i just learned about murderduo and i want to know more. you've picked two characters from the fringes of canon and somehow made them your blorbos.
I would be SO GLAD to tell you more. Murderduo my beloveds.
Before we get any farther, they became my blorbos because I am a bit of a Thanatology nerd. That will make sense later.
Now, Murderduo is made up of two darlings - Blaise Zabini, and Fay Dunbar. Blaise is mentioned in book 1 of the Harry Potter series, and then promptly sidelined until book 6 where he was pretty antagonistic but all things considered quite tame. Canonically, he is Italian, and his mother is known for her suspicious number of dead husbands.
Clearly we as a fandom took this and ran. In most iterations, Blaise is the son of either a mafia member, serial killer, Black widow, assassin, or some combination of the four. Yes, those are all distinct titles.
Now, the fun part. Fay Dunbar. Fay does not show up at any point during the Harry Potter book series. She is a video game specific character! In her first appearance she had black hair, but in the rest of them she’s blonde with pigtails. "Canonically" she’s a pureblood, she doesn’t take Muggle Studies (shows confusion based on muggle artifacts), and wishes to be an auror!
In more important knowledge, she’s a gobstones fiend and dedicates her free time to winning the Hogwarts Gobstones Cup, a thing that exists. It is implied that she’s not in Harry’s year, but a year above them, due to her potions scores and goals directly contrasting HBP’s note that the Golden Trio were the only Gryffindors in Potions.
Clearly I nixed a lot of that. My Fay Dunbar, at her base form:
For one thing - Muggleborn. There are not nearly enough of them shown in canon, let's fix that. I put her in Harry's year, because we need more Gryffindor girls. She is specifically a Gryffindor because she heard about how much favoritism they get, and she said 'I can use that'. If Slytherin didn't hate muggleborns the hat would have put her there so fast.
I gave her a backstory: her dad (Adrian) is a mortician or ME or funeral director, and her mom (Vivian) is a mafia princess who got out. Fay is very desensitized to death because of her parents, who did not realize they needed to not expose their baby girl to corpses. Whoops. She's very bright, much smarter than she lets on, and is a master of being so loud she's invisible. It varies from au to au, but I also tend to give her some big traumatic experience around age 7 or 8, that she totally pretends to have recovered entirely from.
Specifically, in Hyacinth, her character is described as
She features as a key character in Hyacinth, Not (Our Parents') Children, Dark Magic for Dummies, Britain's Gone Belly Up, Tend To A Plant, Taught Me Well Now Watch Me Learn, If the world ends don't let it end alone etc, etc. I'm just linking the Fay Dunbar tag filtered through my account for now because not all of these are published and I'm too tired to do individual links.
There is some variation, of course; in Anethertystic, Fay's parents are actually magic-fearing and abusive, and comatose. In Hyacinth and Don't let it end alone, Vivian is dead. In NOPC, Regulus Black is her third parent, so she's got some history there. In Dark Magic for Dummies she's a Malfoy who was kidnapped and raised by Adrian n Vivian. DMFD is a fun au I need to spend 6k talking about sometime. Anyway, getting off topic a bit, here's My Breakdown Of Characterizing Fay That I Wrote For Friends and My Own Sanity.
Onwards to Murderduo!
How did we get murderduo? Well, it was the Magpie's Hoard Rarepair 2024 Fest, and I had already written a Fay&Blaise fic, and have long since planned for them to date in Hyacinth, so I picked them up as one of my main pairings.
And since we were guessing fics, and I wanted someone other than me to write them, I made up a name to give as a clue.
It should definitely be mentioned that this duo name could have meant a lot of characters. It's actually very vague when you look at my favorites.
@weak-fragile-mortal and I actually expanded on this idea a few days ago
It should also be mentioned that my plan worked, check out the Murderduo Bakery to see some banger fics from myself AND my friends.
I also have this post about them, and this one about Fay specifically and also Murderduo, and this one about them in Tend To A Plant.
They are just. Such a good pairing. They're ilk and they're opposite and they understand each other on levels most don't. Fay sees death as natural and inevitable and respectable and Blaise sees it as an inevitable choice and something to be inflicted and hidden. Fay respects the dead and Blaise pities them, maybe even hates them. They both know too much about how to kill and how to hide a body, they take too much comfort from having blood on their hands and death in their ears. Fay is bright and loud and finds joy in everything, because she has seen too much and she refuses to lose to entropy. Blaise is quiet and secretive and observant because he's seen too many things be ripped away in milliseconds and he won't be the next thing lost. They were both introduced to death and murder and darkness by their parents, but Adrian Dunbar and Madame Zabini approach it in such different ways that it REFLECTS in how their children act.
Fay hides in plain sight. Blaise hides in shadow. They can tell when the other is hiding and choose to seek them out. They know what it's like to have your life nearly cut short and they know what it's like to watch someone else die. They don't get grossed out by the things normal people do, they can have conversations that get deep and bloody and disturbing and they can keep up with each other.
They are equals and they are opposites and they love so, so much, even though it's under layers of trauma that mean they can't always show it, let alone show it well.