Maybe sprout wings: Introduction

I knew I wanted to bind Maybe sprout wings the moment I read one of Moorishflower’s responses to an ask on her blog about the fic (Asks and Answers, Moorishflower’s response to kulapti). At that point, I was still catching up to the latest chapter, and the fic hadn’t even been fully posted yet. But Heather’s response was so thoughtful, and the discussions I found ongoing in the AO3 comments section so engaging, that I knew I wanted to preserve it all.

This is one of the things I love most about fandom: sometimes, someone speaks so passionately about a piece of art—whether their own or someone else’s—that you just have to check it out. What’s going on over here? you ask. And you find a group of people already seated around the fire, talking and listening and laughing—inviting you to join them. Take a seat they say. There’s plenty story to go around.

And what a story indeed! Rich and layered with meaning, Wings transforms and subverts several literary canons—most notably those of The Sandman and The Odyssey. The former is a given—after all, this is a Sandman fic. What makes this story so interesting, in my opinion, is its transformation of the latter. As one of the oldest stories we have in…well, the history of humanity, the Odyssey’s characters and narrative arcs have taken on a mythology of their own—as Moorishflower puts it: “the characters in any great epic are TROPES. The returning hero, the faithful wife, the loyal servant.” So too does Wings build its own mythology, placing Hob and Dream in a variety of complementary and overlapping narrative roles. Hob is Odysseus, seeking nostos and battling the forces that would deter him from his homeland of Dream’s heart—both metaphorically as Dream’s romantic suitor and literally as Dream’s dual identity as the Dreaming. Hob is also Penelope, weaving and unweaving himself to become someone he deems worthy of his beloved. But Dream is also Penelope, awaiting rescue from Roderick Burgess as well as Hob’s return from his encounter with the Fates. Dream is Poseidon, Scylla, and Charybdis—obstacles not only to Hob’s happiness and homecoming, but to his own. Finally, Dream is Odysseus, on his journey to self-love and acceptance of Hob’s devotion.

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: Making Myths Into People

But Hob and Dream are more than patterns set upon the backdrop of an ancient epic: “Hob and Dream are people! Actual, full characters! They contain all these tropes and more!” (Selected Comments, Moorishflower’s response to chubsthehamster). And indeed, throughout the story, Hob becomes someone who escapes his narrative lot—claiming authorship of his own story (Meta: pastrypuppy’s “Hob as an author figure”) and thus allowing Dream to do the same (Selected Comments: viecamille on Chapter 14). After all, real life is messy and incongruous; unlike a story, it has no inherent narrative arc or internal logic. Instead, we are the ones who create our own narratives, imposing patterns upon the chaos of life to make sense of it all. In order to survive, we have to tell stories; we have to dream.

I would argue that, perhaps, Hob first breaks the narrative cycle not when he begins to speak to Dream more informally, nor when he returns from his encounter from the Fates, but right from the story’s onset. Because at the beginning of Wings, Hob dies. Except he doesn’t—like his canon counterpart, he refuses to move on, and instead chooses to continue his existence in the Dreaming. Hob’s character, both in Sandman canon and in Wings, is about rejecting the oldest narrative, the one none of us can escape: that of Death. During Orpheus’s arc in the comics, Dream tells his son Orpheus: “You should [say goodbye]. You are mortal. It is the mortal way. You attend the funeral; you bid the dead farewell. You grieve, and then you continue with your life.” But Hob does not say goodbye. He refuses to follow the story of mortals; he refuses Death, and all the mortal rituals which accompany her. In Wings, he becomes even more of a narrative breaker—There’s a new man in the Dreaming, says the Fashion Thing. Hob, above all else, is new.

His existence as a dream takes on greater meaning when he later shapes the Dreaming—and thus Dream himself—through his words and deeds. In claiming authorship of his own story (Meta: pastrypuppy’s “Hob as an author figure”), Hob becomes his own Shaper of Form, a true king in his own right, and the master of his own destiny. But he also becomes more than that—in many ways, he becomes emblematic of humanity’s story. Much like his role as a stand-in for humanity in canon, so too in Wings he does he become a dream of humanity, of all we are and could be. Hob is worst of us in his hubris and his relentless pursual of what he wants, often to the detriment of himself and others. But he also represents the best in us, in his love and devotion to Morpheus. To those who inhabit the Dreaming, he becomes a myth unto himself—the dreamers’ hands burnish his body, and they offer him words of comfort as they pass (Chapter Ten, Maybe sprout wings). Hob reaches out to the Dreaming (and by extension, to Dream himself), and in turn the Dreaming reaches back, leaving them both forever changed.

This kind of myth-making is not limited to Wings. Quite the opposite—the ongoing creation of new stories is central to the Sandman’s thesis on the nature of storytelling and dreams. Gaiman is a well-known Shakespeare fan, often incorporating in his stories not only Shakespeare’s work but the playwright himself as a character. He does this in a few chapters of the Sandman, and perhaps most notably in the chapter “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Volume 2, Issue 19. John Pendergast explores this further in “Six Characters in Search of Shakespeare: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Shakespearian Mythos,” in which he argues that this chapter, as well as the series’ final chapter featuring The Tempest, demonstrates the inescapably physical nature of the creation of art. Art—and theatre in particular—requires real, physical resources and labor to be successfully communicated to an audience. Its creation by artists both relies upon and can be disrupted by physical aspects of the world, as we—both those who create art and those experience it—are beings with physical needs.

In a similar way, Hob creates for himself and Dream a new reality outside their narrative roles by physically altering the world around him. During his time in the Dreaming, he learns how to navigate and shape it, weaving for himself ribbons, weapons, armor, and whole identities. Much like any artist coming into his prime, he learns the tools of the craft over years of trial and error, honing his skills and eventually finding his own creative voice. The true test of his abilities comes when he must leave the Dreaming, using all he has learned to make his way back to the Waking World and take on a physical form in Jessamy. His departure from the Dreaming is perhaps the ultimate proof of authorship of his own story; he becomes, for the first time since the story began, tangible. It is only in this physical form that he is finally able to break the cycle of tragedy and rescue Dream. In doing so, he claims ownership of his own story, and—beyond even claiming—creates his own ending. “I’ll just do it myself, then,” he tells Dream, in Chapter Thirteen. “Happily ever after, yeah?”

This is what makes Wings so memorable, at least to me; at its heart is the question what if it was different? What if we were aware of our role in a narrative tragedy, and had the power to change it? Wings is a love letter to the Odyssey and the Sandman, but like any good alternate universe fic—and really all good fic in general—it also interrogates the choices the characters from those original stories made by showing a world in which things could have been different. What if Alex Burgess had been given the support he needed to set Dream free and escape his father? What if Hob had well and truly died in the fourteenth century, and yet still found a way to exist as himself in the Dreaming? What would that mean for someone like Dream, to constantly experience love from someone who had chosen to live on in him and of him? And finally, perhaps most importantly: What if Hob had a really sick sword? By the story’s end, you’re left spinning with the possibilities—when Hob spins stories out of the Dreaming, what could be literally becomes what is. The intangible is made tangible, and the story continues, its players just a little different—a little more real—than they were before.

This Book

Such is the limitless nature of dreams and stories—the Odyssey, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Tempest, the Sandman, and now Maybe sprout wings—each of these stories lives in the world of the intangible, and yet they also have real, physical impact on the world around them. These stories were all shaped by the lives of the authors who wrote them and—just as crucially—the people who continue read and love them.

This book, then, is a love letter to not only this story, but also to the people surrounding it—to their conversations, playlists, memes, reblogs, and squeeing. This is the most collaborative book I’ve bound yet, featuring the incredible work of not only Heather, but also several other wonderfully skilled artists and authors who were kind enough to grant me permission to include their work. To each of them, and to Heather especially, I am forever grateful for their generosity.

This book was also bound for my bookbinding guild Renegade Bindery’s “Binderary,” a festival we host every February as a bookbinding Nanowrimo. Fanbinding itself is a growing artistic movement and a still-developing area of acafan study, with thousands of fanbinders hailing from all around the world. It is in this context that I bind books, and it is my hope and dream that this book and the story contained within go on to last as long as there are people to tell it. (And perhaps, as the fanbinding movement grows, that dream may become a reality, not just for this fic but for many others—is it not said that it only takes one thousand dreamers?)

Fanbindings are limited in that the story itself cannot be edited or amended after it has been printed and bound. There may be adjustments made and bonus stories added later to this verse; there will certainly be more comments and meta and art, all of which will not be part of this volume. That is both the fanbinder’s blessing and curse—once printed, while the story is made physical, it also becomes set in stone.

However, if there is one thing that The Sandman and this dear, vibrant, wild community has taught me, it’s that perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing after all. This book is both mouth and tail of the ouroboros of creation that is fandom, as my friend landwriter once put it. This book is a snapshot of what this story is and means to those who love it. This book is a moment in time. A facet, if you will, on the face of a gem whose shape and color is still being formed, even now.

I hope you enjoy it as endlessly as I do.

All my love,

chubsthehamster

February 2023

This essay was originally published in Moonham Press's first edition fanbinding of Maybe sprout wings, February 2023.