#hob is. so hard to draw lol

[sarcasticorgasms]

@banjosandmoonlight your museum mini fic has me in a fucking chokehold. accidental museum date my beloved ♥️

[rexwrendraws]

spotted on the wall behind the white horse theater!!

Happy one year to Bolt in the Blue by @valeriianz ! Truly the best band au fics I've ever read, I am Endless' #2 fan forever (#1 is Hob, of course) 💙🎸✨

+ alt. colors for the flyer & other scans:

i love taking advantage of my art uni's massive (MASSIVE) scanners for literally anything i can. it's got the most gorgeous grit and scan banding that photoshop trickery cant replicate (though i try lol). so, yes, i literally printed out the b&w flyers, scanned them in, then added color and printed them again to stick on my wall haha.

when digitally adding color, i wanted it to really feel like black ink on colored paper instead of trying to print on color paper and then scan it again (i have done this before idk). i think the xerox-y look is pretty convincing! the green, pink, and purple are my personal favs.

an irl friend suggest i try non-black-ink versions to see what i liked. i think they look cool but some of the text gets a bit lost. still, i like the pale yellow+red ink one. (this almost makes me want to try riso printing this to see what it'd look like 👀👀).

^ this is what the white horse metal barrier edit looked like before I added the Huji Cam filter lol. it wasn't feeling convincing enough like this, so i actually took a photo of my laptop screen with the filter and somehow that looked more real than the actual shot from the show lol. (also, because i've stared at this screenshot for so long, the orange/yellow June 12th poster? is everything on it a reference?? loll)

anyway, had a lot of fun making this!! feel free to print if you want!! READ THE FIC EVERYONE GO READ BOLT IN THE BLUE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kulapti]

Spoilers with no context from The Pain of Knowing by @blueberrymffn (Dec. 2022, pencil & personal landscape photo. ID in alt text.)

1: When you ACHIEVE overcoming your sensory issues and can finally eat the damn toast, aka things that I imagine would occur in an epilogue.

2: Daniel showing Hob a dream of waking in spring.

[chaosheadspace]

A little birthday gift for @seiya-starsniper. May your new year of life be full of happiness and joy! Also tagging @ginoeh, because the start of this is technically me misinterpreting one of her prompts, lol.

Without further ado, have some Dream raiding Hob's dreams post-fishbowl.

Stars twinkle through the window as Hob stands in his kitchen and cooks. It is late, but he is hungry, having forgotten the time grading. He’s got a day off tomorrow though, and so he is making himself a rather elaborate feast, because he feels like it. Because he can.

The light summer breeze coming through the window stirs the various smells about, sauteed onion and tomatoes and beef, spices and fat and broth, warm milk for hot chocolate and the dense, syrupy sweetness of baking apples. He’s never been good at moderation, least of all with food. Sue him. There’s a few candles burning on his kitchen table, decked out with earthenware, and through the speakers of his radio is playing a song he’s quite convinced he’s heard some time in the seventeenth century. It’s really crazy what musicians nowadays dig back up and incorporate into their music.

Just as he stirs the pumpkin soup bubbling on the back burner, there’s a low sound behind him. Hob turns, the dripping spoon still in his hand. “Oh,” he blurts out, “I am dreaming.”

Because there, in front of him, stands his stranger, who snubbed him at their last appointment, who he hasn’t seen in much longer than a hundred years. Who definitely, positively, has deep, black pits for eyes, who looks even more gaunt than usual, malnourished, even, and who is absolutely bang naked. He has to be dreaming. The music suddenly makes a lot more sense. The dishware, too, really.

“You are,” his stranger says, and even his voice is different, cavernous, deep and soft like his eyes.

“You’re welcome here, regardless,” Hob tells him. “You can have a shirt and sweats from me, if you want. Soup will be ready in just a tick.” He can see him swallow, hard, the movement of his Adam's apple on his slim neck stark.

“Very well,” he says, turning away. “See that it is.”

When he comes back, he’s wearing one of Hob’s old band shirts that’s somehow black now, and a pair of pajama pants with little yellow stars on them. Hob smiles, motions for him to sit down, and puts a bowl of the promised soup in front of him, steaming and fragrant, spiced with curry and nutmeg and roasted sesame seeds.

His friend wastes no time, forgoes the spoon entirely and lifts the bowl to his face to drink, his bony fingers clutching the glazed dish tight, uncaring about its heat. He doesn’t stop, doesn’t breathe until the heavy bowl is empty. Then he holds it out to Hob, the rim clutched between three fingers as if it weighs nothing. “More,” he demands, and Hob obliges.

This goes on four more times, and then the pot is empty. Next Hob serves up venison pasties, and he’s more than a little smug as his stranger devours the first one in just three bites, but Hob figures he’s allowed. “They’re good, right?” he says. His friend just glowers at him and reaches for the next one. When the pasties are gone, there’s dumplings and omelette and the apple pie.

It all vanishes, piece by piece, bit by bit, bite for bite, into his stranger. Afterwards, they look at each other in silence, Hob stunned at the speed it all vanished, his stranger apologetic for some reason. Then the silence is cut by the rather loudly growling stomach of his friend.

“I. uhm. I could make you some pasta?” Hob offers. “Maybe some pudding, too, let’s see…”

“No,” he’s interrupted just as he gets up. “I am afraid I have to hurry. There are things I have to tend to rather urgently. I thank you for being so hospitable.”

Suddenly they are standing in the doorway again, from one second to the next, Hob blinking up confusedly intovast, starlit eyes. They’re close, closer than they’ve ever been. There is no warmth emanating from his stranger, just a heavy, almost humming sense of presence that draws Hob in.

“Do you have to go?” He pleads. “Maybe I could—”

“I am afraid I cannot delay my task any further, Hob.” His stranger shakes his head. “I thank you for this.”

“Wait,” Hob says, desperately. “This is a dream, right?”

His stranger turns back around, the look on his face incredulous. “Yes,” he confirms for the second time, “it is.”

“So there’s no harm in doing this then,” Hob murmurs, stepping closer, gently placing one hand upon a lily-white neck. His friend shivers. Hob gets up on his toes and slowly, gently kisses his brow. “I hope you fare well,” he whispers, “and I will not give up hope to see you again when I am awake.”

From one moment to the next, Hob is alone. There is a relieving sense of loss in him, like a splinter being drawn from a wound.

Hob wakes.

[teejaystumbles]

For the WIP ask game:❔Choose a random WIP and talk about it ❤️

So let me tell you about A Friendly Heart, my underappreciated stepchild. It is so hard to write that fic, and still I love it with all my heart? Like, I wish I was better at writing proper novels so I could fill it with all the necessary bits between conversations more easily? I wish I could properly draw on Beagle's poetc writing of The Last Unicorn and integrate it better into my story which is directly based on it, but I have no education in writing and am just winging it all the time! HAHA :D

Still, I love to write the dynamic Rachel, Johanna and Dream are naturally falling into, they are besties. Rachel will defend Dream with her life, she has immediately adopted this wet cat after one look at him and Hob has already clued in on that. He wants to protect him too, of course, but right now he thinks Rachel and Dream are an item. Poor Hob. Johanna is rolling her eyes very hard at all of them, trying to keep Burgess busy (like Schmendrick lol).

[onerios]

Ok so here is the bit of Dreamling fanfic I wrote at like 3am a couple weeks ago. Its definitely only a first chapter, but I'm probably not going to continue it. I'm not a big fan of writing but I needed to get this out of my brain lol

If anyone wants to continue the story or use it for their own work please do I'd love to see it!

After the 1889 meeting, Hob Gadling felt uneasy. How could his stranger storm off like that? When all Hob had done was offer his friendship! He tried not to think about it, it wasn't a good idea to dwell on something so painful. Yet dwell on it he did. His mind kept replaying that night over and over, even in the most inopportune moments.

"Sir?"

The bartender snapped him out of his thoughts, and Hob realized he had balled his fists so tight his nails were beginning to draw blood from his palms. He was supposed to be ordering beers for his mates. Instead he had been just standing there glaring at the wood of the bar for several minutes. He had thought going out would get him out of his thoughts, but it didn't seem to be working.

"You alright Hobbsie?" One of his friends asks when he gets back to their table.

"I'm just feeling a bit under the weather, I think I better call it a night." Hob coughed for emphasis, but that probably only made it more obvious he wasn't ill.

But Hob was too angry to enjoy the night, and he knew his friends would be pestering him to share what was on his mind. Hob was grateful to have such caring friends, but it only made things worse. There was no way he could explain the situation with his stranger and not sound insane, even leaving out the immortality aspect.

After all, he barely even knew the man. Or creature or god or whatever he was. A few meetings once a century that didn't even last more than a couple of hours at most. There was no reason for him to be affected like this.

Gadling was typically not one to hold a grudge. In his long life, he recognized how fleeting most disagreements were, and how pointless it was to hold onto anger. He wasn't naive, he knew when people overstepped. When people treated him as stupid or less than. But it was hard to begrudge someone when in 100 years they'd be dead in the ground and he'd still be living his life. But this was different. No matter how much Hob told himself it wasn't a big deal, that he ought to just get over the stranger and move on, the rage continued to gnaw at his insides.

Years passed, then decades, and the rage only intensified. One night in 1926, after one or maybe more honestly five too many drinks, Hob decided his stranger wasn't ever going to come back. Their centennial meetings were most likely a thing of the past, and all because the stranger couldn't accept friendship from someone he saw as so beneath him. So it was time to face facts. Time to stop moping around London and time to move on. It'd probably be good for him to try other parts of the world for the next thousand years. But Hob wasn't going to just leave quietly. No, if this bridge was burned he wanted ashes. The White Horse wasn't his special place to meet his stranger anymore, and he didn't want it to be special to anyone else either. Hob was going to burn it to the ground.

[secondjulia]

Sandman Anniversary — Day 1 & 2 — Death & Desire

BOTH one of the first I saw in the fandom & one of my first/favorite Dreamling smut reads: Licking the Spoon by @dsudis

Also, one of my first digital drawings and I *think* maybe my first time EVER making art for somebody else's fic, which was terrifying but I just could not get the image of touch-starved Dream discovering food and spoons in Hob's kitchen out of my head.

I think I posted some others before this, because this one was hard & I had no idea wtf I was doing with digital art lol (still don't, but now I'm happier about it!) Anyway, this fic is super smutty, but so sweet and gentle and caring and extremely well written and I keep coming back to it ❤️

On Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42298905

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Oh yeah. While there is something to say about people practicing what they preach, "pick up the spatula spongebob" it's such a transparent dodge lol. You're drawing attention to a fandom wide issue...one that happens ACROSS fandoms, and people respond by going "bUt whY don't you make it yourself! Solve it by yourself but don't you dare expect me to even do the arduous work of *checks notes* questioning biases and trends. Also something something this is homophobia (even if you never said m/m ships were bad inherently) something something somehow all the women are badly written. All of them. Ignore that one or that one. Also fandom is transformative and the peak of progressivism" (yknow. Even if that progressivism only ever happens to focus on two (usually) white men and erases or mischaracterizes nonwhite characters and female ones, let alone queer female relationships. Also it often avoids even canonically queer characters to fixate on one's who are only subtextually so but who you're more attracted to)." So these people are just basically regurgitating all the stuff you pointed out already but...uncritically and with outrage that anyone dare criticize any of these rationalizations. Yeah I get why that'd be frustrating.

And even aside from "not everyone has the inclination or ability or TIME AND ENERGY to write and draw" it very much ignores the fact that if everyone just refuses to engage with stuff around these characters, then it can be demoralizing for people who can and want to, to continue or even try! "Write/draw for yourself" is all very well but its not terribly realistic to human nature, you can be a genuine creative who makes from the heart but we're social animals!!! Its normal to want attention and feedback when you work hard on something for free!!! And people acting like you must JUST be doing this for attention - that's always seemed disengenous.

And it rings a bit hollow coming from people who can regularly count on at least some attention if they draw/write about the right characters. It perpetuates a vicious cycle that can be broken if even a few people also decide to do that with you, but it's not easy. I've literally seen multiple people point out that the only fics and art of theirs that gets lots of attention are about Dream x Hob and the same couple characters. Even for the most passionate self-motivated person alive that's going to have a draining effect. Why wouldn't it?

When the standard response to any critical thought is always, ALWAYS, “Write your own stuff then!”

Me:

Also me:

[eidetictelekinetic]

Banishing the last of the brain worms with another excerpt, lol

Actually, it’s a funny thing, how many stories Hob’s collected over the years. All his own stories, the good and the bad, the miserable and the joyful, the proud and the shameful. The things he wishes never to forget and the things he can never make up for, no matter how hard he tries. These are his, and once a century he spills them to a pair of intent blue eyes, pale as ice yet somehow night-sky dark all at once, his memory sometimes needing a bit of prodding from a deep voice he hears in his dreams far more than once a century. 

(Let’s… not talk further about that, shall we? It was always a bit of a thing, and over time it became a rather concerning thing, and really it’s all just rather pathetic at this point.)

His and Lynna’s stories are for sharing with the Stranger and his daemon, is the point. But Hob and Lynna agree that other people’s stories are not. So it’s entirely possible that their Stranger and Cat think they’ve never entangled themselves with anything supernatural but, well, the pair of them. And the unfortunate incident where Hob and Lynna were deemed a witch, that is. 

If they think that, that’s hardly Hob and Lynna’s lookout, now is it? 

They glimpse it, off and on, through the centuries that follow. There’s Jacquetta, of course, but she hardly counts because they see her in all kinds of places, over the years. Vampires are like that. Royalty is also known to do whatever the fuck they want, and Hob can’t be positive but he’s fairly sure Jacquetta used to be a princess. She looks like Elizabeth Woodville, anyway, and she did say once her name isn’t the one she was born with, though it is a family name. 

At the White Horse itself, though… Well, there’s Kit Marlowe, for one — it’s not just that Hob and Lynna like his work more than Shaxberd’s, even before the little prat draws away the Stranger before they’ve even had time to really talk. Hob figures out before too long that he’d been taking entirely the wrong tack anyway, behaving like he would at court, but, well… It’s the only way to try and impress someone, or win them over, that he knows back then. That and causing mild to moderate mischief, which is how he and Eleanor first caught each other’s eye, but he never thought that would work with the Stranger. 

Court posturing didn’t either, though, and probably he ought to have expected it. 

(Actually, a century later, he’s fairly sure his Stranger likes him better a wreck and a beggar, and it takes him a long time to figure out it’s probably because he was sincere again, then.)

Marlowe, he’s just… There’s something about him. Unlike Jennet and her griffin, Hob and Lynna never find out just what Kit Marlowe and his little dark falcon might be, aside from a poet and a playwright and a spy. Strictly speaking, they don’t even know if there was more to Marlowe than the entirely human, mercurial and clever as he and his falcon were. But there was a sense of it, some edge of the uncanny. 

Then again, in another two centuries, Hob will be told he has a touch of the uncanny in a fight, and that’s only because of the lifetimes he’s had to practice. There’s no magic in Hob’s blood, he knows because there was a time when, thinking back to when he’d been drowned as a witch, he’d been caught up with bitter defiance at the memories enough to try a spell or two.

[doctor-rainbowfoxey]

So I’m doing a dreamling drawing practice atm and trying to figure out Hob’s 1800s hair lol but the shadows make it hard lol.

[roosterbox]

Fic Rec Friday 9/29/23

Title: 39 Days to Fall in Love

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Inception (2010)

Relationship: Arthur/Eames (Inception)

Characters: Arthur (Inception), Eames (Inception), Jeff Probst, Original Characters

Additional Tags: Survivor - Freeform, Reality TV, Alternate Universe - Reality Show, AU, Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Cuddling & Snuggling, Kissing, Rutting, Frottage, Shower Sex, Anal Sex

Summary: Outwit, out play, outlast. That’s the game. Sixteen castaways are stranded on the beaches of the Philippines and split up into two tribes to survive and fight for the one million dollar prize. Romance isn’t supposed to be part of the strategy, but sometimes it happens anyway.

———

This one’s an old favorite, guys, so please allow me to indulge.

I feel like Survivor AUs are some seriously untapped potential. Just in general, not in Inception fic in particular. So many characters, so many creative situations to put them in, so many relationships and alliances and strategy, JEFF PROBST. They practically write themselves!

I love the flow of this fic. The build-up, of both the tension in the story and of the relationship between A/E. It’s very believably paced. Makes me wish I had seen that season of Survivor, or at least wish it was real, lol. And I also love the side characters. It would have been so easy to put the other Inception characters in as other contestants, but the author didn’t do that. And a lot of the OCs, though the narrative interacts with them very briefly - Arthur and Eames are the draw, after all - seem very interesting and cool. I always appreciate good OCs. Also, Jeff Probst is there too, did I mention that? I was almost more excited for that than to see my boys fall in love, lmao.

Every stop on this train feels earned. Every lingering touch, every kiss, every cuddle. It moves fast only in the sense that it’s reality TV. Kind of hard to take things slow when you’re out in the wilderness with a camera crew all hours of the day, right? But it’s believable, that’s the important part. And the ending! Not gonna spoil it, but man, getting Jeff Probst to help you when you [SPOILER]? Talk about setting the bar high for the rest of us mere mortals, Eames!

This will always be one of my favorite AUs of all time.

———

Next Week: how about some Dreamling again? This one’s got two things I always appreciate in a Dreamling fic: insecure Dream and loving, understanding Hob. Plus it’s got a slight Meet-the-Family sort of plot to it. Well, meet the sibling, in any case (Hi, Death!).

Until next time!