Neil Gaiman explains why he fires back at trolls hating on The Sandman

If there’s one thing you don’t want to do on Twitter, it’s mess with Neil Gaiman. After waiting decades for someone to effectively adapt his beloved comic The Sandman to the screen, the show is finally getting the live-action treatment at Netflix, and it looks spectacular. But predictably, there are some trolls calling out the show for being “woke.”

Usually they’ll cite things like Black actor Kirby Howell-Baptiste playing Death, who is an anthropomorphic personification of the concept of Death; her race seems kind of beside the point. Or they’ll complain about non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park playing Desire, a character who was depicted as both male and female in the comic. These criticisms are silly in the extreme, and Gaiman has made a habit of clapping back at them. “Sandman went woke in 1988,” Gaiman tweeted. “And it hasn’t gone broke yet.”

Gaiman’s response runs counter to the conventional wisdom on trolls, which is to ignore them; if we don’t fire back, the thinking goes, we’re not inciting further arguments. That said, Gaiman simply can’t resist putting the trolls in their place. “I know the rule is you’re meant to ignore the trolls and not feed the trolls,” he told Yahoo. “But I would look at people sounding off on Sandman who were obviously not Sandman fans.”

"What I would watch would be 60,000 Sandman fans going, ‘Of course you’re doing it this way. Of course you have a non-binary Desire, Desire was always non-binary, that’s brilliant casting.’ Or ‘Gwendoline [Christie] as Lucifer, what amazing casting.’ And then you’d get five or six people trying to make a lot of fuss who never read Sandman in the first place. And I mostly decided I was done with it."

The haters are few and far between. “Occasionally I do feel like I’m taking an enormous sledgehammer to squash the tiniest ants, and you really shouldn’t,” Gaiman added. “But then again, they can be really irritating sometimes, and I’m proud of what we made.”

The Sandman cast loves Neil Gaiman swatting down the trolls

It’s not only the fans that get satisfaction from seeing Gaiman call out the haters. The cast loves it, too. Mason Alexander Park adores seeing Gaiman strike down the trolls. “He’s one of the funniest people to follow on Twitter and just watch him troll people back. I get so much joy.”

We love it. If you’re not already following Neil Gaiman’s Twitter page, I implore you to do so.

The Sandman premieres on August 5 on Netflix! This has been a long time in the making, you don’t want to miss it.

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