#it's been too long since i meta'd it all just burst out i'm sorry

[landwriter]

oh my friend tell me about that just like love follow up it sounds BRILLIANT

Oh boy oh boy! Okay I've already shared so many snippets and too many tidbits so I'll just tell you *about* it.

tl;dr: If Just Like Love was about what how the Corinthian and Hob Gadling come into each other's lives in the absence of Dream and happy ignorance that it's he who haunts them both, then the sequel is about everything they manage buy with that ignorance, and what they bear in finally paying it - when the ghost they've been moving and speaking around this whole time comes back to them both.

Just Like Love jumps off from 1989 show canon and is basically set up like, okay, if just enough information was withheld, these two characters could meet, and they would be changed enough for canon to shift. Maybe the could even save each other. Or there could be a promise of it, at least. I sincerely meant to just write dirty sex but the themes. You know how it is. The symbolism got me again, boys, I'm hit, etc.

But the other thing that is withheld is Dream himself, because of his very special ability to get in his own way and make that many other people's problems. At the core of him I envision this huge bezoar of entangled duty, fate, and repression. None lend themselves well to accepting change for oneself, or allowing it for one's creations. Certainly not to being accused of it by a mere man. Being named in 1889 by Hob as a needing thing - who seeks not knowledge but base company and friendship - is such a grave insult to him. He isn't known for accepting help in canon. He thinks himself an island and indeed every time he has reached out in hunger it seems to have ended in catastrophe.

This is in contrast to Hob and the Corinthian both, unabashedly hungry, hedonistic creatures, who nonetheless are fated for their deepest and most lasting bond being to:

someone who both Made Them (as far as Hob knows!)

and can Unmake Them (as the Corinthian certainly knows and Hob surely must wonder about),

and reviles such base things as want. What is wanting something when there is duty, after all?

read: Dream, Oneiros, Protestant Work Ethic of the Endless :)

(a fun show note! Dream finds the time to condemn them both for not 'doing'/creating to his standards - the incredulous 'But what have you done?' in 1489; Dream's bit I can't summon off the top of my head at The Corinthian's unmaking at the Cereal Convention. meanwhile these guys are here to drink wine, swive women, soldier and feast)

Back to the rest of the missing information about each other: Hob does not know that the Corinthian was an accomplice in Dream's imprisonment. Hob does not know the Corinthian was made by Dream. Hob does not know he wasn't made by Dream. Hob doesn't come along on the Corinthian's Morning Arson Jaunt in Just Like Love - he doesn't even know Dream is imprisoned. Why would he? It's not like the Corinthian is especially keeping a secret here. The information is simply irrelevant because the Corinthian has no idea Hob even knows Dream. Let alone that it's Dream, in both his presence and absence, that has brought them together. They could have been allies in this, and it would have gone differently.

But instead the Corinthian frees Dream, alone. Because he was made with his master's arrogance. He wants Dream to chase him. To see him. To not find fault with the shape he was made in by Dream's own hands, and instead of casting him aside anew, to see the worth of him. Hob, in naming him and seeing him and wanting him still, gave him, I think, the last fateful drop of surety. And I think it's sort of a perfect tragedy, actually, because these two characters find something like what they were looking for in each other, and the relief of that is what sets them both on this path to misery, delivered in the shape of their missing North Star, carrying all the knowledge they were earlier spared, a fundamental disbelief in change, and the unfinished business of unmaking a wayward nightmare.

Which is to say: Just Like Love's sequel is a totally fun lighthearted madcap romp of Hob finding the Corinthian in America, going on adventures together, and caring for each other in way neither has had the luxury of ever before - of seeing and naming and changing one another: monster, hungry, not-quite-human, not-quite-nightmare - living, briefly, in their own little world; until Dream returns and finds them both, together, and the story stops asking how they might change one another, and starts asking if it will be enough.