There are only two things that will make me block you outright: 1. You use GenAI to “create” art or “write” fic without labelling it and 2. You post uncredited art and/or steal other people’s work to pass it off as your own. In both cases, I’m not the right person for you to follow.
Hi, I’m so glad you’re here! This started out as a small writing blog but has developed a horrifying (^jk) life of its own since 2022, so it was about time I just faced the facts:
A Sandman Blog it is!
I organised the links and tags to all my Sandman stuff for you to make it easier to find your way around.
For quick reference:
[The Ultimate Sandman Character Tag Library]
[The Women of the Sandman Tag Library]
[Sandman Comics: Original Artists Library]
[The Sandman Timeline]
[Sandman Reread (Comics)]
[Sandman Rewatch (Netflix)]
[Sandman S2: From Inception to First Impressions]
[Sandman Reference: How to Collect the Comics, Companion Books, Annotations/Reference Literature etc]
[Sandman Movie Concept Art by Jill Thompson & John Watkiss]
[In Light of the Neil Gaiman Allegations]
Ordered by topics (recommended):
Sandman Meta-Analysis: My literary/conceptual/psychological analyses. I have also written some musical and art metas.
Sandman Fics & Poems: My own work, mostly m/f and f/f canon pairings and OCs, both long fics and shorter works.
I’m also Dream’s Therapist. I think we all agree he needs one.
Sandman Art (general tag that contains all art posts, from fan-art to gif-sets. Separate tag for official Sandman artists).
Sandman March Mania was an event we specifically ran for the comics art lovers, so check it out.
Sparkle Content Curation (a not-quite-serious collection of Dream/Morpheus thirst-trap fan-art and unhinged posts). Please also peruse the tags #contraceptive sparkles, #glitter herpes and #murphy and his cool hat (yes, I am sort of responsible for the #muhulhu tag on here) if this hell-site has left you in a state of being desperate for laughs
A Little Intro…
Once there was a girl with so many words, so many images, so many songs in her head that had no place to go. So she decided some of them will just go here…
Well, that sounds a bit contrived, but it’s not entirely untrue. Apart from the “girl”-part, because I’m at the younger end of Gen X. Or the “no place to go”-part, because some of my work actually *did* go places. Just not the stuff I decided to put on here…
Which is mostly Sandman stuff right now, let’s be honest (I fell in love with it as a teenager and it still has a tight grip on me three decades later). And the fact that my blog a wild mix between my metas, my fanfic and a bit of my doodling already shows the pull in different directions I have experienced for most of my life:
I guess I’m just a multi-hyphenate who can’t make up her mind what she wants to do with her life, so she tries to do it all and ends up burned out half of the time. I hold two degrees (one of them a triple major—yeah, I like torturing myself) and work(ed) in science/academia, the performing arts/theatre and mental health.
Somewhere along the way, I managed to publish a few novels under a pen name, and only a select few people know about it. And I intend to keep it that way.
I used to draw much more (mostly pencil and ink), but between working and having a family, something had to give, and if I have to choose, writing always comes first. But I doodle and experiment a lot in Procreate, and it usually helps me when I procrastinate on my writing. I drop the odd drawing in here, but I don’t see myself as a fine artist, and I’m in perpetual awe of the talent I see on here.
This is just an account for unapologetically being me, with all my hyperfixations—and undoubtedly some pointless shitposts just for fun…
Hey everyone, just hopping on briefly because I forgot to switch off asks (it’s rectified now):
My Sandman blog is currently on hiatus and I’m not sure if I’ll be back as a creator and curator any time soon, if ever. I will check in occasionally, so you can absolutely send me DMs or yap about old posts, I just won’t create for The Sandman fandom in the foreseeable future because I’m too busy with other stuff, plus I’m not feeling the general (not talking about individuals) fandom flavour enough right now to still enjoy it. It’s simply time to love this story again like I used to, and that means stepping away from Tumblr.
The Sandman archive is still available via my pinned post, at least for now, and the search function of my blog will also help if you have any Sandman-related questions. I think there isn’t much that I haven’t covered over the past four years (I probably won’t finish the public reread/rewatch now, but in the grand scheme of things, everything’s been said).
The last ever 🥺 Chapter Drop for “The Pillars of Creation” (Morpheus/OFC): Zoē
Here is the Master Post for all 31: “The Pillars of Creation”
And you can help pulling me out of my post-completion blues via: Send me a request
Meta
Sandman Reread: Brief Lives Chapter Six—Starting Over
Background: Comics Single Issue 46 and “Death Talks About Life”
Art is always chosen to support meta and fic, so you’ll either find it if you scroll back through the week or have a look at the corresponding tags (Sandman Art or my Character Library that has well over 100 Sandman characters tagged by now).
You can also find links to all meta, fic, art and whatever else there is in my pinned post.
Reread from Tomorrow
Edit: Sorry, I need to put things on hold. Blog’s on hiatus for now
Brief Lives Chapter Seven (#47)
I’m not well… (about #47. I’m okay and just don’t have the time to give this the focus it deserves right now, but thanks to everyone who checked in—I certainly didn’t mean to worry anyone 🖤)
Like for The Light of Stars, here comes the promised master post that will take you directly to every new chapter on Ao3. [You will need an account since my fics are locked. Some full chapters can also be found via the “the pillars of creation”-tag on here, but I’ve stopped posting complete chapters to Tumblr after ch. 19]
And as always: Your comments, likes and reblogs/shares are super-appreciated, be it here or on Ao3. Writers and creators love to hear from you.
Art by Jill Thompson
Chapter 1: Prologue, in which Delirium crashes Dream’s castle and awkwardly reveals her role in Thalia’s fate.
Chapter 2: Food for Thought, in which a cooking session goes sideways because family drama proves harder to digest than Thalia’s cookies (iykyk).
Chapter 3: Family Business, in which family conversations go spectacularly wrong.
Chapter 4: On the Nature of Pleasure, in which we witness risky corridor encounters and awkward small talk with Mervyn.
Chapter 5: Aurora, in which Dream’s… feelings light up the sky, and some bridges should rather be left burned.
Chapter 6: Syzygy, in which Dream agrees to go on a quest he’s certain is a terrible idea.
Chapter 7: Holon, in which Thalia seeks Lucienne’s counsel.
Chapter 8: Building Fires, in which stubbornness and worry lead Thalia to insert herself into a quest she hadn’t bargained for.
Chapter 9: Love and War, in which an ancient goddess dances for the last time and Desire reveals uncomfortable truths.
Chapter 10: Unfair Persuasion, in which Thalia and Morpheus find… errr, comfort after trauma, but a brief mention of Desire makes things a lot more… uncomfortable.
Chapter 11: Pythia, in which Thalia has a vision warning her to leave, and Morpheus decides to seek out Apollo.
Chapter 12: Discordant Truths, in which Delirium gets the world’s ugliest cardigan and Morpheus discovers that loving someone means accepting their particular brand of madness.
Chapter 13: Ephemeros, in which a tense banquet leads to private revelations, and Dream must confront his past.
Chapter 14: Potamós, in which Morpheus delivers news to Thalia and says a goodbye that feels far too final.
Chapter 15: Aisa, in which Apollo shares a prophecy about Morpheus’ quest and tells Thalia she holds the key to preventing it.
Chapter 16: Topaz, in which Thalia obtains a dreamstone from Lucienne, only to realise it’s the wrong way forward.
Chapter 17: Adamas, in which Despair and Death both visit Thalia and she understands the very thing that could save Morpheus has been with him all along.
Chapter 18: Fracture, in which an impossible choice is made and Dream returns to his realm forever changed.
Chapter 19: Home, in which Dream’s hands won’t let go of his guilt but Thalia refuses to let him grieve alone.
Chapter 20: Invocation, in which Thalia makes a decision that may save or destroy everything.
Chapter 21: Pánta Rheî, in which Thalia seeks counsel from Calliope about an impossible truth, and four words prove too heavy for Morpheus to bear.
Chapter 22: Apognosis, in which Thalia learns that carrying hope for two people is impossible when one of them has already made up his mind.
Chapter 23: Life, in which Morpheus knocks on Thalia’s door for only the second time, and she asks him the most terrifying question of all.
Chapter 24: Original Sin, in which Morpheus shows Thalia his darkness, and she steps closer instead of away.
Chapter 25: Waiting, in which a throne holds more than it should and a child is returned whole while a mother’s grief quietly becomes something else.
Chapter 26: The Unravelling, in which Delirium is the only one who truly understands what happens.
Chapter 27: Semnai Theai, in which Thalia turns toward the one person who has every reason to refuse her and Calliope makes the choice that may cost her everything she has left.
Chapter 28: Katharsis, in which Johanna Constantine spends a night in the Dreaming and the Kindly Ones balance their scales.
Chapter 29: Light, in which an armchair nobody asked for appears in the library, light breaks through the windows and Morpheus says “Hey”, which is so not him. Or is it?
Chapter 30: Otherwise, in which Dream wishes things had been different, and then someone arrives loudly and apparently with opinions, and everything gives way.
Chapter 31: Zoē (Epilogue), which ends with a stubborn sapling in a ravaged forest.
I’ll publish the last chapter of The Pillars of Creation this week, and I’m sad, but also relieved. I wrote two long fics for those two over the past years, and while I might pick it up again, I also need a little break for something new.
Which brings me to: You can still send me requests. I still have a couple of oneshots in the pipeline, but if you’d like me to write something for you (you can get a feeling for my writing here), just send me an ask. Before you do, please familiarise yourself with what I am willing to write (you don’t need to use the prompts, there’s an open one at the very end):
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
This is for @dreamarakne (love the new name btw. I screenshot your ask because the formatting for replies always gets wonky). And can I just say: I want to kiss you because this is the first prompt I’m fulfilling, and it’s straightaway for one of my absolute favourites. I insist Bast and Morpheus should have had a litter of adorable kittens, half of them black and glittering like starlight, the other half blue-grey and glittering like quartz in the desert. But the prompt was “I wasn’t supposed to care about you”, and the kittens didn’t quite fit. Platonic with tension or romantic with a lot of restraint—you decide. I hope you like it 🖤 (and I’m also stealth-tagging @duckland because we are both the resident presidents of the Morpheus x Bast fan club on here)
I’m taking more requests right now, you can find everything there is to know here.
And Yet…
Bast finds him, as she usually does, when she is not searching for him.
Look for the Lord of Dreams and he is certain not to appear, but let attention wander and the mind drift? Let it slip into the memory of once ample offerings left at the feet of statues that have become much more scarce in recent times, and lying on warm sandstone after a meal she didn’t need to hunt for herself?
There he is, at the edge of her oasis like he was there all along.
“You’re brooding,” she says, settling beside him with her legs tucked beneath her.
He doesn’t look at her, and his eyes stay fixed on something apparently only he can see.
“I am thinking,” he says. Bast has known for a long time that thinking and brooding mean the same thing when it comes to Morpheus.
Her ears briefly tilt toward the sound of distant jackals (and those ones are really wolves, but things have been called different names over time), and then she looks at him the way she has looked at him forever. “You’ve been thinking for three days. My worshippers, few as there remain, are starting to worry.”
He briefly throws her a sideways glance with a raised eyebrow. “Your worshippers cannot see me unless I choose they can.”
“You’re right, but they have noticed I am not eating their offerings, and they’ve come to their own conclusions about me.” She leans back and tips her face up to the stars. “They think I’m in love.”
Of course they think is a lie (not the love though). And of course he says nothing, and she knows that this is often his way of speaking. But his mouth moves in a way one might call a smile. A very small one. And a thing about Morpheus that no one who hasn’t known him for a very long time understands is:
He is actually quite funny.
Funny in the way that tragedies can sometimes be amusing, or saying the desert is beautiful because it will kill you. He does not tell jokes, he simply is one, dark and mostly unintentional, this being who has mourned a Nubian poet whose name the waking world forgot within a generation. She isn’t supposed to know that because he had thought himself unobserved, and to this day, he still hasn’t figured out that she did observe him. Or maybe he has. No matter.
“Something is wrong,” she says, and it definitely isn’t a question.
“Many things are wrong,” he states with a frown. “They usually are, it is the way of the world.”
“Something is wrong with you.”
He is quiet for long enough that she can hear the Nile. But that would make no sense, so perhaps it’s only the wind, and she is too sentimental. Then again, she is allowed to be sentimental, because it reminds her of love. And she’d had love in abundance from her people before it began to fade.
She also has… what do you call it exactly when an Endless has been regularly sitting beside you for five thousand years to argue philosophy? And once, only once, in a moment neither of them has ever mentioned again, reached out and touched her face with the back of his hand?
“I saw,” he says finally, “a future.” She waits. “It was not…” He stops again. And this, she knows, is vexing him, because he does not like to be imprecise. “It is difficult to explain. There are moments when I…”
“When you are not entirely in control?”
He finally looks at her with eyes as unsettling and beautiful as the night. And she has looked into them more often than she can count, and they still do something to her that she doesn’t have a name for in any of the languages she knows.
“I saw myself,” he says. “Ending… and beginning.”
The oasis seems too quiet all of a sudden.
“Dream…”
“I do not say this to distress you.” His voice is measured, but she can hear things underneath in the way all cats can. “I say it because…” Another long pause during which she watches his hands, which are so very pale and so very still, and she wants to… She doesn’t let herself finish the thought. “Because I found that I was not distressed for myself. I found I was…” He looks at the water again. “I found I was thinking of who would notice an absence. Or a change. I found that I was thinking of…”
He does not say her name and he doesn’t have to. Bast has been alive long enough to recognise dying things. Gods and humans and the small brave animals that were later brought to her temple wrapped in linen. She knows what it looks like when something, or someone, is trying to put themselves down quietly.
She has also never wanted to scratch someone so badly in her life.
“You are not allowed,” she hisses, “to feel guilty about it.”
He blinks. It is, she thinks, genuinely possible that no one has ever said that to him before.
“I did not think I…”
“You’re sitting here with me, in my desert, feeling guilty for caring whether I would grieve you. Which is, let’s say, the most you thing you have ever done. And I have known you for a long time.”
His expression is very controlled and she knows, knows, that underneath it all, he is doing the thing he always does: He is trying to file himself away neatly. The Lord of Dreams doesn’t occupy the same space as the being who feels. No doubt very inconvenient things, at least in his mind. Bast spent thousands of years deciding, on and off, whether to do anything about that, and she is beginning to think she made the wrong call.
“I was not supposed to care… about you,” he says quietly. And it sounds like it’s a thought he didn’t mean to say out loud. “That was not… I did not intend…”
“I know. I wasn’t supposed to care about you either.” She reaches out and puts her hand over his, and she feels him go very still. “And yet…”
Over the millennia, people have seen her in many ways and called her many names: Lady of the Flame, Eye of Ra, Devouring One, She Who Comes in Peace. She was all of these things, still is some of them. She is also, right now, simply a goddess sitting with her hand over the hand of someone who has been her friend for longer than anyone, and who is apparently having feelings he is… very unhappy about. She finds, to her own surprise, that she doesn’t mind.
“I will not always be here either,” she says. “You know this better than anyone.” She feels his hand turn beneath hers. Slowly first, like he’s deciding, and then all at once, until his fingers close around hers. His grip is careful and very light. “But I am here now. And so are you. And I think…” Her ears twitch and she tilts her head, listening to the jackals who have started up again. “I think now is what we have, and it isn’t nothing.”
Morpheus doesn’t answer because he is infinitely better at silence than talking. But his thumb moves, very slightly, against her knuckles. She leans her head against his shoulder, which feels surprisingly solid, and she watches the water until the stars begin to disappear and the sky in the east changes colour.
He stays until the sun is fully up. This, she knows, means something. He usually has things to do, because he always has things to do.
When he finally stands, his shadow is very long and very faint.
“Bast.”
“Dream.”
He looks at her for a moment, and she looks back with eyes that have, she is told, the unsettling quality of seeing through things. Or people.
“I will endeavour,” he says, with much deliberation, “not to end.”
And she knows it is both a lie and the truth, but she smiles. “Good. I would be very put out.”
He inclines his head with the courtesy she has long known to be his kind of saying he cares, and then he is gone. And she is standing by herself in the early morning light with the feeling of his hand still against hers.
All of a sudden, she begins to feel unsteady, and she needs a moment to sit back down by the water. One of her cats comes and winds around her ankles. She reaches down and strokes her, and the cat purrs like something that has finally found its frequency and will not let it go.
I wasn’t supposed to care about you, she thinks, in the direction of wherever he has gone. And yet...
The morning bustle rises, and she listens, and she cannot stop smiling despite feeling like crying...
Thought I’d reblog this one today because Bast has been all over this week (especially in the #46 meta). I’m going to die on the hill that more people need to create for these two, whether you read them romantic or platonic. This one can be read both ways…
Summary: It all ends with a stubborn sapling in a ravaged forest…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Thalia Callaghan (OC), Zoē (OC) Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC | Rating: M over all, but this is T | Navigation: Bottom of post
Content Warnings: I hope none. This is the last chapter, it’s hopeful…
Author’s Note: It’s a long one, sorry, because this is it. I’ve spent nearly four years (from first idea to last chapter published today) on two full length novels and a Christmas one-shot for these idiots, and I’m ready to let them go (for now anyway). But it’s bittersweet, and I just want to say: Thank you to everyone who’s been reading. The atmosphere has changed so much between writing TLoS and this one, for a million reasons (the creator being a pos, S2 coming to an end an the interest waning/the fandom somewhat dying, my locking down my fics because of AI scraping…), so it felt more difficult to publish in many ways. But that’s why everyone who still stuck with it regardless meant the world to me.
When I edited this last chapter (it’s been written for a long time, so I just got it ready to publish), I cried, and I don’t even know why. Maybe it’s a bit about letting them go, but I don’t think that’s it alone. There was something about the images and symbolism in this chapter that had come to me so naturally when I first wrote it that I don’t think I ever truly let it in while writing. But reading them back with a bit of distance just hit me out of the blue. And while I won’t share the reasons, I will share my feelings around it because that’s something AI fics will never connect with (and what makes them soulless)—all the parts of you that find their way into a story even if none of the characters are you. But before I get emotional again, I’ll leave it at that and will once again say thank you for reading. You rock 🖤
GIF by @gifs-by-renegadesstuff (the original Tumblr attribution didn’t work because it wasn’t the first gif in the set)
Thank you for reading. Comments (here or on Ao3) and reblogs are always appreciated. And asks, too! I love yapping about my fics 🖤
✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨
I wasn’t exactly a cry because Zoē rarely cried in the way that human children did. What she made instead were smaller sounds. But of course Thalia had learned to hear those sounds anyway, and she suspected she would be able to hear them from the bottom of the ocean, or any distance the universe chose to put between them for that matter.
Morpheus was already sitting up. He didn’t say anything, he simply left, and Thalia followed him…
Zoē was still asleep when they reached her.
Other children, woken by nightmares, eventually surfaced. They cried but gradually let the dream go when they were held and not alone. Zoē did not surface. She stayed, and her small face moved through expressions like fear and frustration, and then something that looked as if she were attempting to negotiate with whatever she had found in the dark.
She was her father’s daughter, that much had been clear from the start.
Morpheus stood at the side of her bed and looked at her with an expression Thalia knew all too well: It wasn’t worry, because worry implied a kind of helplessness that he permitted himself only on very rare occasions, and this wasn’t one of them.
“What is it?” Thalia asked quietly.
“She has gone further in than she should be able to.” He said it calmly, but Thalia could hear the slight alarm. “She should not have the reach for this. Not yet.”
“Well, guess who’s her father.”
Morpheus glanced at Thalia, amused and slightly exasperated. “She is also yours. May I remind you that you are not particularly prone to stay… boundaried either? You dreamed your way into my castle and never took no for an answer.”
“And aren’t you glad?”
He looked at her with a smile. “Perhaps.”
Zoē whimpered again.
“I would like to go after her,” Morpheus said, and Thalia nodded…
— — —
They were standing at the edge of a forest. Or what had been a forest. What surrounded them now were trees that were leaning, angles all wrong, stripped of their leaves by something that had moved with force, and the ground underfoot was full of broken branches and scattered bark.
Thalia recognised the scent immediately. It was the smell of autumn she had loved when she was still alive, but that was what worried her, because it was the smell of death she had once found comforting. Earth and dead leaves, the smell of something ending that once had been beautiful. And it was hard to tell what it meant here.
Zoē was standing ahead of them at the tree line, her back turned and her nightgown very white against the grey-brown wreckage around her.
Thalia instinctively took a step forward, but Morpheus touched her arm gently to hold her back. “Let us see what she does.”
What Zoē did was reach out and touch the nearest fallen tree.
She put her small hand against its bark with the intensity that she brought to everything she was genuinely interested in. Thalia watched her daughter standing very still and with the focus of someone paying attention so hard that she had temporarily forgotten everything else.
Then Zoē said something that was too quiet to hear, in that voice of children when they are talking to themselves but also to the things around them. Thalia had been watching her do it for almost a year: Zoē talked to everything as if it were capable of replying. And in the Dreaming it was of course.
The bark under Zoē’s palm changed very slowly. Thalia watched a strip of bark that had been grey turn a colour that was closer to brown. Zoē took her hand back and looked at it. Then she put it back again, with greater confidence.
Thalia heard Morpheus exhale. Well, it might have been a sound if he had given himself permission.
“She’s fixing it,” she whispered to him.
“She is asking it.” Thalia took a quick glance at him. “She is not commanding.”
She looked back at her daughter, at her little hand pressed against the bark like someone making a promise.
Zoē had heard them. She turned, and for a moment her face did that thing it sometimes did when she was between sleeping and knowing she was sleeping. Then she truly saw them, and she just said, “The trees fell down.”
They walked toward her. “Yes,” Morpheus said. He crouched in front of her so that they were level. “Do you know what happened to them?”
Zoē considered it with very apparent gravity, and it nearly made Thalia laugh because she looked so like her father with her serious little face, but she bit back her smile. “Something was scared,” she said.
Morpheus was very still for a moment. “Yes. Something was scared, and when it moved through here, it moved without meaning to hurt the trees.”
“But they got hurt anyway.”
“They did.”
“That’s sad,” Zoē said. Such a simple statement, yet so to the point.
Thalia often thought that her daughter had an almost aggressive relationship with accuracy, and she wondered whom she’d got that from.
“It is sad,” Morpheus agreed, and he didn’t add a but. “What were you trying to do, when we came in?”
Zoē looked back at the tree she had been touching, and then at her hand. “I thought maybe… if I asked it to remember…” She sounded as if she were working it out as she was saying it, the way she always did when she was reaching for something not quite within the vocabulary of a three-year-old yet. “If it could remember what it was like before. It might… want to go back to that.”
Thalia crouched down too, and the three of them formed a triangle in the wreckage. “Did it work?”
Zoē’s expression hovered between annoyance and excitement. “A little bit. But it kept forgetting.”
“The remembering takes time,” Morpheus said. “But the asking was right.” Thalia could see the slight change in Zoē’s expression. “The asking was exactly right…”
They walked further in, and it was Thalia’s idea. She had looked at Zoē’s face, and then she had thought of every late October afternoon of her life, every walk she’d taken in autumn when her world had felt like something being put on hold, and she’d thought: Let her have all of it. Give her the whole of it so she can understand it.
She took Zoē’s hand, and Zoē took Morpheus’, and they kept walking.
The forest began to adjust; Thalia knew the difference between the Dreaming being directed and the Dreaming being responsive. And right now, it was responsive because of Zoē. Even the sky started to look a bit warmer. Under their feet, the branches broke like they did in real forests. Thalia remembered her own childhood, the small satisfying cracks followed by a bit of give. After a particularly crunchy one, Zoē looked down at Thalia’s feet with great interest.
“Again,” she said with a little giggle.
So they found her branches to step on. And Thalia couldn’t help but find it hilarious: Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, walked slowly through a forest that was healing itself around a three-year-old who was now extremely focused on finding the branches that would make the best sound when you stood on them. And when Zoē found a particularly… resonant stick and then made him stand on it too, Thalia caught his eye, and he looked at her with an expression that she had only seen on him in moments like these. Moments that could be considered so ordinary, but to him, they weren’t. He looked a bit helpless and overwhelmed in the way only happiness overwhelmed him, because he had less practice with it than with anything else. She reached over Zoē’s head and put her hand against his face, and he turned his lips into her palm for a moment. Then he looked away.
“Daddy.” Sometimes, Thalia wondered if that was a word Morpheus had ever been called despite his fatherhood, but she dismissed the thought quickly.
“Yes.”
“I want to show you something.” She stopped walking. They had come to a clearing, and in the middle of it there was a tree different from the others. It hadn’t fallen, it wasn’t leaning. It was tiny, a sapling almost, and it looked like something that had only recently understood that it is supposed to be growing and had taken this information very seriously.
Zoē put both hands around it. She stood there with her feet planted on the forest floor, her dark hair a mess and her nightgown getting the hem dirty, and Thalia stood and watched her daughter… talk to a tree.
And she didn’t know why, but she had to think about that small corner of her flat when she was still alive, that corner where the light was good, where she had spent years in front of canvases with the kind of attention she had not been able to bring to anything else. She had loved painting with her whole body, the same way Zoē was now doing this, completely absorbed, entirely gone into the thing. She had never been able to explain it to people who didn’t do it, because creating something required surrender. She recognised her daughter in this and she recognised herself.
Sometimes, she thought that she might have given her only ordinary things, like parts of her face or her stubbornness. She had not imagined she might also have given her this. Then again, being entirely in the place where the work was happening was also he. Thalia’s throat tightened, and she couldn’t stop looking.
The sapling put out another leaf. Really slow, and it took long enough for Thalia to wonder if she had imagined it and it had already been there. But it was a small, perfect thing that had not existed before, and now it did.
Zoē took her hands back and looked at the leaf with the pride of a, well, three-year-old. “I asked it what it wanted to be. And it showed me.”
Morpheus was quiet, but Thalia knew without even having to look at him that he was navigating something difficult.
“There is something I want to tell you,” he finally said while sitting on the ground with his legs crossed. And Zoē came and nestled herself into his lap without being asked. Or asking, for that matter. But he smiled briefly and held her with both arms before he turned serious again. “This dream frightened you.”
Zoē looked as if she were contemplating denying it for a second before agreeing. “Not very. But a little bit.”
“And so you came to fix it.”
“I wanted it to not be sad.”
“You cannot always do that.” His voice sounded measured, the way it was when he was telling her something he believed she was capable of understanding. “Some dreams are scary or sad because the person dreaming them is scared or sad, and those feelings are important and belong to them. The dream has purpose, and some things stay broken for a while. You will not be able to ask every tree back to life.”
Zoē looked at the leaf on the sapling. “But some of them I can.” And that was definitely not a question but a statement to set the record straight.
Something moved across Morpheus’ face, and he looked at Thalia while pressing his lips to the top of Zoē’s head. “Yes,” he said very quietly with a smile. “Some of them you can. I am sure your mother knows a thing or two about that.”
“Really?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it one day.” Thalia sat beside them, and her shoulders were touching Morpheus’, and Zoē immediately reached out to take her hand without looking, like someone who had never in her short life reached for a hand and not found it.
She will keep reaching like that, Thalia thought. And she wanted it that way. She wanted Zoē to know that whenever she reached out, her parents would reach back, for as long as she needed it. And as she thought it, Morpheus looked at her, and he just nodded, and his eyes were pooling with tears, and for once he wasn’t trying to hide it.
The sky seemed to finally make up its mind and turned golden. The leaves on the remaining trees, the ones that had fallen and been stepped on, the single new one on the small stubborn sapling, all did the thing that leaves did in actual late autumn in the actual waking world:
They caught the light and held it for a moment before they let it go.
It was everywhere, ending and not ending, like it had always been since the first thing had ever changed.
And Zoē breathed it in with her eyes closed. “I like it here.”
Morpheus took Thalia’s hand, and Zoē briefly opened her eyes when he kissed it. “So do I…”
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Summary: It all ends with a stubborn sapling in a ravaged forest…
Fandom: The Sandman (Netflix/Comics) | Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Thalia Callaghan (OC), Zoē (OC) Relationships: Dream of the Endless/OFC | Rating: M over all, but this is T | Navigation: Bottom of post
Content Warnings: I hope none. This is the last chapter, it’s hopeful…
Author’s Note: It’s a long one, sorry, because this is it. I’ve spent nearly four years (from first idea to last chapter published today) on two full length novels and a Christmas one-shot for these idiots, and I’m ready to let them go (for now anyway). But it’s bittersweet, and I just want to say: Thank you to everyone who’s been reading. The atmosphere has changed so much between writing TLoS and this one, for a million reasons (the creator being a pos, S2 coming to an end an the interest waning/the fandom somewhat dying, my locking down my fics because of AI scraping…), so it felt more difficult to publish in many ways. But that’s why everyone who still stuck with it regardless meant the world to me.
When I edited this last chapter (it’s been written for a long time, so I just got it ready to publish), I cried, and I don’t even know why. Maybe it’s a bit about letting them go, but I don’t think that’s it alone. There was something about the images and symbolism in this chapter that had come to me so naturally when I first wrote it that I don’t think I ever truly let it in while writing. But reading them back with a bit of distance just hit me out of the blue. And while I won’t share the reasons, I will share my feelings around it because that’s something AI fics will never connect with (and what makes them soulless)—all the parts of you that find their way into a story even if none of the characters are you. But before I get emotional again, I’ll leave it at that and will once again say thank you for reading. You rock 🖤
GIF by @gifs-by-renegadesstuff (the original Tumblr attribution didn’t work because it wasn’t the first gif in the set)
Thank you for reading. Comments (here or on Ao3) and reblogs are always appreciated. And asks, too! I love yapping about my fics 🖤
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I wasn’t exactly a cry because Zoē rarely cried in the way that human children did. What she made instead were smaller sounds. But of course Thalia had learned to hear those sounds anyway, and she suspected she would be able to hear them from the bottom of the ocean, or any distance the universe chose to put between them for that matter.
Morpheus was already sitting up. He didn’t say anything, he simply left, and Thalia followed him…
Zoē was still asleep when they reached her.
Other children, woken by nightmares, eventually surfaced. They cried but gradually let the dream go when they were held and not alone. Zoē did not surface. She stayed, and her small face moved through expressions like fear and frustration, and then something that looked as if she were attempting to negotiate with whatever she had found in the dark.
She was her father’s daughter, that much had been clear from the start.
Morpheus stood at the side of her bed and looked at her with an expression Thalia knew all too well: It wasn’t worry, because worry implied a kind of helplessness that he permitted himself only on very rare occasions, and this wasn’t one of them.
“What is it?” Thalia asked quietly.
“She has gone further in than she should be able to.” He said it calmly, but Thalia could hear the slight alarm. “She should not have the reach for this. Not yet.”
“Well, guess who’s her father.”
Morpheus glanced at Thalia, amused and slightly exasperated. “She is also yours. May I remind you that you are not particularly prone to stay… boundaried either? You dreamed your way into my castle and never took no for an answer.”
“And aren’t you glad?”
He looked at her with a smile. “Perhaps.”
Zoē whimpered again.
“I would like to go after her,” Morpheus said, and Thalia nodded…
— — —
They were standing at the edge of a forest. Or what had been a forest. What surrounded them now were trees that were leaning, angles all wrong, stripped of their leaves by something that had moved with force, and the ground underfoot was full of broken branches and scattered bark.
Thalia recognised the scent immediately. It was the smell of autumn she had loved when she was still alive, but that was what worried her, because it was the smell of death she had once found comforting. Earth and dead leaves, the smell of something ending that once had been beautiful. And it was hard to tell what it meant here.
Zoē was standing ahead of them at the tree line, her back turned and her nightgown very white against the grey-brown wreckage around her.
Thalia instinctively took a step forward, but Morpheus touched her arm gently to hold her back. “Let us see what she does.”
What Zoē did was reach out and touch the nearest fallen tree.
She put her small hand against its bark with the intensity that she brought to everything she was genuinely interested in. Thalia watched her daughter standing very still and with the focus of someone paying attention so hard that she had temporarily forgotten everything else.
Then Zoē said something that was too quiet to hear, in that voice of children when they are talking to themselves but also to the things around them. Thalia had been watching her do it for almost a year: Zoē talked to everything as if it were capable of replying. And in the Dreaming it was of course.
The bark under Zoē’s palm changed very slowly. Thalia watched a strip of bark that had been grey turn a colour that was closer to brown. Zoē took her hand back and looked at it. Then she put it back again, with greater confidence.
Thalia heard Morpheus exhale. Well, it might have been a sound if he had given himself permission.
“She’s fixing it,” she whispered to him.
“She is asking it.” Thalia took a quick glance at him. “She is not commanding.”
She looked back at her daughter, at her little hand pressed against the bark like someone making a promise.
Zoē had heard them. She turned, and for a moment her face did that thing it sometimes did when she was between sleeping and knowing she was sleeping. Then she truly saw them, and she just said, “The trees fell down.”
They walked toward her. “Yes,” Morpheus said. He crouched in front of her so that they were level. “Do you know what happened to them?”
Zoē considered it with very apparent gravity, and it nearly made Thalia laugh because she looked so like her father with her serious little face, but she bit back her smile. “Something was scared,” she said.
Morpheus was very still for a moment. “Yes. Something was scared, and when it moved through here, it moved without meaning to hurt the trees.”
“But they got hurt anyway.”
“They did.”
“That’s sad,” Zoē said. Such a simple statement, yet so to the point.
Thalia often thought that her daughter had an almost aggressive relationship with accuracy, and she wondered whom she’d got that from.
“It is sad,” Morpheus agreed, and he didn’t add a but. “What were you trying to do, when we came in?”
Zoē looked back at the tree she had been touching, and then at her hand. “I thought maybe… if I asked it to remember…” She sounded as if she were working it out as she was saying it, the way she always did when she was reaching for something not quite within the vocabulary of a three-year-old yet. “If it could remember what it was like before. It might… want to go back to that.”
Thalia crouched down too, and the three of them formed a triangle in the wreckage. “Did it work?”
Zoē’s expression hovered between annoyance and excitement. “A little bit. But it kept forgetting.”
“The remembering takes time,” Morpheus said. “But the asking was right.” Thalia could see the slight change in Zoē’s expression. “The asking was exactly right…”
They walked further in, and it was Thalia’s idea. She had looked at Zoē’s face, and then she had thought of every late October afternoon of her life, every walk she’d taken in autumn when her world had felt like something being put on hold, and she’d thought: Let her have all of it. Give her the whole of it so she can understand it.
She took Zoē’s hand, and Zoē took Morpheus’, and they kept walking.
The forest began to adjust; Thalia knew the difference between the Dreaming being directed and the Dreaming being responsive. And right now, it was responsive because of Zoē. Even the sky started to look a bit warmer. Under their feet, the branches broke like they did in real forests. Thalia remembered her own childhood, the small satisfying cracks followed by a bit of give. After a particularly crunchy one, Zoē looked down at Thalia’s feet with great interest.
“Again,” she said with a little giggle.
So they found her branches to step on. And Thalia couldn’t help but find it hilarious: Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, walked slowly through a forest that was healing itself around a three-year-old who was now extremely focused on finding the branches that would make the best sound when you stood on them. And when Zoē found a particularly… resonant stick and then made him stand on it too, Thalia caught his eye, and he looked at her with an expression that she had only seen on him in moments like these. Moments that could be considered so ordinary, but to him, they weren’t. He looked a bit helpless and overwhelmed in the way only happiness overwhelmed him, because he had less practice with it than with anything else. She reached over Zoē’s head and put her hand against his face, and he turned his lips into her palm for a moment. Then he looked away.
“Daddy.” Sometimes, Thalia wondered if that was a word Morpheus had ever been called despite his fatherhood, but she dismissed the thought quickly.
“Yes.”
“I want to show you something.” She stopped walking. They had come to a clearing, and in the middle of it there was a tree different from the others. It hadn’t fallen, it wasn’t leaning. It was tiny, a sapling almost, and it looked like something that had only recently understood that it is supposed to be growing and had taken this information very seriously.
Zoē put both hands around it. She stood there with her feet planted on the forest floor, her dark hair a mess and her nightgown getting the hem dirty, and Thalia stood and watched her daughter… talk to a tree.
And she didn’t know why, but she had to think about that small corner of her flat when she was still alive, that corner where the light was good, where she had spent years in front of canvases with the kind of attention she had not been able to bring to anything else. She had loved painting with her whole body, the same way Zoē was now doing this, completely absorbed, entirely gone into the thing. She had never been able to explain it to people who didn’t do it, because creating something required surrender. She recognised her daughter in this and she recognised herself.
Sometimes, she thought that she might have given her only ordinary things, like parts of her face or her stubbornness. She had not imagined she might also have given her this. Then again, being entirely in the place where the work was happening was also he. Thalia’s throat tightened, and she couldn’t stop looking.
The sapling put out another leaf. Really slow, and it took long enough for Thalia to wonder if she had imagined it and it had already been there. But it was a small, perfect thing that had not existed before, and now it did.
Zoē took her hands back and looked at the leaf with the pride of a, well, three-year-old. “I asked it what it wanted to be. And it showed me.”
Morpheus was quiet, but Thalia knew without even having to look at him that he was navigating something difficult.
“There is something I want to tell you,” he finally said while sitting on the ground with his legs crossed. And Zoē came and nestled herself into his lap without being asked. Or asking, for that matter. But he smiled briefly and held her with both arms before he turned serious again. “This dream frightened you.”
Zoē looked as if she were contemplating denying it for a second before agreeing. “Not very. But a little bit.”
“And so you came to fix it.”
“I wanted it to not be sad.”
“You cannot always do that.” His voice sounded measured, the way it was when he was telling her something he believed she was capable of understanding. “Some dreams are scary or sad because the person dreaming them is scared or sad, and those feelings are important and belong to them. The dream has purpose, and some things stay broken for a while. You will not be able to ask every tree back to life.”
Zoē looked at the leaf on the sapling. “But some of them I can.” And that was definitely not a question but a statement to set the record straight.
Something moved across Morpheus’ face, and he looked at Thalia while pressing his lips to the top of Zoē’s head. “Yes,” he said very quietly with a smile. “Some of them you can. I am sure your mother knows a thing or two about that.”
“Really?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it one day.” Thalia sat beside them, and her shoulders were touching Morpheus’, and Zoē immediately reached out to take her hand without looking, like someone who had never in her short life reached for a hand and not found it.
She will keep reaching like that, Thalia thought. And she wanted it that way. She wanted Zoē to know that whenever she reached out, her parents would reach back, for as long as she needed it. And as she thought it, Morpheus looked at her, and he just nodded, and his eyes were pooling with tears, and for once he wasn’t trying to hide it.
The sky seemed to finally make up its mind and turned golden. The leaves on the remaining trees, the ones that had fallen and been stepped on, the single new one on the small stubborn sapling, all did the thing that leaves did in actual late autumn in the actual waking world:
They caught the light and held it for a moment before they let it go.
It was everywhere, ending and not ending, like it had always been since the first thing had ever changed.
And Zoē breathed it in with her eyes closed. “I like it here.”
Morpheus took Thalia’s hand, and Zoē briefly opened her eyes when he kissed it. “So do I…”
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his mama was a friend of mine / and this boy was a muse's son / on the railroad line on the road to hell / you might say the boy was touched / 'cause he was touched by the gods themselves!
give it up for Orpheus!
[Image Descriptions:
Image 1: A digital drawing of Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, cradling a very young baby, swaddled in a piece of black, starry fabric. Around them swirls the cosmos, colorful stars in the deep black void. Dream is a very pale white man (/anthropomorphic personification) with jet black, short-ish hair. He is slightly hunched over and looking down at the baby with a vulnerable, almost star-struck expression. He is shirtless, the painting cutting off above his hip. Dream has both arms securely around the baby, one hand supporting their head, the other their legs. The baby is light-skinned with short, brown hair, and is looking back up at him, one arm slightly outstretched toward him.
A golden-yellow glow hits Dream's hair, face, chest, and arms, making it seem like it is radiating from the baby he is holding. The baby themself is not glowing.
Dream (but not the baby) is stylized heavily and messily with very colorful brushstrokes, shadows in dark blue, purple, magenta and the occasional turquoise; highlights in cyan, pink, white, and the occasional yellow. The brushstrokes are placed almost violently on Dream's back, as if the artist was having a lot of monumentally intense emotions. (They were.)
A quote from Chapter 8 of Brief Lives is arranged around the two. Above Dream's head, it reads: "I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. They're always / flaring up and / caving in and / going out." Next to his head, it reads "But from here," and then wrapping around the baby's head: "I can pretend." The words continue running down Dream's back: "That things last." The following sentence, placed below Dream's arms reads: "I can pretend / that lives last longer than / moments."
The full text reads: "I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. They're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here I can pretend. That things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments."
Images 2 and 3 are two close-ups of Dream's expression, and the baby in his arms.
Image 4 is a version of the artwork without the text.
Brief Lives is many things, but it’s also a story about a quest that Dream didn’t take seriously to begin with having a cost: Bernie Capax crushed under a falling wall, Ruby burned in her motel room, Ishtar’s final dance that took out a whole club, Etain fled, the Alderman vanished. And by issue #46 it’s patently clear that something started for bad reasons (I’m looking at you, Dream, even if your sister asked you to) is paid for by other people. What’s equally important though is whether Dream can be honest about the damage he has caused (and yes, he did, bite me 🤣) to strangers and his sister.
The issue turns on three characters: Bast, Death and Delirium.
What Remains of Gods
We didn’t really get Pharamond in the show, which is regrettable because I think this conversation is actually quite important to show Dream’s change (then again, he was already changed by the end of S1, so what gives 🤐🤣).
Dream then visits Bast in a dream he conjures specifically for her, and he really makes sure that no one knows because he does regret especially Ruby’s death. This is right after the conversation with Pharamond:
[Well, Death once told Destruction they could all know everything and most of the time just choose not to. So Bast is definitely onto something here…]
We immediately get that there is, or at least was, a lot of mutual understanding between those two, and that even in a dream, he doesn’t want to put Bast at risk (hence the complete lockdown in advance—he’s really not taking any chances here). And also that Dream used to be different in the past, and given that Egyptian Gods are not that old in cosmic terms, it does make you wonder…
Bast still maintains her presence as a goddess through the faith of those who remember or are in any way close to her. She is diminished from what she once was, and especially the end of the scene when she wakes up is rather sad. But has anyone ever noticed this (Chloe is the little girl Dream met on the plane):
Anyway, when Dream comes asking about Destruction, Bast receives him with a familiarity that suggests they have been finding their way into each other’s company for a very long time (and also that she wishes they had been lovers, and she still teases him about it. The scene when she asks him to be his Tom and he wonders if she’d really ask that of him is honestly priceless. I mean, what if she’d said yes? Could Dream be talked into something for intel? 🤔🤣).
But not to worry, it turns out that she lied to him during Season of Mists, and that she doesn’t know where Destruction is anyway, but at the end of the day, it’s not really about the information she can or cannot provide I think. It’s rather about Dream’s desperation (that he’d never truly admit of course), because he’s going to a goddess who doesn’t have much power left, and he asks her for help in hopes she knows something. But she doesn’t and hence probably would have been safe from Destruction’s defences anyway…
Delirium’s Closed Realm
The way Delirium closes her realm is distinctly different between show and comics. While show!Delirium does it after Desire tells her that Dream basically doesn’t care about her and only wanted to find Nada, comics!Delirium initially just retreats to her realm because Dream calls off the search for Destruction after Ishtar’s death. She even says she’s available in case anyone wants her.
So it can be assumed her sigil turns black only after she notices that no one wants her, because she doesn’t even know at this point that Dream lied to her about really wanting to find Thessaly (he only tells her this later. And I think it’s important that he tells her first, and that he’s not landed in it by Desire like in the show, which honestly cheapened the whole thing a bit for me).
What makes this a different kind of sad is that Delirium usually doesn’t make clear decisions because that’s not really in her nature (and we only see a similar kind of clarity about something in the next chapter). But this is a fairly clear choice and the message is fairly unambiguous, which means she has been pushed past what she can cope with.
Death Tells Off Dream…
Death is at least partly (and probably fully on a symbolic level) responsible for Dream seeking out Delirium, apologising and then looking for Destruction with her in earnest. And seeking Destruction in earnest is where it all goes wrong (or gets better, depending on how you look at it I guess).
And the scene where Death confronts him about Delirium is one of the most important in Brief Lives precisely because she is Death. First of all: He calls her, not the other way around, and I’ve said it on here many times: The Endless are siblings, but they’re also their function. Always, at all times. And if you ask Death for advice, what does that mean? If Death already gave you comfort in “The Sound of her Wings”, what does that mean? If you already reached for her hand but take her arms instead for now, and she’s visibly taken aback by that (like in the show), what does that mean? [He was always closer to Death than to any of his other siblings (also in the show), and there’s a reason for that 🥺] If Delirium finds you after a bad break-up (and many other things that have destabilised you but you never let on before, but they start catching up with you) and asks you to seek Destruction, what does that mean?
On the sibling front, Death isn’t looking away because it’s literally her function to witness what happens at the end of things. So it’s almost to be expected that she’s also at the end of cumulative consequences, and she tells Dream plainly that Delirium closing down her realm and being in a (even more) unstable state is his responsibility in all the ways that matter: He treated the quest as a distraction/a way to find Thessaly, he betrayed her trust and at the end of it, he abandoned her again.
The call for accountability comes from the sibling who arguably knows him best, and whom he loves most. Which is true but also the most… errrr, unsubtle foreshadowing if you’re not completely blind...
This is the literal kiss of Death (not just a cute thing between siblings), because her basically subtly bullying him into seeing Delirium is one of the central turning points…
The Apology
Time apparently shatters instead of flies/flees/fleets (it’s usually tempus fugit)
Dream doesn’t apologise easily or often (well, in the show he somehow does, but that’s a different topic), although he did apologise to Delirium once before in #42, and he also apologised to Pharamond for the death of Ruby. His pride is a part of him, bound up in his sense of function and duty, and to apologise means admitting you were wrong, which means admitting fallibility. And that generally doesn’t sit well with him. But he starts doing it. Sparingly, much more sparingly than in the show, and it works in the comics precisely for that reason.
In the opening of Brief Lives, he agreed to accompany Delirium because he wanted to find Thessaly. He knew he was using his own sister. And by issue #46, after all the deaths and the lying, he finally admits it to her. Resuming the quest almost reads like a peace offering borne out of genuine care here (a peace offering to Delirium. That symbolism again 😩).
[We didn’t get her threatening him in the show either 😒]
I mean, it’s one of the quintessential messages of Brief Lives, if you will: Dream’s rigidity has never protected anyone, least of all himself him. But he’s starting to bend, and the real tragedy isn’t that he can’t change (it never was, and how some people still say that’s the main difference between the comics and the show is quite frankly beyond me, because he also very clearly changes in the comics). It’s that he changes enough to understand what he has done over millennia (of course he’s been hurt, too, but he’s not just a poor misunderstood victim in this; he’s also a perpetrator), that in any other scenario, he even might have been okay, but that he chose to release his son in one final act of love because he had changed, and that it was just too much to carry. Combined with the burden he had felt about his function for so long, it was simply the final straw, and he chose not to back out of the corner he had painted himself into (he could have, up until the very end).
I quickly want to say something about Jill Thompson’s Dream, especially in the scenes with Delirium. I love love LOVE J.H. Williams III’s Dream, as an example, because he’s both beautiful and almost alien-like, and he’s the quintessential pre-fishbowl Dream for me, in every possible way. You can’t really compare their art styles, but Jill Thompson’s Dream is so much more human to me. He is still dark and slightly otherworldly in a way (although again, definitely the most human-looking, and that’s also for a reason), but Brief Lives is the arc where Dream most looks like… he might not survive his own story, if you know what I mean? And the apology scene in particular so massively benefits from her artistic restraint:
To finish: I didn’t know where else to put this, but this still absolutely belongs here (because of the hint at change and the comedy), and once again I have to say: We were robbed…
fun fact part of why i reblogged that post of yours (the g*iman one) is because someone directly 'called me out' in a post and lowkey tried to sic their followers on me because of my thoughts on the matter :') so i went looking for your post for a nice refreshing dose of. nuance. akjnskdjfnsdf
Seriously?! So sorry that happened to you. I also recognise this from another platform, not saying which one, but people will honestly keep themselves in a constant state of aggravation about it, will basically infiltrate every remotely related thread (as in: just discussions about something written by said author) etc. And I don’t even want to say that I don’t understand that people want to raise awareness (and I’m saying this as someone with previous firsthand and ongoing secondhand experience of SA, so not staying stumm about it is important), especially if they suffered that kind of trauma themselves. Raising awareness is good, but there comes the point when that kind of hostility that really has nothing to do with making people aware starts to actively harm others and yourself because you’re focusing on it 24/7 (I mean, it’s for a reason that we sometimes don’t talk about the traumatic event in therapy before the body has relearned to recognise what it feels like to be safe, because rehashing it over and over isn’t helpful and keeps your nervous system permanently activated). It makes me think that these people are either chronically online or still need support with processing their own trauma (or both).
There is activism that makes sense, there is also not forgetting about what happened and raising awareness, and then there is harming others and yourself over whether you’re allowed to read a book (very often one you already own) or like a story despite its creator. Ditch it or don’t, and let others make that same decision for themselves.
In any case, glad you found the post helpful (it’s this one in case anyone else might)…
