Dhmis Clock X Notepad Novels & Stories

DHMIS fandom honestly feels too niche for dedicated platforms to have a ton of curated crossover material. I usually have to rely on the big archive sites and just get good at searching. AO3 is my primary haunt—their tagging system saves lives when you're looking for something as specific as Clock and Notepad. Filter by the 'Don't Hug Me I'm Scared' fandom tag, then start adding character tags for Clock and Notepad. I've found a few solid ones that way, though sometimes you get a lot of experimental meta stuff which isn't really my thing.

Sometimes Tumblr yields results if you're willing to dig through reblog chains and older posts. People will write little drabbles or headcanon threads that aren't formally posted elsewhere. The vibe there is more chaotic, but you can stumble on some genuinely funny or weirdly poignant shorts. I wouldn't call any one platform 'the best'—it's more about casting a wide net and being patient.

Okay, this is a niche I've spent way too much time in. Clock and Notepad fics are weirdly intense given the source material is a surreal nightmare puppet show. A lot of stories lean into the inherent power dynamic—Clock's aggressive, time-obsessed control versus Notepad's quieter, observational anxiety. You see a ton of 'Office AU' stuff, which is hilarious because they're literally office supplies, but writers twist it into mundane corporate hellscapes where Clock is the tyrannical boss and Notepad is the put-upon assistant documenting every minute of misery. It's a metaphor for creative burnout, honestly.

Another big theme is memory versus time. Clock wants to move forward, erase the past, stick to the schedule. Notepad is literally a record keeper. So you get these angsty loops where Notepad is trying to preserve moments Clock is desperate to destroy, and the tension becomes this twisted form of care. I've seen a few surprisingly tender fics that frame their arguments as a messed-up way of keeping each other 'real' in their fabricated world. The body horror elements from the show sometimes bleed in, too—gears sticking, pages tearing—used as physical expressions of their dysfunctional dependency.

But yeah, the most common thread is probably a corrosive, codependent relationship that's equally about fascination and frustration. It's less romance and more psychological horror masquerading as a ship, which fits 'Don't Hug Me I'm Scored' perfectly.

Kind of shocked nobody's brought up the 'confessional' angle yet. The Notepad is where Red Guy's thoughts go to get rationalized, compartmentalized, but they're never actually erased—they're just organized into something the Clock can measure. I've seen fics that play with Notepad being a passive archive of all the surreal trauma, while Clock is the active force trying to make it fit into a schedule, make sense of the nonsense. That tension between archival and narration drives a lot of the angst. It's less about romance and more about two systems of control failing to control each other. One wants to document the madness, the other wants to timetable it, and both are completely unequipped to handle the raw, messy feeling bubbling under.

What gets me is how writers extrapolate from their designs. Clock's face is literally a display; he's performance. Notepad's lines are blank until filled. So you get this dynamic where Clock performs his rigid routines at Notepad, and Notepad absorbs it, maybe scribbles a cynical margin note. I read one where Clock's ticks were slowly filling Notepad's pages with invisible marks, a timeline only Notepad could feel. That kind of metaphorical exploration feels truer to the source than forcing a conventional ship.