#aitww

[qqueenofhades]

SCREECH!

(With big big thanks to @fishfingersandscarves, who designed the gorgeous cover and arranged for it to be printed into a book!)

[fishfingersandscarves]

little scene from chapter 15 of and in the waking world we wait and want by @qqueenofhades

[qqueenofhades]

write a fic that is epistolary except instead of it being a letter it's Hob writing a rage response to GoT/HotD

OKAY LOOK NONNIE, HOB IS OBVIOUSLY A HISTORY PROFESSOR IN 2022, YES?

So that means he has ABSOLUTELY heard of GoT/HOTD, his students come into class with many dumb ideas because of it, and this (uh, not in any way inspired by actual events) makes him very, very Tired. So one day he just draws up a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Why Game of Thrones Is Not History PLEASE STOP CITING IT IN YOUR ESSAYS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD UNLESS IT IS SPECIFICALLY A COMPARATIVE MEDIA ANALYSIS THANK YOU!" and goes to town. One of his students films it and puts it on YouTube. Hob becomes a viral video star for a while, which is the worst thing that has ever happened to him in 600+ years of life. He gets lots of nasty comments insisting that he is very wrong and a politically correct snowflake and that Joe Q. Viewer, Noted Medieval History Expert, is obviously right, especially about Women, Gays, and Black People.

Hob takes all these comments, compiles ANOTHER PowerPoint, and gives a conference paper about Popular Medievalism and Public Perception, wherein he just reads them all for filth in an extremely thoughtful and academic way. (I see Hob as being primarily a late medieval/early modernist with particular focus on Britain's role in the Atlantic world and the impact of the slave trade in the development of empire, or at least that will be his main research interest in AITWW). However by nature, and for Reasons, he also teaches medieval history survey modules and medieval independent studies and such, so he is definitely very conversant in all that too.

Anyway, Hob then passive-aggressively publishes said conference paper in some journal or other. Professors are like "oh my god thank you." His students tend to think he's cool. Hob may be cool, but he is mostly just a man with a burning, burning grudge. Against Will Shakespeare, and against fucking Game of Thrones.

[qqueenofhades]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 20/20 Fandom: The Sandman (TV 2022) Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling, Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling, Death of the Endless & Dream of the Endless Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, Hob Gadling, Desire of the Endless, Death of the Endless, Lady Johanna Constantine, The Corinthian (Sandman), Lucien | Lucienne (The Sandman), Jim | Peggy (The Sandman), Matthew the Raven, Rose Walker

[qqueenofhades]

Hey there! Quick question, when you had Hob as a Union soldier in the US civil war, was that comic canon or was that a choice you made as an author? I thought it was the latter until I randomly saw another post referencing to Hob as a Union soldier and now I’m wondering if they were citing you or if there’s parts of his fictional biography I was totally unaware of from the comics?

On my end, that came from discussions with friends on WhatsApp, and wasn't related to comic canon. I think it's an understandable move to give Hob a more concrete way of atoning for slavery and to have him continue to work on making major changes to his life/system of beliefs. So yeah, AFAIK, it's not Official Canon but just something that makes sense and which I used for him in AITWW. Other people might have seen it there or come up with it themselves; fandom is a hive mind and is obviously all working with the same material, so of course we often come to similar conclusions.

[qqueenofhades]

Okay so I’ve been a huge Old Guard fan since the comics and recently binged all of Deo Volante and KoS on the recommendation of a friend and loved absolutely every bit of them. The same friend said I absolutely had to read all of your works but I don’t overlap into any of the other fandoms- I know a bit about Good Omens and Sandman through tumblr osmosis and a bit less about Shadow and Bone, then nothing at all about Timeless and some of the others.

The friend in question said most of your works are similar to KoS in that they’re completely separate AUs that reference/cameo canon but can be appreciated and understood without reading them (I believe they specifically mentioned one called Promised Land or something that was that way?) and I just want to poke in and ask if you’d also say that was the case, like which of your works (if any) can be read and appreciated without having read actual canon and if there are any I should avoid until I’ve read/watched the source material?

Aha, thanks so much. I think one of the highest compliments you can give a fic writer is to want to read their stuff even from fandoms that you yourself are not in, so yes. This will not by any means be an exhaustive list (you can find my full AO3 profile here, I have a lot of fics and most of them are, uh, Long) but some highlights that you might enjoy include:

Shadow and Bone:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

This is the "Promised Land" fic referenced by your friend above. It's a historical AU set in the 1980s Soviet Union. You don't really need to know anything about the source material to enjoy it, and other fans of mine who weren't familiar with SaB have read this and liked it.

The Sandman:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

This will introduce you both to the characters and the ship (Dreamling) in the course of a long historical saga. This one isn't an AU; it's canon-verse (for the TV show) all throughout, but it's designed in a way that doesn't really rely on knowing the TV show beforehand (and especially since this ship became a fan favorite after literally 30 minutes in half an episode).

Timeless:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

This is another of the fics of mine that people who don't know the source material have read and enjoyed. It's an AU set in a magical steampunk Victorian universe, and features one of my favorite Garbage Men of all time, Garcia Flynn. Blowing up things, as he does, and being outmatched by a tiny and feisty historian named Lucy.

Also, if you are a KoS fan, I have exciting news for you, in that I'm currently working on an original-novel rebuild of it based on the same premise, featuring all-new characters, world, relationships, plots, etc., entitled The Empire of Bones. I have just finished part 2 (of a planned 3) and am planning to publish it when I'm done, probably independently but possibly also looking for a tradpub deal (depending on how much hassle that proves to be; I have tried it before and don't have unlimited patience). Anyway, yes. I'm very excited about this project and am looking forward to being able to share it.

Happy reading!

[qqueenofhades]

You people reading AITWW (which is, uh, literally a quarter of a million words long) without even being in the Sandman fandom are the real MVPs. Damn.

[qqueenofhades]

Hello. I recently read your fanfic (and in the waking world we wait and want). It is beautiful, and I appreciated the historical accuracy a lot. This is a personal matter, but I thought I would still ask away since it affected me more deeply than expected. I read the part in which Hob realizes what awful things he has done by partaking in the slave trade and then has a nightmare about it. It shocked me because it resembled an experience I had myself. A few years back I had a very vivid dream, in which I had been ordered to shoot some people who were standing in a row in front of me. And when I did, I kept becoming the person I had shot, having to look at myself in the eye while killing, then switching back to the shooter's pov and looking myself in the eye while dying. I also did feel some amount of physical pain, which has never happened to me in a dream before or since. When I woke up I felt sick and vomited.

It took me a while that this might have been about some of my family's involvement in fascism. I am from Italy, and I know (almost by chance, because no one talks about it openly) that several of my great grandparents were fascists, and not in the "going along with it" kind of way. But in the "fervently convinced until their death" way. It is no secret that my country has never properly come to terms with the horrors of the dictatorship, (not in the way Germany did) and that the ideology continues to linger slightly below the surface, hidden by the myth that "Italians are good people". This becomes scary when you look at the elections we had yesterday. Our PM now, Giorgia Meloni, is the closest thing to a fascist to occupy the position since the end of the war. I did not even get to vote, because I'm turning eighteen in a few months.

But I digress. Mostly I just wanted to say I admire the realism of the guilt and grief in this sort of context, and say I was even a bit scared by the accuracy. I assume you've had a similar experience? How did you do it?

First of all, thanks for sharing this. There are definitely a lot of us, myself included, who are eyeing the Italian elections with deep consternation and noting that the current global fad for authoritarianism and right-wing pseudo-fascist (or indeed, openly fascist) populism has by no means subsided. Even after six thousand years, humanity can't break its old bad habit, in times of plague, war, economic upheaval, social turmoil etc, to gravitate to the authoritarian strongman figure who promises to "fix everything" and tell them who to blame (even if this is obviously not who is really to blame). Every country has its own troubled history with this paradigm, and many of them (Italy, America, the UK, Russia, etc etc) have definitely not owed up to it at all and are repeating the same old pattern and causing even more damage with them yet again.

As for Hob and the dream, I have never had an experience quite like that, but also, I felt it was authentic and necessary for the story. First, I feel that a lot of people, to some extent understandably, skip over or generally minimize this part, whether due to feeling uncomfortable with how to deal with it, liking Hob as a character and not wanting to dwell on his (MAJOR) failings, seeing him as uncomplicatedly "good," etc. It also reflects the fact that there's a pervasive tendency among all kinds of people to come up with excuses as to why their participation in bad systems isn't actually as "bad" as everyone else (as we saw Hob doing with all his rationalizations and excuses in the previous chapter). Because he has a boring office job in London and just balances books and moves money around and isn't out there on the plantation or on the ship himself, surely he isn't "really" involved in slavery, right? Even if he knows that is the system he's ultimately working for and how he makes his money, surely he's "not as guilty" as the obviously evil/oppressive bad guys, right? What use would it do if he personally quit his job, when there's such a huge and worldwide industry that he alone can make no real impact on? Etc. etc.

The point of the dream, therefore, is to show Hob -- viscerally, personally, unavoidably -- what he has been enabling with all his deliberate excuses and his unwillingness to admit that his conscious participation (and profit) has directly contributed to these outcomes. Hob doesn't do it because he's a Bad Person, but that's the point. The aren't Good People and Bad People; there are people who do things, and people in every age who are willing to go along with systems of oppression because they can find a way to make it personally make sense to them. As Hob points out in his excuse-making stage, these people go to church! They have families! They give money to beggars! They donate their huge fortunes, made from the profits of slavery, to found universities and libraries and other institutions to improve human knowledge! This "slavery philanthropy" is technically good, right? You can ignore the absolutely evil reasons for its existence if the money does good when it's redistributed, right? That's why Hob also tries to make himself feel better by handing out lots of money to friends and the poor and people down on their luck. If he's in a position to do that, and help out people in need the way he used to be, surely it's not terribly, unfathomably wrong to do this, RIGHT?

And of course, he's wrong. He's not a "lesser" or "lesser evil" participant just because he had an office job in London instead of a plantation overseer in Barbados. In fact, as Hob also points out once he comes to his senses, that makes it worse, because he deliberately kept himself away from the worst reality of it. Deep down, he knew that if he was put face to face with the full extent of it, he wouldn't be able to continue making excuses and keep his comfortable job and nice life, and he wanted to do that more than he wanted to do the right thing. So once he is in fact forced to experience, even in a nightmare, exactly what he's done to the people that his firm made money off by exploiting and enslaving, there's absolutely no question of him continuing to deny it or pretend it wasn't as agonizingly evil as it was. But feeling bad alone isn't enough. He needs to do something about it, and he can never stop doing something about it. He can't just sit there in his guilt and wallow and feel sorry for himself. He needs to ACT.

And he does! To his credit, he does! He sells his house and all his stuff and he joins abolitionist societies and he goes out on the streets and talks to people who don't want to hear it, he encounters wealthy business owners making the same excuses he was, he hates them because he realizes that he WAS them, and he is horrified about how easy it was to slide into that morally absent place, because it was just so much money. He works for William Wilberforce and helps him pass the anti-slave trade and anti-slavery acts, and those are tangible accomplishments. He goes to America and fights for the Union at Antietam and Gettysburg, and is horribly wounded at the latter battle to the point that it takes even him, immortal, several months to recover. So at some point, you would ask, has he not atoned sufficiently? Has he done enough? Can he stop being a good person now, and go back to doing... whatever?

The point of Hob, though, is that he realizes that he can't. He has to keep choosing to do good for himself, on a personal and individual level, and he has to balance that against his original impulse to get as much Stuff as possible, because he was born as a medieval peasant in the middle of the Black Death and things have always been something that can be taken away. Of course he felt for the first several hundred years that the only point of immortality was to get enough Stuff that he would always be comfortable and not have to worry about experiencing that kind of deprivation again. But after 400+ years, he finally gets that is not what the human experience is about at all -- especially if you want to be able to look yourself in the eye for the rest of eternity when you're going to have to live with yourself and see exactly how those choices are going to play out. You have to be kind and do the right thing for yourself, and not because you're expecting any kind of reward, and when indeed you might experience punishment. You have to be willing to let go of your shallow materialism and see the larger picture, and that's what Hob finally does. Which is why he and Dream are finally, when they see each other again in 2022, actually in a place where they might be good partners for each other. Hob has grown up and become kinder and more universally minded, and Dream has come down off his haughty pedestal and discovered more compassion for individual humanity, despite his long ordeal being stuck in the fishbowl.

Anyway, I find that a much more emotionally resonant, complicated, and interesting arc for Hob than just "he's always been a good person and it's easy for him" because... he hasn't been! He's a representation of the good and bad of humanity alike, and he didn't become immortal just because he was always some shining moral exemplar. He had to struggle with it, to learn what he was supposed to do with it, to be forced to live forever with the consequences of his worst mistakes as well as his greatest joys, and figure out what he was going to do about it. He has to critically interrogate the history he has lived through, the history he has enabled even as one man, and what he's going to do differently going forward, and that is what I love about him.