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xx-vergil-xx · 6 months

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Can I ask what pushed you to end Hounds the way you did? It's a fantastic ending, but I'm curious. I expected the Fates to revive Dream, or allow him to inhabit a new form (such as one made by Daniel, so that Dream becomes a dreamthing), etc. But instead, his death is made to have never happened. Which makes it partly feels like Hob's whole road trip journey was for nothing since he lost all those memories and connections with Matthew, the Corinthian, Delirium, Despair, Desire, Death, etc. (thank god he kept the farmhouse). But it's almost like he traded all those memories and connections for Dream. Unless I missed something while reading (I was crying very hard).

Again, fantastic ending, and I'm also glad it's a happy ending. But I'm curious as to why you didn't go in the other direction

howdy! thanks very much for the ask — an excellent query, one which i’m happy to answer

(verg of the future: this answer ended up long! there’s a short form at the top here and at the end <3)

in brief: he did make that trade you described! but not strictly for dream — it was the price of swapping genres!

an explanation:

what i had in mind while planning and writing was less the idea of erasure of prior narrative action and more a subversion of the expected genre, in particular the genre tropes that follow dream in the original arc of the comics, where his story is very classically tragic (with the understood weaving of hob into that tragedy, this being a dream/hob telling and all)

for reference, i also drew a lot of inspiration for hob’s road trip odyssey from the aeneid, an epic that is, yes, about the founding of rome but also (at least to my reading) a fundamental tragedy — the cost of founding rome is aeneas’ home, many of his friends, much of his core family, and the very end of the story is not some victorious depiction of the glory of rome to be (which we do get earlier in the book, with the ekphrasis on his shield) but aeneas, overcome with fury and loss, killing a man who begs his mercy. i’ve always felt that the aeneid, while certainly stepped in the expected amount of roman nationalism, is centrally about a single man and his singular suffering as an instrument of higher destiny.

i wanted to model hob’s arc around the aeneid (minus, y’know, some of the chunks that are strictly battle sequences <3) both because intertextuality is a huge part of how i wanted to handle hounds (story about stories, made of other stories, etc), but also because hob and aeneas are fundamentally parallel characters — nomads with exceptional ordinances, permanently displaced by the passing whims of higher powers, men who are made to reckon with both extraordinary wonder and extraordinary tragedy regularly while still, at their core, just being human. that’s what makes aeneas so compelling — he’s just a man. and so is our beloved hob — that’s his whole thing, his whole narrative function and his whole central ideal, humanity

so then, approaching hounds with both the thought of the sandman’s original tragic contours (see: the whole lead-in to daniel. christ above is the way that goes devastating to read) and the man vs fate core of the aeneid, i was considering a lot of things about how to mess around with both notions without gutting them entirely. i tend to dislike tragedies that become un-tragic without some sort of Serious Payment For It (not to say i don’t like happy stories because i very much do! but i get ticked off when high stakes get deflated too quickly) and i didn’t want to undermine the very real fact that the Fates are typically not versed in notions of empathy and/or leniency, and that dream and hob and those around them did experience and endure devastation and loss, and that death is a fact typically immune to argument.

the world of sandman is not one with easy answers, and to my mind there’s no such thing as a bargain with the Fates where you break even. for hob to get what he wanted, something had to be given, something dear and vital and real. there’s more to what hob actually gives the Fates than he verbally stipulates, which i tried to address largely via the corinthian and his perception of the situation, especially those last conversations with dream in the “swamp”. i have a lot of options about the corinthian in his function as “dark mirror” having a blistering clarity of understanding much of the time, which is why i foisted the onus of those complexities onto his dialogue, rather than hob, who (and i say this with love) is a creature of bias and often blinded to greater repercussions of his actions insofar as they extend beyond his immediate objectives/enjoyments, or dream, who can see the bigger picture but i think often really keeps himself from doing so when it comes to anything at all that’s personal (king of stories has a blindspot for his own). what hob gives the Fates actually costs him almost nothing, in the long run, if we operate with the idea that he cannot remember, nor is there any lasting effect from, his 600-ish heavily-relived years. there’s narrative and symbolic weight, of course — he gives them love as an oath and as nostalgia (sidebar: his driving force is an almost pre-nostalgia, a continual love of the moment as the moment is passing, but anyway) (cuff links), he gives them in a captured moment the lovely discomfort and simultaneous brilliance of being alive (the hook, the finger prick the blood), and he gives them a rich and complicated experience of humanity (those 600 years). but practically, what is actually taken from him that he doesn’t just get back?

only those few months — and in them, a web of real and known connections, all of which matter, and all of which change his understanding of and relationship to things like grief, and loneliness, and fear, and forgiveness. those are important changes, real changes, that would affect how he operates in the world going forward. that development is gone. he returns instead to the (of course, fought-for and hard-won) stasis of what was, which becomes what will always be. in making the Fates and their judgement more complex, he has actually made his own life less complex. now, i’m not going to sit here and argue that “suffering has inherent value” or some shit like that because i think that’s bullshit! pain is just pain. but he does lose experiences which would have shaped him in new ways, and, i think, good ways. even important ways

and he may well be shaped towards similar courses with dream (especially re: learning that lesson about loneliness — i think hob suffers from the curse of always, ultimately, being alone (immortality etc there’s so much discourse about this), and the road trip was in part about him learning that though it is the simplest path it is neither the sole nor the best path), but he certainly doesn’t learn them the same way, with the same faces, with the same acuity and clarity and intensity.

the thing with the Fates (to me anyway) is that you don’t ever just win. maybe you can get what you want, but it’s not easy (it make take a thousand repetitions of your lifetime until friction and the touch of your hands wears the sisyphean boulder down to a pebble — like the parable of the bird scraping its beak on the mountain), and it’s sure not free.

so yes, those months are lost. that’s a big part of the price. and we don’t know, at the end, how much of that thing he really gave ultimately comes back — his new relationship depths with deanna or cori or the other endless, those things aren’t seen. the main arc is resolved — hob and dream — but there are still pieces missing. he loses a piece of his human experience, he gets tossed back around through the wringer of his life (which is often distinctly not pleasant), and he is, as he ever was, a character with a path whose impetus and dictation rest heavily on external forces. even in attempting to channel his life elsewhere, he still has to bargain, and is still subject to the choices of the fates, and in some ways the story remains irrevocably a tragedy, in that one way or another it has loss in a central place. in the latter half of hounds hob really became my attempted version of an aeneas type — a man with a quest and a fated directive, a deeply human and flawed individual, who can alter the path and even irrevocably change the genre of his own narrative, but only at cost.

of course let’s be clear! some of all the actual rendering of this ended up as it did partly because i am not always a clean writer, and for that i apologize! but i did genuinely want that sense of gaps — of faces and voices given over to the gravitational well of the principal narrative arc of hob/dream versus the Fates. i think those things are gone. the narrative is forcibly re-centered around hob and dream, and in doing this — in shifting the story genre — other ties and bonds are not just cut, but unwoven entirely. when you change the kind of story you’re telling, the change is done at the expense of something else. kind of like how there’s a fixed amount of matter in the universe? you can’t create or destroy matter — to make something new you have to take from another place. (sidebar: wow i’m realizing something about my fundamental storytelling beliefs right now! laws of physics! anon your ask has really got my cylinders firing, and most sincerely thank you <3)

still, they might come back. though i didn’t write it as fully as i could have (i will freely admit there was a great deal of burnout at play towards the end there), i had a lot of thoughts re: repetition and density, namely that if you stack a thousand repetitions of a lifetime against each other it’s the equivalent of writing a word over and over and over on a page. when you erase it, the channels remain. language flows most naturally in the direction once etched for it. maybe hob learns those same lessons and knows the same people in the same way — maybe he and the corinthian find that odd patch of common ground, maybe he takes a long drive with delirium through rural maryland. maybe there are echoes. maybe even if it is gone what was still shapes the topography. maybe a kindness or a word exchanged still ring out when you can’t see them or remember them. while the milestones of our lives rippled the most visibly, i think we’re shaped a thousandfold ways by accumulations of small things we can’t distinctly remember. only a feeling of a thing, or the negative space it leaves.

well. tl;dr — i didn’t want to let hob get away without actually giving anything up, nor without his choice to bargain affecting others besides himself in equally irrevocable ways (sidebar: at his core is a selfishness that is both charming and ignoble — he wants to do a good thing for dream but also he makes a call that changes a plenitude of lives other than his own, and i don’t think he really asks, he just does — grey areas are his whole gig to me), because nobody makes a deal with the Fates for free, and changing genre has a price tag. it was my effort to make the tone of the whole beast more authentically sandman-esque, since sandman does a lot of that sort of water-muddying, especially when using understood narrative models/archetypes/etc etc

i am. sorry this was as long as it is! jesus! but i’m sending it off all the same. anyways, anon, thanks very much not only for your lovely kind words and the high honor of your tears (no pulitzer could mean more to me than knowing a thing i wrote really moved someone, seriously thank you) but also for giving me a blank check to go buck wild and ramble about my own damn writing and Things I Just Think <3 i hope you have a lovely day/morning/noon/night, and thanks a bunch for dropping by <3 <3 <3

#the sandman #hob gadling #dream of the endless #dreamling #hounds #vergil says hello #vergil says way more than fuckin hello tbh #vergil writes a manifesto woukd be a better line for this #anon has given me the greatest gift: License To Monologue #fingers crossed any of that actually answered the question at hand #thanks for saying hi and asking things because i love both experiences immensely #<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

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