For this week’s segment, we’re going to be reading the next two stories, “Moving In” and “Playing House” and we’ll discuss them Thursday. Katherine will, once again, be doing the honors.
As always, if you absolutely positively have to talk about some major spoiler in comments, please rot13.
A certain panel in one of these issues made me realize that I have no idea what Dream does for a living. I know what Death does (there’s even a name for it: she’s a psychopomp), but we’ve only seen Dream in extraordinary circumstances: being kidnapped and then dealing with the consequences of being away for so long.
That’s an excellent point… well, what do we have so far?
His absence was directly responsible for a number of sleeping sicknesses… so, part of what he does is he contributes to good sleep. The threat that got him out of Hell pointed out the power of dreams, even in Hell, so he’s probably also involved, on some level, with daydreams (so his use of “hope” when he won The Game was him playing himself, kinda). He also has a kingdom with a large number of minions and folks working for him… including, of course, Cain and Abel. Lucien works for him too, and Lucien keeps the library.
There’s other stuff that he does… but we’re a ways off from that.
I see him as a top-level manager. Kind of the Steve Jobs of the Dreamworld – he wanders around telling people what to do, solving problems, coming up with new stuff for someone else to keep track of once he gets bored, etc…. 😀
I think the “job descriptions” of the Endless have to do with how they (and humanity) envision their roles, but their actual responsibility is for “all of Title”. So, Death is a psychopomp but that’s not the only responsibility she has – just how she chooses to be present/concrete within her web of responsibilities.
Yeah the disasters that occurred in his absence struck me very much as those people being, in essence, projects he was directly involved in and then vanished from at a volatile point. Like a vial of volatile chemicals being carried by a chemist from the storage room to a processing machine; half way along the chemist vanishes. Boom.