On Hob Gadling

 I am still coughing quite a bit, but less than I was a few days ago. And unlike last Friday, I don’t feel dead! That’s an improvement. I think that I’m slowly getting better, but the parents are freaking out every time they hear me cough.

I was between this, and writing a Note about the Greek goddess Athena and why she should be in more mythology stuff. But I have been reading The Sandman again so I figured I might as well talk about this, considering there’s supposed to be a Netflix series this summer. Let’s hope Netflix doesn’t completely collapse before that happens!

—

On Hob Gadling

I know I have written about this character before, but I don’t know if I’ve ever dedicated an entire Note to him.

So in The Sandman comic series by Neil Gaiman, one of the recurring characters is Hob Gadling. Dream first meets him in England in 1389 when he goes with his sister Death. She thinks he should get out more and talk with people. They encounter Hob Gadling in a tavern talking with his friends about how dying is for losers, and he’s not planning to die. Dream and Death make an agreement, and so Dream approaches Gadling and tells him that he’ll meet him in that exact same tavern in a hundred years’ time. And so the introductory story is Dream meeting Hob in the same establishment every one hundred years. Several times, Dream lets Hob know that if he gets tired of living, he just needs to say so and Death will come and get him. But every time, no matter how bad his life gets, Hob declines the offer.

Towards the end of the story, in 1889, Gadling wonders to Dream why they do this, and concludes it’s because Dream’s lonely and wants a friend. Dream is very offended by this, the idea that one of the Endless wants a mortal friend, and gets up in a huff, but Gadling tells him if they meet in a hundred years again then he’ll know that he was right. And sure enough, in 1989, Gadling looks up to see Dream coming in, admitting that they’re friends.

I think a thing that bothers me with immortals in fiction is that there is a tendency for them to always go through the same character arc: they want to die, but have no way of doing so (there is a Sandman story that goes like this, but it’s a one-shot). It gets old after a while? The times when this isn’t the case is when it’s a supervillain or something. There are times when the author can make it work, I suppose: for instance, in The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo tells Frodo that his longevity is actually uncomfortable, not because he’s tired of life but because it feels wrong somehow, like being stretched out. And we see what happens to mortals who have their lives unnaturally extended by a Ring of Power–the Nazgul have gone on so long that their physical bodies have rotted away. Then you also have characters like Zasalamel in SoulCalibur III who live forever through reincarnation, but his character bio tells us that every rebirth is actually quite painful, and it gets worse every time, so of course he wants off that ride.

[I should note: in later games Zasalamel, upon finding a vision of the future and what humanity will accomplish, changes his mind and decides to stay in the game. In the reboot that we see in SoulCalibur VI, I think the ‘He just wants to die’ aspect of his character has been removed entirely.]

But most of the time authors go with: this character is tired of being alive, has seen it all. And so he or she just wants to die. And that gets boring, seeing the same character arc over and over again. It’s especially frustrating with characters who didn’t become immortals on their own, but were born in a culture or species where it’s normal for this character to be immortal. This person should be used to it!

And something that strikes me is that it isn’t as if Hob Gadling is afraid to die. He very well could be, I suppose, and that’s a valid interpretation of the character. But that’s not what the text seems to point towards. More than anything, here’s a character who just likes being alive. Several times when he’s at the lowest point he’s asked if he wants to keep living, and he does. He just wants to see where things go.

What’s curious is that Neil doesn’t try to paint him as someone who is really savvy and necessarily agreeable to modern audiences throughout his history. He frequently makes calls that turn out to be wrong. He doesn’t think the printing press will ever really lead to anything big, nor does he think anything of William Shakespeare upon meeting him (although to be fair, Shakespeare makes it big because of Dream). And we find out at one of the meetings that he made money on the Atlantic slave trade, which Dream is quick to tell him to get out of. In appearances at later dates, Gadling admits that it was a bad move, but at the time, he isn’t as if he would have worked this out at the time.

He easily could have gone the route of having a historical character who happens to have modern views on different issues of the past, for no discernible reason, but he doesn’t. And I appreciate it.

Gadling does not have that big of a role in the overall storyline of The Sandman. There are characters introduced that have a much larger role than you expect when they first appear, leading to bigger storylines and important events as the story concludes. Not that his character or story is meaningless, but if you cut out Hob Gadling there isn’t actually that much of the overarching Plot that would change in The Sandman.

But dang, he’s such a good character. He’s one of the most memorable characters in the story, the man who’s just immortal because he feels like it and the Endless gave him a chance. The story wouldn’t feel the same without him there–Dream certainly wouldn’t, as a character. And it’s another example of Gaiman subverting expectations, with an immortal character who doesn’t want to die, who wants to keep living just to see what happens next, because he enjoys living that much.

I just think he’s an interesting character to have a story about.

—