Neil Gaiman has spent almost as much time battling online trolls as he has promoting his Sandman series on Netflix since the fantasy series debuted earlier this year. Even now, with the first season having been out a few months and a second heading into development, Gaiman is still trying to explain how the casting decisions made on the show all have their source in his graphic novels if people care to read them before sharing their opinions online.

When The Sandman arrived on Netflix, it brought with it many comments about characters being played by black actors, some characters having genders altered, etc, etc. While Gaiman has admittedly tried not to react to many of the complaints, he had constantly found himself in a battle to turn attention away from petty complaints about who should and shouldn’t have been cast in the show and get people invested in simply enjoying the series. He recently doubled down on his stance over the casting of non-binary star Mason Alexander Park as Desire or Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death while speaking with Inverse. He said:

"Oh, and occasionally, you get people shouting at us for having made up all of these gay characters who weren’t in the comics, and then we’d go ‘Have you read the comics?’ And they’d go ‘No.’ And we’d go, ‘They were gay in the comics.’ And they’d go ‘You’re just woke and nobody is going to watch your horrible show.’ And then we went Number 1 in the world for four weeks. And they went ‘It’s all bots! We hate you. You’re woke.’ It’s a weird silliness. These complainers don’t like gay people, they don’t like Black people, and they don’t like women. And if you look at their profiles, they don’t like vaccines, they don’t like Democrats, and they’re not big on voting."

Related: Neil Gaiman Asks People to Stop Sending Requests to Play Delirium in The Sandman Season 2

Why Do Many People Have Such an Issue With On-Screen Diversity?

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DC Entertainment & Netflix

This is the eternal question that is far from being satisfactorily answered to everyone’s liking. Hollywood has been attempting to make its output more encompassing of minority groups, from color and race to gender and sexuality. In doing so, many casting choices have caused friction from certain individuals and, as expected, on social media in general.

Very few movies and TV shows are made now that don’t have at least one Black or Asian lead, one character identifiable with the LGBTQ+ community, a prominent female and so on. While this is a generally well-received shift in the industry, when that comes with characters being changed to accommodate these additions is where social media takes a dark turn. There is an argument from some sides that equality and diversity in movies shouldn’t simply mean taking a well-established character and changing them to fit a box-ticking exercise, and more should be done to create new iconic characters. However, when adapting older works of fiction that did not have diverse casts due to the time in which they were written, it becomes inevitable that some changes are required. In the end, as long as the best actor is cast in a role, whatever race, color or orientation, that should be the ultimate goal of any casting director.