THE LIFE AND DEATH OF WANDA Written by Richard Tuinstra Introduction In Neil Gaiman's "A Game of You" there are no absolute truths to be discovered. Nothing is sure. There is uncertainty about what is the "real" world and what is the "fantasy" world, what is gender (seen as either male or female), what is a person's identity etc. Almost nothing and nobody in this story is as its seems. Gaiman's answer at the end seems to be that these questions or issues in the end really don't matter att all. Life is a fleeting moment, starting abruptely, and which may end unexpectedly and fast. At the end of the story, one of the main characters, Barbie, sums this up in her concluding words: "And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can". But there is more to find in the book. Much, much more. Above all, however, there is Wanda.... The Story (contains spoilers): The story "A Game of You" takes place in two worlds. The first one is the one the reader is tempted to regard as the world we are living in, the real world . In the book this real world is New York. However, while the famous landmarks are there, things are happening in the story in NY city which we will never regard as normal (even in New York): in Fifth Avenue suddenly an enormous dog-like creature appears from nowhere, a man in appartment building open his chest with a knive and out of his empy chest birds will fly, in the same building a woman seems to be more then hunderd years old, and a dead person can speak vif his face is stripped, pinned to the wall and provided with eyes and a tongue. The other world is more like our classic fantasy world. The world we know from Tolkien's Middle Earth and The Wizard of Oz, books to both of which direct references are made in the book. This world is simply called the Land, and is a part of The Dreaming, the place where we all spend our time when we sleep and dream and which is ruled by the Sandman, the charactar who hardly appears in the story, but who is the principal figure in the overall 75-issues storyline the Sandman. The Land is in danger. This we learn in the first pages from a dialogue between unseen characters called Prinado, Luz, Wilkinson, and Martin Tenbones, The only one who can save the Land is the Princess, and Martin Tenbones decides to go and ask her help. Then we are in New York and we meet the characters in an old appartment building. First there is Barbie, a character we have seen before (and will also so later in the series) when she was married to Ken (!). Then we meet the other people living in the building: Wanda, Thessaly, Hazel, Foxglove, and George. They alll are not who they appear to be or have secrets nobody knows: Barbie is in fact the Princess and creator of the land, Wanda used to be man called Alvin, Thessaly is a centuries old "witch woman", Hazel is a secretly pregnant lesbian, her lover Foxglove used to have a friend called Donna, and George is a secret informant from the Cuckoo, the enemy of the Land. Barbie is transported to the Land, and teams up with Luz ( a parrot), Prinado ( a monkey) and Wilkinson (a rat). Barbie's quest is to undertake an epic journey to take a magic Porpentine to the Sea and do "something" in order to save the Land. George, who is an informant of the destroyer of the Land called the Cuckoo, in the meantime causes the inhabitants of the building to have nightmares depicting their worst fears. Thessaly discovers this, kills George, and afther his death questions him by stripping his face of, pinning it to the wal and sticking eyes and a tongue in the face. By questioning George, Thessaly finds out, as do the others which are all in George's room, that the Cuckoo wants to harm them by sending them the nightmares. Also he tells that the Cuckoo is living in Barbie's dream. They then summon the Moon-goddess and get acces to the Dreaming, with the exception of Wanda, who must safeguard the body of Barbie. Barbie and her companions meanwhile are constantly threathened by the Dark Forces of the Land. Prinado is horribly killed, and when reaching the Citadel of the Cuckoo, Luz turns out to be a traitor, and the Black Forces take Barbie and kill Wilkinson. The Cuckoo turns out to be Barbie as a child, and the animal characters are based on Barbie toys she had as a young girl. The Cuckoo has moved into Barbies dreamworld and now wants to destroy Barbie. The Cuckoo's ultimate aim is to take over Barbie's dreamworld (the nest), to destroy the Land ,and then leave the nest and then to fly "out of your deams into your lives". While the final confrontation takes place with the Sandman, the Cuckoo, Barbie, Thessaly, Hazel, Foxglove, the appartment building is destroyed by a magical storm killing Wanda and a black bag-lady. The Land is uncreated, the Cuckoo is stopped but not punished, and the four women are sent back to the real world. In the last part we see Barbie paying a visit to Wanda's funeral. Pheew... that is the storyline in a nutshell. It will actually make much more sense when you just go and read the book! The tragedy of Wanda The story of Wanda in "A Game of You" is a very tragic one. In the beginning of the book we discover that Wanda Mann is a pre-op transsexual. When telling Barbie that she was born as Alvin, Barbie says: "Alvin? That's your real name?"To which Wanda replies "Wanda's my real name, barbie-baby, Alvin's just the name I was born with". When Barbie, the Princess of the Land, is mysteriously transported to the Land her body lies in coma in the appartment building. She is laying in George's room, who has been demasked by Thessally, and killed by her. Thessaley has removed the skin from Georges face, pinned it to the wall, and inserted George's eyes and tongue, after which it can speak. Thessaly summons or the Moon-Goddess (the Moon has always been considered a female god) with the use of the ultimate feminine magic symbol: menstrual blood. This makes it clear: this is a female affair! It is therefore extremely painfull and tragic that of the group of four Wanda is not allowed to accompany the other three to the realm of the Dream King, beacuse she is not a real woman ( a quote from the intro to the hardcover/trade paperback by Samuel R. Delaney: .."the moon cares wether or not you have a "y" chromosone, and punishes you accordingly"). She is therefore comdemmed to stay in the room with Barbie's comatose body, and the "talking head" of George which is pinned to the wall. The role Wanda has to play now is one that is often considered a 'female' role, staying at home and taking care of the ill. She kill the time has by having in the beginning akward conversations with George, which later transform in conversations on gender. While the three are on the way to the Dreaming, and Barbie is travelling with her three companions trough the Land an enormous magic storm is building and slowely threathening the old appartment building. Wanda's heroic character appears when she sees from her window a bag-lady (the I-dont- like-dogs- lady, which was inroduced in the beginning of the story line ) being hurt by a thrash can in the storm outside. She goes outsides and takes the lady in the house. While the other's have their harrowing adventures the old building is finally destroyed and both Wanda and the bag-lady are killed. The tragedy is therefore twofold. Not only gets Wanda killed, but in fact she gets killed by her alleged gender. If Wanda would have been allowed to go with the others in the group she most probably would have stayed alive. The last part of the storyline is called "I woke up and one of us was crying" and mainly is about the visit of Barbie to Wanda's funeral in Kansas (!), interwoven with flashbacks of the meeting of Thessaly, Hazel, Foxglove,and the Cuckoo with the Morpheus (the Sandman), and the aftermath of the destruction of the building. We meet Barbie gaian when she is in the bathroom painting a veil on her face. She meets Dora, Wanda's family, who warns Barbie not to mention the name Wanda, but Alvin, when talking to Wanda's parents. We also hear that Wanda's hair has been cut and put in a suit before being laid to rest in the coffin.She then meets Wanda's parents, the Mann's(!), typical components of the religious Bible-belt people. After the official funeral is over, Barbie goes to to Wanda's open grave, throws a copy of Wanda's favorite comic on the coffin, and strikes out the name Alvin on the tombstone with lipstick and replaces it with the name Wanda. She then remembers a dream she has had yesterday in the Greyhound on her way to Minneapolis where she sees Wanda, and a character which the reader of the Sandman will immedialtely recognise as Sandman's sister Death. "Then Wanda turns around and she seems to see me and she waves. They both wave". And this is finally Barbie goodbye to her friend Wanda. The death of Wanda The death of Wanda has caused some strong reactions amongst the readers of the Sandman. There are more deaths occuring in "A Game of You", but the death of Wanda and the "I-don't-like-dogs lady" (the only black character in the book) have caused the most upset. These are certainly not "politically correct" deaths. In the introduction Samuel R. Delaney uses the words "troubling death" when describing Wanda's fate. And other people have reacted as well. Here are two of them, and in the end Neil Gaiman reacts himself. Rachel Pollack (a.o author of several Doom Patrol issues, and a lot of good feminist sf/fantasy books): "There are two things I disliked about A Game of You. One is that I think the claim of the "face" and Thessaly that Wanda is a man never gets answered. Instead, it seems to me that Neil tacitly supports it by having Wanda realize that she's unable to cope with things the "real" women take in stride. The other is that Wanda is the only major character who dies. When you see a story that seems sympathetic to a minority character, and then that character is the only one that dies, you have a clue that the writer cannot really accept the minority figure as a person, again, as a reality. Then when Barbie sees Wanda in a dream she describes her as looking like a real woman. Thus, ts women can only exist-- once agian-- in a fantasy world in the writer's head. at the time I wrote Neil a long letter about this, and we has soem discussion (the tpb's intro by Samuel Delaney takes up some of the points I raised, because Delaney and I had discussed them privately), but I felt the Laughing Game (Doom Patrol) to be amu ch better response." Caitlin R. Kiernan ( a.o. author of the brilliant Wanda story Escape Artist in Sandman: Book of Dreams, and writer of the upcoming storylines "Souvenirs" and "Unkindness of One"): " It hurt a lot, when she wasn't allowed to go with Foxglove and Hazel and Thesssaly, because of the genetic thing. And I was devastated when she was killed. But. That last part of the story, with Barby going to the funeral in Kansas, was so perfect, that there was no way, ultimately , for me to be angry with Neil for having written the story he wrote. I know he caught a lot of flack from some folks at DC about killing Wanda, but I can't recall who he said, in paricular was so upset. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that "A Game of You" gave me the most positive transsexual character I'd ever encountered. And it was someone like me, someone I actually identified with, above and beyond the issue of being ts. Author Neil Gaiman comments: " I think- and this is applying some kind of afther-the-fact pondering to the affair- I killed Wanda because she was the only person whose death made the story a tragedy. I certainly didn't plan who would live and who would die when I began the story, everyone was up for grabs. As the story progresses, and Wanda became the only haracter who was doing noble and valiant and brave and good things, it also became failry obvious that she was going to be killed whem the house collapsed in the hurricane. Which meant that I was going to be able to do her funeral, and give Barbie to show what she'd learnt". I liked the fact that the same people who were writing to go "We don't like this ts person in our comic make him-it-ho away" were the same people who six issues later were writing "They cut off her HAIR!" "They didn't even let her be buried under her name!" (Something I'd made up, and discovered later from TS friends has happened.)" Bust mostly Wanda died (as did the I-don't-like-dogs-lady) (as did George, Martin Tenbones, and Wilkinson and Luz) because that was what happened in the story." "Just as Morpheus died, and the people in Brief Lives, and Orpheus, and the Spider women, and Rose's grandmother, and Carla (well - Carla and Ruby died because Nada died but you know what I mean) - because that was what happened in their stories. Keep any story going long enough ( as the waitress points out in 24 hours, before she dies) and they end in death." Wanda lives ! At least, in prose. In 1996 the Sandman: Book of Dreams was published. It is a collection of stories, set in the Sandman's universe, by some famous sf/fantasy/horror writers like Gene Wolfe, Tad Willams, and Nancy A. Collins. There are two stories which take on Wanda. The first one, and also the best story in the collection, is "Escape artist" by Caitlin R. Kiernan. the secone one, which I also recommend very much, is "An extra smidgen of eternity" by Robert Rodi. The storyline A Game of You was originally published in issues 32-37 of the popular Sandman comics. They were in 1993 collected in both hardcover and trade paperback. All pictures: Copyright DC Comics 1993. The Sandman: Book of Dreams. Edited by Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer. Published by HarperPaperbacks. Copyright DC Comics 1996. Back to the Literature-section.