#me: chats PURE WHAM for 147 hours

[menelaiad]

hi! what are some of your fav menelaus headcanons??

oh anon you've done it now

tall. like. 6ft tall.

not broad. muscley and clearly strong. but leaner. aga and ajax and the like are certainly wider than him.

has been tall a long time. grew very fast. pissed of aga in the process. has a habit of curving his shoulders because of this. trying to appear shorter than he is.

a follower. hence the shoulder thing. he spent a lot of his formative years just. following aga. listening to aga. he was the second son. he wasnt set up for kingship or anything so he was kinda just left.

protected a lot by aga. i feel like menelaus' kinder nature was allowed to grow and flourish and wasnt CRUSHED by atreus because aga ... protected him. menelaus could be himself around aga.

ginger.

grew his hair fucking super long in sparta like the spartan men. even before the marriage to helen. because of the exile and tyndareus' kindness he just felt like sparta was home. so he kinda ... assimilated himself as soon as he could.

goes freckley in the sun.

he always makes a habit to use helen's name. not an epithet. or a title. her name is Helen.

due to not being prepped for kingship. menelaus can not read or write very well. if at all. he's even dictated to or gets people to write for him. after he became king he probably learnt the basics? but i feel all of atreus' energy went to aga (who also cant fucking read tbh)

i personally think menelaus was kinda ugly. or not like. conventionally handsome. but he's just such a nice freakin dude that people can't help but like him.

menelaus likes birds.

despite his. usually dormant nature. menelaus inherits atreus' anger. and it comes out in bursts. like strong. violent outbursts. like you see in book 3 with paris. when menelaus just drags him around and beats him. it's explosive and heated. it burns hot and dies just as quickly. but that is very atreus of him.

menelaus suffers from aches in his wrist after the paris fight and also he develops a limp from the wound in his thigh where he was shot with an arrow.

emotional. very emotional. with both the good and the bad. feels every emotion very strongly. feels others emotions (agaMEMNON in IOA) very strongly.

sharp features. sharp jaw. sharp nose. high cheekbones.

expressive as all hell. raises his eyebrows. makes faces. he is feeling things and his face will tell you what.

laughs a lot. not afraid to laugh and smile. smiles with his teeth a lot.

his smiles never quite reach his eyes but we'll move on from that.

develops a really close friendship with pat over the course of the war. that stems from them meeting at the suitor thing and they had lil chats then. often laments to him about how different things would be if helen had chose pat instead.

loses his fucking MARBLES when antilochus dies. i feel like the atreus anger would have come out again here.

after pat's death and him returning the body, achilles beats him to shit and menelaus doesn't fight back. he takes the blame ...... and the beating.

unintentionally always one of the funniest people in a room. is funny without even realising he's being funny. makes helen cry laughing several times.

i believe he was meant to marry clytemnestra. or at least that was the OG plan. they have a lot of fond yet awkward memories of each other.

blames himself for aga's death. and by extension - cly's.

iphigenia inherited the HOA red hair. watching her get sacrificed fucked him up tbh.

hermione is so SO SO important to him. especially as she was conceived around the whole 'sterile curse' thing in sparta. she is like a lil miracle to him.

honestly? can sometimes be a bit of a bitch.

gonna stop here cause that got REALLY long. but there's a handful of random ones that i wrote as they came into my head SDFGHJKL

#long post for ts /// #i have a lot of menelaus headcanons #like for his whole life #but here's a Taster #u know i love this man #someone: menela- #me: chats PURE WHAM for 147 hours #i also project onto menelaus and believe he has seizures #but that literally stems from 13 year old me projecting when i suffered my first seizre