The Dream Unending - N.M
When we are young we all receive something from the family or loved ones in our life due to who they are or for one reason or another. Some of us receive aspirations, the desire to do what those who came before us couldnât, or perhaps the desire to create something that has never been. We carry these aspirations until eventually we decide what we truly want to do with them. These dreams no matter where they come from or what we do with them are something we always hold close to our hearts because they are the looking glass we have into what tomorrow holds for us.
Sancho is the adopted turned vampire daughter of Don Quixote, Don Quixote is just one of the oldest and strongest vampires and Bari is a strong Fixer who shows up to the previous twos house unannounced. Bari when she shows up to the vampire's home says that she can help them find âwhat they truly seekâ after that she then suggests that someone takes her up on a duel. Don Quixote accepts and they duel for three days. On the third day Sancho suggests they take a break and Bari agrees, Don questions it by asking who made those rules law and Bari answers simply with âFixersâ, which are just the real world equivalent of official bounty hunters. Don has a growing curiosity over his interactions with Bari which is why he agrees to wait for the conclusion of the duel. This gives them a reason to look to tomorrow, to think and question what might happen the next day. What Bari thinks the vampires need is something to strive after, a dream that they follow day after day instead of waiting and stagnating for their entire immortal lives within the walls of their home.
They continue battling but the winner of the duel is never found and Bari keeps coming back and now begins to regale Sancho and Don Quixote with tales of Fixers and humanity in general, about how kind the world could be and how Fixers are honorable heroes that served as bastions of justice. Don Quixote gets particularly fixated on amusement parks during her many talks, hearing about how they can make people âhappy just by being thereâ. This is the birth of Don Quixoteâs dream for human and vampire co-existence.
Don Quixote thinks that creating a theme park called La Manchaland and having it run completely by vampires would show humanity that it's possible for them to co-exist and vampires would no longer have to bear the mantle of âvillainsâ. A big part to building this dream is creating âblood barsâ which are just bars of coagulated blood from willing donors, they are reported as tasting badly but its okay since for a while they seem to be working. Vampires working at the theme park unfortunately really want to consume blood and while the blood bars can sustain them they are miserable subsisting off of them since they taste bad and they donât exactly share Don Quixoteâs dream. This starts to show Don Quixoteâs all encompassing idealism, his desire to chase after a dream no matter how impossible it may seem, even if it doesnât account for everyone involved in it, he could have worked to have just him and those close to him be the face of co-existence with humans and vampires but that thought never even crossed his mind.
The working vampires plan to revolt against Don Quixote and know he likes collecting Fixer trinkets for fun so they tell him about a helmet that will weaken him, leaving that part out, and sending him and Sancho on a long quest to retrieve the helmet During this time at the amusement park the vampires start to feed on all of the humans. They travel for quite some time and eventually find the helmet and go back and Don Quixote is furious to see his dream in shambles. Fighting between the vampires and Don Quixote starts and he sends Sancho away to Bari, also enchanting her shoes to seal away her vampire nature. Sancho eventually cannot take the weight of her memories throughout her time with Bari and she is given a way to make her memories recede into the depths of her mind. Bari gives Sancho a nice little place to live and books on Fixers, while Sancho adopts the persona of âDon Quixoteâ .
While that is happening with Sancho, Don Quixote seals off the amusement park from the rest of the world. The other vampires force the helmet onto him and torture him for the next 200 years in an attempt to get him to open the amusement park again but Don Quixote does not budge. Around the same amount of time, after reading Fixer literature and wanting nothing but to be like the heroes in the story she read, âDon Quixoteâ is recruited to work for âLimbus Companyâ.Â
Here she will get to have the adventure she always dreamed of having alongside eleven others in similar circumstances. After a while of travelling the amusement park, La Manchaland starts appearing again due to Don Quixoteâs weakening will and âDon Quixote" and her friends enter, which starts to remind âDon Quixoteâ of who she is and her true nature. At first when she remembers, Sancho rejects the journey she has had so far, she feels her dream of adventure is dead just like her fathers dream had died. The only path forward she sees is one right back at her fathers side as things used to be. A feminist reading of this could lend to the idea that this is similar to the expectations the world has of women. People expect them to put down everything they wish to do with their lives and take care of family regardless of what their dreams were.
Sancho after fighting with her friends knows in her heart that she doesnât want her adventure to end. After everything, Don Quixote stands in the way of her dream, wanting to end her âchildish, juvenile dreamâ. But even if sheâs seen the dream for vampires and humans to co-exist end in blood and rage before her very eyes, she will take up her lance and press onwards to reach that impossible dream. Don Quixote and Sancho clash in the sky, Sancho wanting to continue a similar dream that he imbued in her and Don Quixote wanting to spare his daughter the pain of having her dream crumble in her hands. Despite all odds Sancho wins their clash and kills Don Quixote, ending the dream of La Manchaland once and for all.
Don Quixote and Sanchoâs clash in the sky is very literally the clash of ideals that most pieces of media have, Sancho wins because like her counterpart in the original story, she holds both an understanding of the cruel reality they exist in, but also the fervor and passion to dream beyond despite what the world may be. This temperance guides her dream, past the forgetfulness, past the enemies and beyond where her and her fathers dreams lay at rest.
- Author's Note: Truly not some of my best work, the hardest thing about writing this is trying to find the room to summarize everything and also say what I want to say. I find it very hard to decide what is âirrelevantâ or not because all of the narratives I fall in love with I know and believe that every last detail has relevance in how everything shapes out in the end. While that is true when trying to make a point there are often things that can be left at the wayside but Iâm very bad at figuring that out. I really wanted to explore and tell everybody about this beautiful narrative about no matter how impossible your dreams may seem or feel, there is always a way forward. Itâs something that speaks to me very personally as someone who could understandably be judged very harshly for who theyâve been, but has to continue on regardless. Because thatâs how good lives are made, and that's how good lives should be lived.
