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Reply Subj: The only thing worse would have been drinking from his sister. Who knows where she's been? Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 at 03:50:52 pm EDT (Viewed 8 times) | |||||||
... On making Sally more of an expository prompt than a fully-rounded character, but once Dream starts making shit up as he goes along, I suspect it takes someone who knows him fairly well to keep up, and even then only if they're confident and competent enough to ad-lib themselves ... which, I suppose, was part of what I was attempting to show here. As I said in another reply, I've been hammering home that "You're an awful liar"/"No, I'm a great liar!" running joke enough times that I really felt like I needed to prove it, by showing how remarkably manipulative Dream can actually be. In a way, it's kind of like the old jokes about the inherent contradiction between James Bond being both "internationally known" AND a "secret agent," because Dream is essentially the world's most honest liar - I mean, he proudly tells anyone who will listen that he's a liar, and then, in spite of it all, he manages to fool them anyway. "Hello, Homer the Thief!" As for Sally, I felt constrained by the fact that I still see her as JJJ's character, so beyond the fence-sitting position that he already put her into, I've consciously tried to maintain a sort of holding pattern for her, in part by giving her situations to react to which could eventually motivate her to become either a hero or a villain (again). By pairing her up with Dream, I accomplished this by showing how Dream himself can be both inspiring and scary, all at once - in the bedroom scene, we see both his fidelity to his loved ones AND his arguably falling short of his own standards, the latter via the call-back to the Moderator's reality, and with the vampires, we see not only his extraordinary abilities to make connections and to think on his feet, but ALSO his deeply tweaked disconnect from both the horrors that he's facing and any sense of self-preservation on his part. The more traditional archetypes of superheroes tend to emphasize either how far above us they are (Superman, and even Batman, are practically godlike) or how close to our own level they supposedly are (Spider-Man and Wolverine are arguably contrasting archetypes of the "street-level" superhero), but Dream is neither above, below or on the same level as the perceived "everyman" - he's just plain SIDEWAYS, and that's as likely to drive Sally away as to draw her in. | |||||||
