#God I hope the readmore works on mobile if not I am SO SORRY

[smallraindrops-blog]

I started watching Dungeon meshi a few days ago (and I started the manga), and Hades 2 reawakened my fixation on the games.

(Potential spoilers for Dungeon meshi?)

So seeing the Fanart of Hades characters as Dungeon meshi characters has me gnawing on my enclosure. Falin Hypnos, my beloved.

That's said I keep thinking of an au for WMFTD where Y/n is in Falins' role and Hypnos is in Marcille.

All this boils down to dragon Y/n and necromancer Hypnos being even more obsessed devoted and in love with one another. :) (You brought me back even though the ones we love most told you not to, I came back wrong, but I know I still love you. You did the unthinkable, and now I am forever indebted to you. You are mine, and I am yours.)

As for the other characters, I think Zagreus would be Laois (brotherly bond and instead of food, his thing would be filling Achilles codex and fishing), while not fulling matching characters I think Thanatos would be in Chilchuck role, and for Senshi... I'm not sure. You could put Meg there not because she necessarily fits as Senshi but to keep her with Zagreus and Thanatos, a knight, maybe? I was thinking of putting Achilles in Senshi's place because it just seems fitting. (And the Angst potential)

But aaa, that's all for rambling. I hope you enjoyed it and have a good day!

I enjoyed your rambling! ^-^ also on mobile. sorry for mistakes.

Putting my reply under a readmore.

But yes I love that line between devotion and obsession because that line might be thinner than love/hate. Also don’t cross that stuff out! That is the goooood shit. 🤌

As for the role for people to play:

Zagreus

Zagreus as Laois fits really well, methinks. It works bc part of the reasons Zag left the house was because he felt like he didn’t fit in.

I think with Y/N getting nom on and leaving Zagreus behind would only increase that feeling of isolation for him.

especially if the others kinda blame him for what happened. ( also maybe the dragon could be a hydra? so in place of feathers, y/n ends up with those horns things? And fangs? )

Maybe Achilles’ codex could still be greek monsters along greek gods and Zagreus having his own personal one for all the different kinds of fishes and the many ways to cook them.

If it was up to Zagreus, they would eat fishes for every meal. The others veto it very quickly.

Thanatos

I actually he would be a great fit for the chilchuck role. Both of them would much rather keep work and personal life separate.

also while Thanatos can fight and fairly well, he is not a skilled/trained combatant like Meg or Y/N would be.

so letting him have a role where he focuses on overall safety and solving puzzles would really let his natural skills shine.

also since y/n isn’t a healer, it would help Hypnos to have someone who also has the skills and patience needed for healing spells.

also I think the fights between Zagreus and him about not being reckless and learning to trust the eachother could be interesting.

Megaera

She could fill in for the Namari/Shuro role. She just didn’t leave the group since she had personal reasons to want to stay ( but it could be interesting if she did leave after Y/N became a sandwich bc the whole episode with her was one of my favorite)

especially if she ends up getting her sisters to help find y/n

it would also help bc while Zagreus is learning how to fight, the lost of skills and knowledge of combat after Y/N got nibble on would be huge blow to the group.

It also possible she felt some guilt for what happened to y/n as well but still blames Zag which could have some fun tension/fights.

As for the senshi’s role, I love the idea of it being achilles, but if I may suggest another character, I think Dusa would be a good fit for the role.

She already shown to be super helpful and has skill in domestic tasks along with being an outcast. Like the group find her and she ends up helping out by showing Zagreus how to de-bone and cook the many different fishes. Along with dealing various monster and gods since she lived in the dungeon for so long.

She would also be a friend of Zagreus while being a neutral third party, something the group desperately needs.

Achilles just wouldn’t be able to stay calm or listen if he lost his son. He would likely get everyone killed along with himself before saving Y/N. Especially if Pat is no longer in the picture.

So maybe…

Tall man Pat and Achilles adopted little Y/N, who might have elf or something else in him but no one knows for sure. As y/n get a little older, his parents began working in the dungeon together, leaving him with Persephone and baby zag. Y/n would start studying fighting skills so he could join his parents sooner.

Something happened, monster or demon and it left Y/n alone with baby Zag, hiding until his parents found them.

So Patroclus and Achilles takes Zag in and they grow up as brothers.

Somethings happened to Patroclus and Achilles, the only thing found of them were ruined gear along with Achilles’ bloody and torn codex. maybe that was part of the reasons the brothers decided to go down there. To try get some answers.

I think hypnos would be unsure at first but seeing the deep pain Y/N’s eyes would make him agree. Also only because hypnos totally thought Y/N as a great friend, nothing more. Nope. He definitely doesn’t get jealous when he caught Meg staring at Y/N a few times.

and he totally doesn’t cozy up to y/n whenever he got cold in the dungeon. Or share more snacks with y/n or fuss over Y/N more when he is doing the healing magic.

They formed the group and everything seemed to be going well.

Then y/n became an ‘all you can eat special’ and the journey began.

And like Hypnos might be going a little crazy bc he just lost his best friend, someone he knew as a boy then as a man and he just really wanted his best friend back. That was all.

Then they finally got y/n back and hypnos knew he was being clingy but y/n didn’t to mind, even letting hypnos hold on to him for far longer than appropriate and hypnos just didn’t want to let go. Maybe they share quiet, gentle kisses when alone together, promising to talk more when they got out of the dungeon.

Then shit goes sideway.

Hydra!y/n is huge, powerful, quick moving and terrifying. With dozens of little hydra following him around. ( kinda like the harpies kinda did with Falin.)

But he seemed to recognize Hypnos, he touched Hypnos’ chin like he did before they shared those kisses. And he was able to say Zagreus’ name.

Also lol imagine poor hypnos during that shirt ripping part with y/n.

So Hypnos can totally bring Y/N back to normal. Totally. He is not crying thank you very much. No, he didn’t want a tissue, Dusa but thank you.

And yeah lol. Thanks for letting me ramble lol.

[lexicals]

Liner notes for An Echo, An Answer

Okay let's give this a go I guess? I may add more to this if I remember things too lol

Fair warning this is an exceedingly long post. It has ~subheadings~ (ooh). These cover: 

Fun Facts

Notes about mira

Notes on actual writing/plot

Post-canon tidbits (to be supplemented by actual post-canon oneshot coming maybe not soon but definitely at some point probably)

Needless to say this contains some BIG OL’ SPOILERS. Please enjoy o:

Some general Fun Facts™:

When I posted the first few chapters of this fic, I didn't have a fucking clue where it was going. I didn't even know how kravitz died until I'd already posted like 10 chapters lmao. This was a stressful way to write and I am never doing that again

In terms of inspo, I remember there being a fic in which taako was a ghost and kravitz was a medium (if anyone knows what fic this is PLEASE tell me I cannot find it) and I think I subconsciously took inspiration from this. Also I’d already written a vampire au and I wanted more undead boyfriend shenanigans, I looove playing with the liminal aspects of kravitz being a dead-but-not-dead character

There was a goof version of this fic where kravitz wasn't from the 1900s at all and died in like. The early 2000s or something. He died having come back from/at a costume party, people assumed he was an actual ye olde victorian ghost, and he decided to just lean into it. Cue fake accent. This was scrapped mainly because I loved the ‘sleepy hollow’-esque man-out-of-time shenanigans way too much and also because I know very little about the early-2000s US but do you know what I do know a moderate amount about? 1900s england

I have not read the cask of amontillado and I did not know what it was until seeing the memes, which was after I wrote the basement body twist. I just wanted to have a cheesy secret basement behind a bookcase c'mon it's a murder mystery in an old spooky house let me have this

Anyone who's followed my content for a while probably knows that I'm a big trans kravitz stan, but I dithered over making him trans in this fic a Lot. This was mostly down to self-doubt abt a story ft. a trans man living as his preferred gender in that time period would be deemed "unrealistic" but in the end I said fuck it I want this & I think that was the correct move. Also I read a fair bit about absolute legend dr james barry & that made me a bit more confident about committing to the decision bc these people did exist & they deserve their rep

You may notice that all of the major OCs created for this fic are women. This was an accident but also I stand by it bc I think it helps to balance out the fact that so much of the ‘screentime’ is being dominated by the male leads (inc. angus, who probably has the 3rd most screentime after taako & krav). They’re also all just, absolutely indomitable people. I have a type when it comes to OCs. Speaking of:

Notes on mira:

Mira was very much a character created to serve a purpose, but she ended up becoming a lot more than that and I'm glad people warmed up to her while reading as much as I did while writing. She wasn't going to have anywhere near as much screen time initially as she did in the end but I just loved her & how her relationship with kravitz turned out so much that I ended up writing a bunch of snippets with the two of them just for me, which eventually turned into the fragment chapters because I wanted to share how gd cute they were. Also they ended up being pretty useful for plot too lol

She and flossy were actually kind of the same character to begin with, being kravitz's best friend who he lived with in a kind of lavender marriage with neither of them interested in the other but being happy enough being friends & pretending. I scrapped this pretty early for a lot of reasons but she was still the cause of his death in that version, whether or not she actively killed him. I think there was a gambling debts element at some point

Whatever iteration of the story, she was always going to be the cause of death. I ruled out actual murder pretty early on because I didn't want to tell a story about a gay, black trans man getting murdered in cold blood in his own home, which in a ghost story only really leaves manslaughter, and an accidental killing by a loved one was an idea that followed pretty hot on the heels of that decision - it's very sad, but there's no hatred behind it, so it's not too outright depressing for what is most likely an audience with a high population of marginalised people. That bittersweetness of tone - sad events, but almost always with loving intentions behind or around them - ended up being a real touchstone for the story as a whole

In terms of post-canon content for her, or I guess just stuff that wasn't mentioned in-fic lol, my idea of how her life played out is that she was a pretty solid pillar of her community for a very long time. She took what kravitz said about thinking about what she wanted to add to the world very much to heart, and her answer was for her to be to as many kids and vulnerable people as possible what kravitz was to her. Obviously in the end she poured a lot of herself into helping others out of guilt for having killed a man who she likely remembered a little rose-tinted, but the intent was always there before that too

I don't know how much this came across in the actual text but mira is mixed race (Black/white), though she is Black-coded in terms of how people see and respond to her (please tell me if I’m using these terms incorrectly). I downplayed a lot of the racial elements of this fic bc I don’t feel like it’s my place as a white writer to delve into those areas, but it is an element of her story that ties into anti-miscegenation laws and general societal attitudes and I didn’t just want to entirely gloss over those aspects, bc that wouldn’t be right of me either, so I can only hope the balance ended up working here, and for kravitz’s story too. I did a lot of the writing for mira’s story before even really thinking about this angle which is something I’ve learnt from now bc oh boy should I have thought about it sooner lmao........

Anyway. I love her. I’m very glad that other people love her too

In terms of story writing:

I used to watch A LOT of crime dramas when I was younger, and got so familiar with the structure of them that I used to predict who the killer was going to be about a quarter of the way into them almost every time. Most of the time the killer is someone introduced early on as someone fairly innocuous, but still notable, before the narrative doubles down on a red herring suspect who's proven innocent about 3/4 of the way through, paving the way for the real twist killer. You see where I took my base structure from here

So, mira is introduced early on as someone important to kravitz, who was involved in his life (& death) somehow, but in general she's more suggested to be a victim than a culprit - because of course she is, she’s a child and she loves him! I'm only just realising now that this is a "person of interest" style plot twist here. (Remember what I said about the crime dramas? Just so many of them.) But then in the end she suffered just as much as anyone else, so I guess you could say she's both a victim and a culprit, even by accident.......

Structurally I'm actually really happy with how this turned out. In my head (BECAUSE OH BOY I DID NOT WRITE ANY OF THIS DOWN! Or at least not in a coherent way) the story was split into three mini arcs - the enemies section ending with the kitchen blowout, the friends section ending with the the bay window scene, and the lovers section which covers the rest of the fic. This ended up integrating really well with the main mysteries/pulls of the story - the first being the will-they-won't-they (they will, it’s fanfiction, but how?) of the romance element, and then once that's tapering off starting to dig more into the murder mystery element, which had been more of a subplot up until then, while the romance moves onto the back burner a little bit. The dual genre was an interesting challenge to try to balance and I think it turned out pretty well!

While I'm on this, setting up my breadcrumb trails for the plot twists was simultaneously very stressful and very rewarding. Trying to keep things obvious enough to be noted but subtle enough not to give the whole game away? Gave me so many headaches lmao. I actually thought for sure that some people would twig about the body in the cellar sooner than ch42, but then actually in ch42 way more people picked up on fisher's sniffing around than I expected. Clues are hard!! But at the same time seeing the handful of people who called mira as an adoptive daughter, or the fact that krav fell down the stairs, or the fact that mira's og parents were involved was very cool and it made me very happy to see people picking up the little stuff and putting it together

QUITE A FEW PEOPLE SAID NICE THINGS TO ME ABOUT HOW CLEVER THE PIANO TUNING ANGLE WAS. I CANNOT TAKE COMPLETE CREDIT FOR THIS. IT WAS A PLOT HOLE THAT I SUDDENLY REGISTERED OUT OF NOWHERE WHILE I WAS IN THE SHOWER & THEN ENDED UP WORKING IN SO I GUESS IT TURNED OUT FOR THE BEST & MADE ME LOOK VERY SMART BUT IT WAS AN ACCIDENT

Something else that a couple of people have noted & that I only realised in the process of writing was the fact that a lot of kravitz's ghostliness in this fic has the potential to be read as an allegory for chronic illness/disability. This was something I only caught onto myself while I was writing the scene on the porch at the end of ch42 when I was writing kravitz's dialogue and was like..... oh shit that's a thing huh. Bc he is, y'know, quite literally housebound and limited in what he can do in a lot of ways, which is part of the reason I really tried to hammer home in that chapter that even though the fic ends with him being 'cured' (because that ending was always the intention from day one before I ever thought about this reading), they would have been happy together regardless. Love is not conditional!

Post-canon thoughts:

Taako and kravitz go into the house. Kravitz says oh my god what is that smell. Taako says he made blueberry pie earlier. Kravitz says okay we're putting bedroom fun times on hold I need that RIGHT NOW

Kravitz eats way too much too fast and spends the rest of the afternoon curled up on the sofa with a horrible stomach ache. He is not used to that much rich food. Taako is not impressed with this

He rolls his eyes and they watch a movie and talk instead and get to the bedroom fun times later

On the topic of food you Know krav ends up with a bit of a tummy from taako spoiling him. He looks & feels great and taako loves how comfy he is

Also on the topic of bodies I think krav does a lot of experimenting initially with what feels good now that he has a lot more freedom in presentation. He likes to mess with his hair a lot. Dresses and skirts are still a bad feel but a little makeup is fun sometimes. Kravitz living his best undeath 2k18 (I took so long to finish this fic it’s set 2 years ago now lmaoooo)

Kravitz lets taako drive him somewhere exactly Once before vowing NEVER AGAIN taako's driving privileges are REVOKED kravitz is going to get magnus to teach him to drive instead.

Taako says what the hell are you gonna do if you get pulled over you are a hundred and thirty and also dead you can't get a license. (He could get him a fake one, but he's not going to, because he's being petty about kravitz insulting his driving.) Kravitz says fine show me yours then. Taako says no but kravitz steals it anyway. A minute later he’s produced his own undoubtedly fake license out of nowhere complete with a fake DOB and a very nice picture

Taako says gasp kravitz that's ILLEGAL. Also you know you have to make this picture worse if you want it to be convincing right

Kravitz starts giving angus music lessons. Angus isn’t a natural by any means but he works hard and that gets him a long way

OH ACTUALLY I SHOULD PROBABLY SAY SMTH ABOUT THE REUNIONS HUH. GINNY THESE ARE FOR YOU:

Maybe it's weird to start with barry but the poor man has to have a sit down. He has so many questions. Kravitz what is the afterlife like it's fine you can tell him just give him a hint please and also can he maybe get like. A blood sample or something. No that's not weird it's for science what are you talking about taako bring him back

Kravitz is fully expecting lup to wreck his shit, and she acts like she's going to right up until she's close enough to give him a big ol hug instead. She says she missed him a lot & that he's much nicer to hug now that he's not a freezy boy, and kravitz goes ;_;

It's a very tight hug though. In some ways it is still a punishment

Also could he maybe hook her up with this death goddess of his? Lup would like to be immortal too, kravitz. Kravitz can you get a resume to your boss and could you write lup a reference while you're at it

Angus!! He’s so happy to have his other uncle back!! There’s a new caleb cleveland book he needs to read so they can talk about it!! All of this after a lot of crying and hugging.

I think at some point they do go over to visit mira’s descendants. Taako says hi remember me? I brought my boyfriend to visit! Unnamed great great grandchild #1 is like um he looks kind of familiar. Kravitz says well yes there is kind of a reason for that and it’s because I’m in that picture on the wall over there, hi I’m your great great grandfather nice to meet you

The family is a little weirded out by this at first but eventually they’re like. Well alright I guess do you want a coffee

Kravitz says yes please god do you know how many people keep offering me tea

He babysits for the youngest ones sometimes. The kids love him and the adults are happy to give him stories in exchange for his time, seeing as that’s all he asks for

Taako says ask them for money and contribute to this household kravitz. Kravitz says absolutely not they’re family and you’re already getting my youtube ad revenue

Yes kravitz has a youtube channel and is also very involved in the local music scene. He can’t do anything that would technically be classed as interfering with the flow of the living world but no-one said he can’t anonymously share some of his music here and there

Johann gets him a gig conducting for his orchestra every now and then. Kravitz is fucking ecstatic and finally gets to conduct some of his own pieces in front of an audience. Maybe they actually get to that biography johann mentioned at some point. Idk I haven’t thought about that part too much

Okay I wrote WAY more than I meant to here but I hope at least some of it was interesting and feel free to ask me questions if there are elements I’ve missed off of here that you want to hear more about! (Bearing in mind some of the answers may be “actual post canon content coming soon/later” lol.) As you can tell I have a lot of things to say about this fic & I’m always more than happy to hear that people are interested!! o: