Dexter Vex - Blog Posts

Time for random Dexter headcanons:

- He totally uses his magic instead of a microwave whenever he wants to warm up something. It´s way faster and so much cooler.

- He doesn´t like to stay in one place for too long but if he has to, then he´d always chose his apartment in Dublin. It´s home. Whenever he goes there, he leaves lots of trinkets he found during his travels. By now the apartment looks like a tourist shop. The other dead men call him a clutterer but Val thinks it´s wicked. 

- There´s a framed picture of all the Dead Men together on his nightstand but whenever the others come over, he hides it because he knows that Saracen and Erskine would make fun of him.

- He's an overthinker. Sometimes everything gets just too much and it´s just too much pain. In those moments he really needs a drink - or rather one too many. 

- While Saracen is the womanizer, Dexter is known to seek comfort in someone else´s bed when he´s drunk. 

- All the overthinking causes insomnia. When things are really bad and he lays awake the whole night, he´ll watch documentaries on YouTube. That´s why he´s an expert on the most random and most useless subjects.

- Cats just love him. Even the really grumpy ones. He´s like a magnet for them.

- He heard about what went down between Ghastly and Tanith from Erskine but didn´t realize how much it hurt Ghastly until he talked to him at the Requiem Ball. He never forgave himself for not checking up on his friend sooner. 

- Out of all the dead men he was closest to Saracen but Erskine was a close second. That´s why his betrayal hit him especially hard. 

- Most of the time he prefers to listen and doesn´t talk too much unless he has to say something important. That´s why he´s the go-to person for the other dead men if they need to talk about something. 

I fully agree with 2&3, but as a fanfic writer i actually find Dexter interesting to write and read about because we don't know a lot about him.

In the books he's witty and often seems to be untroubled by traumatic experiences but it's also hinted that there's a lot of depth to his character. So, it's really interesting to kinda fill in the gaps that Landy leaves.

I guess, that means that I'm more interested in the idea of him as a character than his actual character in the books because there's really not a lot about him there... (it´s the same with Saracen, Aurora and the Monsterhunters)

The few scenes where we can catch a glimpse at his character are really interesting. Take TM7 for example: He could have told Skulduggery about the god killers and let him deal with them but instead he assembled a team and took care of it himself. If you combine that with him constantly seeking out adventures all over the world, it shows that he needs to be constantly fighting for what he believes is right - even after the war is over. The other dead men (except for Skulduggery) all settled down but not him. Skulduggery fights because of his guilt and his need for revenge. So what about Dexter? There must be something in his past that drives him. Maybe war is all he´s ever known, so he doesn´t know who he is or what to do after it ended or maybe there´s something dark in his past, too. We don´t know, but that makes him interesting. 

That´s where my personal headcanon sets in: His father fought against Mevolent. While he was away, his mother raised him and his siblings, but due to the high child mortality rate he´s the only one who made it past the age of ten. His siblings all died. Anyway, while his father was fighting, his mother got killed by the mortals in their village for being a witch. Dexter had to watch helplessly. It made him so angry that he lost his way for a couple of years. He ran away, until he was taken in by a family that supported Mevolent. They raised him, so he took on their beliefs. Only several years later when he saw a whole village of mortals get slaughtered, he remembered how his biological parents raised him. He ran away again. This time in search of the resistance, but when he finally found it, he had to find out that his father had recently died in battle. That´s when the guilt and the self loathing began. He joined the suicide mission with the other dead men as a way to punish himself. Obviously, it didn´t work out. Not that time and not after. Then the war was over and he still felt like he needed to make up for his mistakes. That´s why he takes on missions by the sanctuaries all over the world, why he helps wherever he can. Sometimes that´s enough, sometimes it isn´t. It´s always been this way, but know he doesn´t have the other dead men to talk to anymore. They all drifted apart after the end of the war. So he has to find other, less healthy coping mechanisms. They don´t work, but he puts on a brave face and laughs it off. Then the war between the sanctuaries starts. He would never admit it, but fighting alongside his brothers again is the best thing that could have happened. Until they die, one after another. First Ghastly and Anton. Then Ravel. Even though he´s a traitor it still hurts. He gets possessed by a remnant. Just one more thing to feel guilty about. It doesn´t matter, he can handle it. But then Saracen dies. His best friend for centuries dies and he can´t handle it anymore. It´s all too much. He doesn´t want to fight anymore. Skulduggery is the only one who´s left but he only ever cares about Valkyrie nowadays. Tanith tries to cheer him up. She really really tries. It doesn´t work. Saracens death is what finally broke him.

unpopular sp opinions?

1- If Dexter wasn’t hot, people wouldn’t find him nearly as interesting - not his fault, but the lack of actual characterisation of any characters after book 7, with everyone becoming the same generic sorcerer, is pretty awful.

2- Tanith and Ghastly never even went on a date and y’all made out that they were soulmates -_- Like feel free to ship them but I feel like after Ghastly’s death everyone was like oh my god how is Tanith ever gonna get over the death of a man who she only spent four books with, when surely we should be focusing on the dead men who’d lost their best friend of FOUR CENTURIES

3- Militsia + Val are actually cute together and I quite like the reality check she’s giving Val

You know you're sleep deprieved when the newest chapter of your WIP is named "Dexter Vex and the clueless mages of the round kitchen table"

Shameless self promotion, but I´m about 50k words deep into a (German, sorry to all of you British folks) story about what could have happened if Valkyrie and Skulduggery had joined Dexter´s team during TM7... the main POVs are Dexter´s, Val´s and Saracen´s and the focus is on the mission as well as on the characters´ feelings / relationships. 

Skulduggery fic idea?

So, it's set after Seasons of War and when Dexter gets together with Razmus. They go to Saracen's apartment to collect his stuff, even though he travelled a lot he still had a main apartment in America. After a while they have his stuff in small boxes in the car and give the keys to the landlord. Before they leave Dexter decides to bring a box up front and look through it while they travel. There are pictures of Saracen in places all around the world, newspaper clippings of stuff that mortals didn't know were magic, and then a small, crudely drawn sketch of all the Dead Men including the departed.

Im having sad Skulduggery Pleasant thoughts today I guess...

I'm Still Standing by Elton John as a tribute to the last 2 Dead Men I'm willing to consider.

During a Dead Men reunion before the last stand, Saracen puts it on and Dexter slags him about it, when Saracen explains what it means to him. Dexter doesn't really take no notice to it. Then in Until the End, he begins humming it to himself.

Maybe even in Seasons of War, after Saracen gets bit he starts singing it to himself until he can't remember the lyrics, even at that when he is about to die he hums the melody until his last breath.

so, idk if this hasn't been said but I have a theory.

SPOILER WARNING for Until the End and Seasons of War!!

So this is for phase three of Skulduggery Pleasant.

So you know all that crap that happened at the end of Until the End (the whole world restarting because of Darquesse and some other dude), would they have control over dimension x? If not, I think I know who the next villain is. So, it is implied that Dexter Vex killed Saracen in Seasons of War due to him being infected by a Draugr, well I don't think he did. He was going through immense amounts of grief already, and with the death of Ghastly and Anton and the stress he was under, he couldn't do it. So he left Saracen there, hoping he wouldn't be killed. And then they left, probably leaving a zombified Saracen. Now this is where my theory gets a bit far fetched, what if they remade Saracen from scratch due to the fact he is in another dimension but, when they do, og Saracen regains a small bit of humanity and realises that the others have left him to die, gets pissed off and somehow makes his way back to the original dimension.

Never, has a one line sentence made me cry as much as this did.