: The Animus & The Wise Old Man

Fiddler’s Green is not a nightmare, but a dream. Specifically a place, an idyllic location representing solace and belonging. His desire to experience life as a human (Gilbert) is contextually really important. While he isn’t a perfect fit for one single archetype, he touches on a few. He could represent aspects of the Self—wholeness and the regulating centre of the psyche (“the heart of the Dreaming”). A desire for integration and completeness, if you will.

Gilbert/Fiddler's Green also represents the Wise Old Man archetype, which often appears as a mentor or guide figure representing wisdom, insight, and moral qualities. In deeper Jungian theory, this archetype closely connects to the already mentioned Self—the archetype of wholeness. Gilbert’s yearning for knowledge, human experience and connection also taps into the higher aspects of the Animus, which are word and meaning (in the sense of seeking knowledge of and connection to the outer world/experience, though typically Animus is the male aspect in a female psyche), and I wrote about this before. And Fiddler's Green also embodies a deep, perhaps unacknowledged, yearning within Morpheus:

He represents the desire for peace, belonging, connection, and perhaps a simpler existence away from the lonely burden of being Dream of the Endless. Gilbert's warmth, loyalty, and appreciation for humanity stand in stark contrast to Dream's initial aloofness and rigid adherence to duty. Gilbert’s temporary escape into humanity mirrors a buried desire within Dream himself for something more or different than his function.

Gault: The Anima & The Mother

Gault, the shapeshifting nightmare who yearns to be a dream and to “inspire rather than frighten”, is a significant change from the comics (more on that later). The Anima is (in a male psyche, according to Jung) the inner feminine aspect, related to emotion, intuition, creativity, connection to the unconscious, and relationship. The Mother archetype, when developed positively, stands for benevolence, nurturing, caring. She protects and provides. But by wishing to be a dream with all of these qualities rather than a nightmare, she holds up a mirror to Morpheus: His own disconnect from his emotions and his mother wound—empathy, the desire to nurture creativity and hope (instead of just reflecting fear), adaptability (she's a shapeshifter!), and the willingness to challenge rigid rules for compassionate reasons. Her rebellion isn't just defiance; it's a plea for a different kind of D/dreaming. She challenges Morpheus' rigid definition of his own purpose and hence the purpose of his creations.

The Dreaming as Dream's Psyche

So in short: The three major arcana don't exist in isolation. They function within the Dreaming, which can also be understood as the externalised landscape of Morpheus' psyche. Each represents aspects of Dream that he must reconcile and (re)integrate:

The Corinthian: Dream's capacity for cruelty and punishment

Fiddler's Green: Dream's wisdom and connection to humanity

Gault: Dream's potential for transformation and growth

What makes these characters particularly fascinating is that they aren't merely psychological projections. They have independent existence and agency. It’s somewhat mindbending to think that Dream must engage with parts of himself that have developed autonomy.

Okay, quick detour. In the original Sandman comics (The Doll's House arc), the rogue nightmares hiding out in Jed Walker's mind were Brute and Glob. They are crude, bullying types, lesser nightmares who essentially created a fantasy world inside Jed's head as their own little kingdom. They represented brute (ha!) force, manipulation, and a fairly simplistic form of rebellion against Dream's authority.

Replacing Brute and Glob with Gault is a huge thematic shift. Instead of two fairly thuggish, self-serving entities, the show gives us Gault: a character with complex motivations driven by a desire to be better. It forces Morpheus to confront not just rogue creations, but the nature of his own role. Gault challenges his rigidity and purpose. She introduces themes of change, empathy, and the potential for even nightmares to evolve, mirroring Morpheus' own needed evolution. Bringing her back from the darkness and her eventual transformation become a significant sign of his growth and changing perspective, something the defeat of Brute and Glob wouldn't have offered in the same way.

Back to all three: The Corinthian, Fiddler's Green, and Gault aren't just obstacles for Morpheus to overcome; they are external manifestations of internal conflicts and aspects of his own being. By confronting his Shadow (Corinthian), acknowledging his yearning for connection/peace (Fiddler's Green), and engaging with his transformative(!)/empathetic potential (Gault), Morpheus begins the long journey of reintegrating his fractured psyche, even if that has consequences we’d rather not think of 🥺 The change from Brute & Glob to Gault significantly deepens this psychological exploration in the Netflix adaptation.

In a Nutshell: This is a Journey of Individuation

Jung described the process of "individuation"—the integration of conscious and unconscious elements into a whole. Throughout The Sandman, we witness Dream's steps toward this psychological integration.

The Corinthian, Fiddler's Green, and Gault represent crucial aspects of this journey—the Shadow that must be confronted, the (highly developed) Animus that guides with wisdom, and the (highly developed) Anima that points toward possibilities for growth. By engaging with these externalised aspects of himself, Dream begins his own process of individuation, moving from rigid adherence to cosmic law toward a more integrated understanding of himself and his role…

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Morpheus—Amber Durran

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Dream—Vince Locke

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Dream—Marcela Ciriano

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Dream—e.m.i.r.o.n

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Morpheus (redraw)—Old Man Biscuit/P. Craig Russell

Full Source:

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Dream and Death—Mindy Lee