Hob, Dream, and their dead sons

I keep coming back to the fact that both Hob and Dream had a wife they loved and lost and a son who died as a young man.

And you can see that Tom Sturridge as Dream knew that, knew the full story of Dream, because it's there in his eyes in the scenes with Hob. It's there in his performance when Hob first shows the tiny portrait of his wife and son in 1589. For most of that scene, you can tell Dream's distracted, even repelled by Hob's excesses in favor of Shaxberd's poetry. The one time he pays undivided attention to Hob is when he brings out the portrait of his family and you see--not jealousy--but perhaps fear, or fearful anticipation of the pain he knows Hob will go through as an immortal in a few short decades at most. Dream does not warn Hob--I don't think Hob would have listened anyway-- but he knows what's coming.

In 1689, when Hob has lost everything, it's not until he talks about losing his wife and son that Dream's expression goes from concerned to grief-stricken.

"My boy Robyn, died in a tavern brawl when he was twenty, I didn't go out much after that..." Hob says. That is when Dream begins to see himself in the tragedies of Hob's life. It's not a stretch to imagine that Dream became a recluse after Orpheus's death* when he also separated from his wife Calliope because of the grief they felt.

That's what makes Hob's next declaration so stunning for Dream. He has hated every second of the last 80 years and so Dream asks him, "So, do you still wish to live?"

There are tears in Dream's eyes when he asks this. He thinks he knows the answer because he has been exactly where Hob is now. And one gets the sense that were he not one of the Endless, he would have ended it back then. It's clear the grief nearly destroyed him, that he still carries it, visibly, in every part of him.

But instead, Hob says, "Are you crazy?" And Dream frowns in surprise. "Death is a mug's game. I got so much to live for!"

Dream is stunned. Impressed. Thoughtful. I don't think it's a stretch to wonder: is this what Death intended when she introduced Dream to a man with such a strong will to live? For this exact moment when, weighted by the inevitable tragedies of trying to live as a normal man while immortal, Hob shows Dream how to continue on, how to choose life over and over again, not out of obligation or duty, but because he by just being alive has so much to live for?

And one final note on the loss of their sons, the revelation paints nuances into the picture of Roderick Burgess begging that Dream bring his son back to life. Not only does he ask for what is not Dream's to give, he asks for what Dream, the brother of Death, could not even give himself.

(*Calliope refers to Orpheus as dead in the show. The comic does complicate this statement somewhat, but for the purpose of this meta, I'm separating the tv show canon from comic canon as they are different stories.)