Hi! This is Mona from ao3. You are very welcome for the comments btw :D My friend and I agreed that a manhunt au by you sounds super exciting! I for one love me some forced proximity for the sake of survival :D Is there anything more you wanna share about the AU/premise? (like maybe what the hell Dream is up to?) I also would love to hear how you came up with the twist in atioi? Like was it a long process or did it just came to you in an instant? And If you what was your first reaction to it? :)
:D hello!! welcome!!!
in manhunt au theres just so much i want to talk about lmao but most of it is spoilers so i’m like. hm. probably shouldn’t. as for dre’s motivation, have an excerpt from chapter 5, free of charge!
unhelpful, but hopefully fun nonetheless. god i love this story they are So bitchy to each other for so long. as a small bonus i will also reveal that there is a part while they still hate each other where they have to help one another bathe and it is exactly as awkward and terrible as you’re thinking.
and for some more fun, here is a map of the main area the story takes place in! blue is for mountains and teal is for valleys/ravines. see if you can spot the many, many references i crammed into the location names lmfao:
as for atioi, the twist was genuinely the initial premise for that fic. i knew from the beginning that the time loop was “contagious” and that truly, genuinely believing the loop was happening to someone is what made you aware of it yourself. i also knew from the start that karl was also looping. in my initial outline, karl had a way bigger role in the second half of the story, primarily because things deteriorated between dre and gog in a much more serious way to the point where they needed a mediator to even have a conversation. i ended up cutting a lot of that because it was just too dark of a tone for what i was going for, and consequently karl’s involvement was dramatically reduced to keep things from feeling too cluttered narrative-ways.