Second Chance, I Guess

Of course when we see them as humans, they're all gonna be horrible, one way or another, not only because they're not humans in the first place, but also because they are what they are. It's their nature to be like that.

Take Death for example; she is friendly, compassionate, and seems to have a good head on her shoulders, so we tend to think that she must have good reasons for doing everything she does.

But she is capricious, she does whatever she wants. Sure she does things because it needs to be done but it's not beyond her to do things because she feels like it, or deny things even though her hands are not as tied as we'd like to think they are.

Or to do things for no deeper reason than 'why not?' (like how she let Hob live for as long as he wants to).

It seems unfair and arbitrary, and some of us may not want to see her that way, but that's what Death is.

We'd want to think that people's death have meanings. We'd like to think that people's death plays crucial part in the grand scheme of the universe. That every death must have happened for a good reason because otherwise it's unfair. After all, death is a painful thing. Why must it happen if not for a good reason? Why must it happen if it's not absolutely necessary? And there are horrible people whom we think deserve to die yet can't seem to die while wonderful people got their lives cut short even though they make the world a better place with their existence. Why must the good die way too soon while the horrible get to live?

It's unfair and arbitrary. But that's what death IS; it just happens. Death isn't a punishment. She's not justice. She's not mercy. She's just death. She takes what she takes and left those she wouldn't, and we don't know her reasons for that—or if there's any reason at all. But even if there is a reason, it still won't be a fair and acceptable reason to us. That's what she does, because she IS Death. That's the nature of Death.

Or Dream. He's our titular character (not even gonna say protagonist cause the series ain't even so much about him as it is about the beings he came across and whose lives he touched). We've seen him most out of all The Endless and we tend to forget that he IS dream itself (himself?) And not a being who controls dreams and nightmares because he has so many titles and more names than his siblings.

He's called The King of Dreams and Nightmares, Prince of Stories, and all that many names, we'd forget that he IS dream. He's not a separate entity who controls dreams, he IS that very thing.

And what is dream, really?

I've already sorta talked about how his weird traits and behaviours makes sense in context that he IS Dream. Dream is many things. He is, perhaps, the one Endless who's the hardest to define because he encompasses so many things; the unconscious, hope and wishes, fantasies and fear, stories and ideas, and so many more. But to understand him, we should also see his 'other side of the coin':

Reality

Dream is The Unreal. That's why he defines reality. That's also where he part with Desire even though they're so alike we often couldn't distinguish them; He's not just what we want, he's what we don't have. The reason we want something is because we don't have it. He's something beyond our reach, because once we reach our dream, it's no longer a dream; it became our reality. And once a dream becomes reality, it stopped being a dream. That's how Dream defines reality. And dream is ALWAYS more appealing than reality. What we want would always seem much better when we dream of it than it is when we actually get them because when we dream of it, we don't actually get to see it—it's not our reality when it's just a dream. When we get what we want, we'd see how it actually is, and there will always be something that's not quite like what we'd hoped it'd be. That's reality; it will never live up to dreams, because dreams aren't real.

Is it any wonder that Dream is distant, unreachable, and always seems more appealing before you actually get to know him? He IS Dream. That's the nature of Dream.

When you get to know him, he'd become a reality to you. If he has his own story, he'd become something 'true'. He'd be something other 'just a dream'—and we know his attitude about the very idea of being something other than what he's supposed to be (but then again, that too, might have something to do with how reality could never live up to dreams—on top of a bunch of traumas, but that's a whole another bagages to unpack).

That's why he can never share himself even with his lovers—even with his own wife. That's why he can't have his own story (or so he thought), because those would mean being known, and to be known is to be real, and to be real is to cease to be a dream. He can't do that.

Those are undesirable or even downright horrible traits in a person, but they're not people. They are what they are. They're exactly what they are called, and those are their nature. And the thing is? The world goes round because they have that nature.

We fill our lives with meanings because Death is arbitrary and seemingly comes without rhyme or reason. We cherish each other and value the time we have together because Death can come anytime and we'll never know when. We try to live our lives to the fullest because the only thing that's certain about Death is that she'll be there for us. We keep trying to do better, change our lives, change the world because we're always trying to reach our dreams. For some people, reaching their dreams might be their reason to live—which wouldn't be so if dreams are easy to reach. Some keep their dreams even after they've reached it because dreams aren't easy to reach. So on and so forth.

And there's this notion that each Endless aren't affected by their own dominion, but I don't think that's the case. After all, Death could and does become a mortal and die once every century. Dream wanted something he thought he could never have. Desire is never satisfied with just one of anything. Destiny occasionally see himself in his book and at some point in person, in his garden, he has his own destiny too—one of it being the last entity to die. Delirium went inside herself when she was hurting, and she is madness.

Taking that to account, I don't think it's so much as they're entirely unaffected by their domain nor are they excluded from it. I think it's rather like how we can never see ourselves except from reflection and we can never interact with ourselves the way other people interact with us. We understand ourselves like no one else, we know things about ourselves that nobody else does, but the only thing we know about how other people perceive us and experience being with us is from reflections and echoes. We never get to see ourselves directly with our own eyes or talk to ourselves like we do with a friend because we are that person. We are ourselves, so we experience ourselves differently from how the world experience us.

(am I making sense?)

What I'm saying is; I don't think The Endless are entirely unaffected by their dominion, or themselves. They're just perceiving and experiencing themselves in an entirely different way than how everything else are experiencing them because that's what they ARE. Much like we can't perceive ourselves the way people around us do precisely because we are who we are—we are the person in question. And The Endless aren't separate beings from their domains, they are EXACTLY that very thing. So it's a given that there are things they know about themselves that nobody else knows, but at the same time they have blind spots because they are what they are, and thus they can't experience themselves the way everything else does.

For example, Death might take on mortal flesh for a day every century, but she'd never lived a full lifetime; from birth all the way till death. She just lived for a day and die when the day ends. Even when the universe made a fake background and backstory for her, it's not real. It's not real to her. She doesn't have any attachment to it. She may take on mortal flesh, but she's still Death.

She might have taste of what it's like to be mortal, she sure knows how it's like to be many other types of mortal beings other than humans, but she still only live for a day. That's totally different than living your whole life the way you may stay in a foreign place for a bit and it will never be the same as the experience of people who have been living there their whole lives. You might get some impressions, you might grow fond of the place, you might even wish to stay there forever, but you wouldn't have the same attachment as the people who've lived there the whole time and thus it won't be the same for you to leave than it would be for them.

She experienced death—she probably had experienced it more than any other being at this point, dying once every century since God knows when—but not in ways mortals do. She can't die like mortals do because she IS Death herself.

In Dream's case, I've seen people bring up the fact that he doesn't sleep to mean that he's not affected by his own dominion, and thus he doesn't dream. Again, I disagree. He wants something he thought he could never have; he wants to quit being Dream of The Endless. That's his whole thing. That's what his story is about. If that isn't a dream, I don't know what else to call it. I think he doesn't sleep simply because... he doesn't need to. He doesn't even actually have a physical body that requires rest to maintain. He doesn't even need to breathe, why would he need to sleep? Doesn't mean he's entirely unable to dream—it's just different for him than how it is for every other dreamers, because he IS Dream himself. That's what he IS.

Also, are we forgetting that the one who actually say that he doesn't dream is Destruction, not Dream himself?