#god cursed me with mental health problems and aggressive writer's block else i'd be too powerful otherwise

[fuckyou-saidtheraven]

You know, actually getting into the Sandman fandom has given me a brand new idea:

A crossover with 17776, wherein the story takes place in an alternate universe where Death of the Endless decided to abandon her post for whatever reason, and her realm is thrown into disarray as a result.

Contrary to what many may think, this does not stop things from dying. After all, the Prodigal abandoning his duties in canon has hardly stopped his realm from existing, has it? So yes, things still die, it’s just that their souls don’t have a psychopomp to guide them to the afterlife. No, the problem here is that because the Endless also embody their opposites, Death is also supposed to be there at the beginning to bestow the gift of life to every living thing. And because she’s gone, things stop being born.

This is what causes the Moment on April 7th, 2026.

Now because this is an alternate universe, things don’t necessarily need to have happened the same way as in canon. Maybe Destruction never left. Maybe Dream and Desire never had a falling out. Maybe Death never had the realization that led her to be at peace with her role, and that’s why she left.

Either way, Death has gone AWOL, and both the Endless and the universe at large are left to pick up the pieces.

To be honest, I think it’d be really interesting to explore the characters of the Sandman in the world of 17776, and there are so many interesting ways it could go. You don’t even have to tether the whole thing in the DC Universe or focus on the inner relationships of the Endless that much!

Like, for example, in the Sandman comics there are already thousands of immortals on Earth from all sorts of time periods, with a few even pre-dating the dinosaurs as strange as that sounds: There’s Hob Gadling, who is literally Just Some Dude who happens to have been born in the 1300′s. There’s Thessaly, who is an actual cold-hearted witch from ancient Greece. There’s Mad Hettie, who's definitely more than a little batty, but is also a practicing haruspex who’s picked up more than a few tricks over the centuries. Hell, there’s even John Ryder, the world-weary living incarnation of Pestilence. How would each one react in the aftermath of the Moment, or in the 3500′s when the nanoparticle network was finally perfected? How are they affected by the way society changes in the millennia that follows? The views on immortality from the people around them?

Or the many alien races in the Sandman: Overture. 17776 has already established that after millennia of searching, humanity never managed to find anyone out there. Of course, you could argue that the universe is a big, big place, but still: what happened to them? Were they consumed by war? Did their societies collapse before they could figure out effective immortality? Were they wiped out by a reality-restructuring event (yes, those are a thing that can happen in Sandman)? Were they the victims of some catastrophic supernatural event(s)? Were they killed off by whatever erased the Terran civilizations that came before the dinosaurs without a trace? Did they adopt an isolationist policy so as to not be affected by the aforementioned disasters? Were there a few who, like humans, went looking but eventually gave up? All of the above? None?

What about the lost souls of the dead? The ones who never got where they needed to go? Do they just wander around? Do they haunt the living in the subtlest of ways? Preludes and Nocturnes states that when an Endless has gone for whatever reason, the universe subconsciously seeks to fill in the gap where possible even if the solution is shoddy at best (this felt like mostly just a way to include Wesley Dodds, but I digress). Do a few become psychopomps themselves? Do others set up a heist to rescue souls from places of damnation?

Or heck, Hell. Hell is a thing in the Sandman. What’s going on with them? Souls have stopped coming in and the demons grow restless. Is there another demonic civil war? Do a few escape to the mortal world to sate their hunger for violence? Is that part of why there are considerably less aliens that usual? Do some try to save the economy of Hell by counterfeiting lost souls (tbh this one’s actually from Hellblazer, but I do find the concept kinda funny so I’m leaving it in)?

And then there’s the time-honored tradition of the Endless interacting with mortals. How much does Despair stare out of the mirrors now that they’re all constantly faced with the loneliness of eternity? How does humans being immortal affect their tales in the Book of Destiny? How does Dream deal with the Dreaming being different, now that all the children have gone?

And, above all, how do they all react to the mortals’ ability to keep going? To find hope even in the face of an existence that stretches on forever? Even after having the rug pulled out from under them and learning that they might as well be alone in the universe? To still choose to look down, and appreciate what they always had and loved? And, at the end of it all, to make janky-ass impossible sportsball games that capture everything about what makes mortals so chaotic and incredible?

#original post #fandom #17776 #20020 #the sandman #the sandman netflix #putting under a readmore bc it's so long #this is giving me some major brainrot lads and i need to get it out #im lowkey going feral over this tbh #im tired it is late and i cannot sleep #i have... so many ideas #i just cannot execute them so i dump them in a big post on the internet #god cursed me with mental health problems and aggressive writer's block else i'd be too powerful otherwise #sandman spoilers #the sandman spoilers #sandman comic spoilers #i guess?? #they're worldbuilding things and not plot things so idk if they count #idea #au #crossover #my thots #is this also an excuse to think of the endless talking to space probes? #perhaps #how big even is the overlap between these two fandoms anyway