Been reading the illiad and wondered why this guy isn't in the story yet, so I had an idea for these situation imagining hwat he would be like in the fate world.

Why Diomedes?

Quick pitch before the lore dump: Diomedes is arguably the single most underused figure from the Iliad. He's the second-greatest Achaean warrior after Achilles, wounded two gods on the battlefield (Aphrodite and Ares — yes, he made Ares scream loud enough to be heard by thousands of men), ran black-ops missions with Odysseus, was gifted a breastplate forged by Hephaestus, and walked away from the Trojan War completely intact — no death, no curse, no divine punishment. He's one of the only Greek heroes with something resembling a good ending.

And that's exactly why he's interesting. Fate has a recurring pattern of taking heroes with clean, successful legends and either diminishing them or just never touching them. Perseus is the textbook case — the myth's most "blessed" hero, granted more Noble Phantasms by the gods than arguably any other Greek figure, and the games turn him into the designated comic-relief loser (there's a real in-universe joke that a Servant version of him is basically "a successful Shinji Matou"). Meanwhile heroes with genuinely messier, more violent, or more ambiguous real legends — Iskandar, Nero — get built up into charismatic, near-mythic ideals. Diomedes is the guy this pattern hasn't even gotten around to using yet, and he's a perfect test case for it, because his myth is unusually clean by Greek standards.

This concept leans directly into that gap: why does a hero like this have no visible tragedy attached to him? I don't think "no flaw" and "no wound" are the same thing, and I wanted to build a Servant where you can see that distinction play out.

I actually went back and forth on how to structure the "wounded" half of this character, so I'm posting both versions I worked through below — genuinely curious which one people think works better, or if there's a way to combine them.

Base Servant: Diomedes (Lancer)

Class: Lancer (secondary affinity: Rider, via the Doloneia horse-theft)

Personality: Cautious yet brave, honorable yet pragmatic — basically the Iliad's own description of him, played completely straight. He's the guy who tells Agamemnon to his face that if the king wants to run home, fine, he'll stay and finish the war alone. Not for glory. Because someone has to, and he said he would.

He's not a hype-man like Achilles, and he doesn't need the war to mean something deeply personal in order to fight it well. That's what makes him a credible foil to Achilles rather than just a jealous rival — he can call out Achilles' glory-hunger and his sulking without it reading as sour grapes, because Diomedes was never chasing the same thing in the first place. Where Achilles' courage is tangled up with ego and the need for recognition, Diomedes' courage is almost procedural — he does the hard thing because it's the correct thing to do, not because anyone's watching.

Quiet, dry sense of humor. Deeply loyal to Odysseus specifically — shared black-ops trauma will do that to two people. He also carries one oddly petty grudge that undercuts his otherwise total composure: he is fully aware he's remembered far less than Achilles or Odysseus despite arguably matching both of their résumés (two wounded gods is not a small thing to have on a CV), and it bothers him more than he'll ever admit out loud. It's the one crack in the man — everything else about him is even-keeled; this is the one thing that'll get a rise out of him.

Master relationship hook: Doesn't need a Master who inspires him. Needs one who'll actually listen when he says a plan is bad — because he will absolutely tell you your plan is bad, calmly, and then help you fix it instead of just doing it his own way and letting you find out later.

Noble Phantasms (Base Servant)

Θεᾶς Ὄμμα — "Eye Granted by the Goddess" (True Sight) Rank: B+ | Type: Anti-Divine, Support/Offensive

Athena's gift: the ability to see clearly which beings before him are gods and which are mortal, and — when active — the authority to strike a divine being without the usual restrictions on a mortal harming a god. This is what let him wound Aphrodite and drive Ares off the field screaming loud enough for thousands to hear. Functions partly as a detection/anti-illusion skill, partly as a combat buff that strips the "protection" divinity normally grants a target once Diomedes' spear is what's coming for them.

Ἥφαιστος τεῦξε — "Wrought by Hephaestus" (Passive) Rank: B | Type: Defensive

The bronze breastplate forged for him personally by Hephaestus. High, consistent defensive value against physical attacks and low-to-mid rank magecraft. Nothing flashy — he's just very hard to actually put down through conventional means, which fits a hero whose whole legend is "walked away intact."

Δολώνεια — "Doloneia" Rank: C+ (situational A) | Type: Anti-Personnel / Infiltration

References the night raid with Odysseus: interrogating and killing the Trojan spy Dolon, then slipping into Rhesus's camp to kill sleeping Thracian soldiers and steal the king's prized horses. Functions as a stealth/ambush skill — massively boosted lethality and evasion in night-based or infiltration scenarios, at the cost of feeling nothing like his usual honorable combat style. This is the least "heroic-looking" thing he ever did, and he knows it.

The Deconstruction: Two Ways I Considered Building It

The whole point of this OC is that the "no tragedy" hero actually is carrying something — it's just not the loud, mythic kind of wound Fate usually reaches for. I worked out two different structural approaches for where that wound lives, and I couldn't fully decide between them, so here's both.

Scenario A: The Counter Guardian Split (same self, same timeline)

In this version, there's only ever been one Diomedes, one history, one war — but two roles he's played across his existence: the Servant remembered by legend, and a Counter Guardian identity that the Throne/Alaya quietly folded him into afterward.

The idea here is that Athena's favor was real, but it was never only what it looked like. Somewhere underneath the goddess's blessing, Alaya was already using the bloodline of Tydeus as a recurring anti-divine asset — the Trojan War being a conflict where the gods themselves had become dangerous enough to humanity's survival that intervention was warranted, and a mortal capable of wounding gods was exactly the kind of tool the Counter Force doesn't pass up. Diomedes lived his whole mortal life never fully realizing this, and only as a Counter Guardian, after death, does the fuller shape of what he was used for become clear to him.

What this gives you: one character who contains both halves at once. The composed, dutiful Iliad hero is the same person who eventually has to reckon with having been an asset, not just a beloved champion — he doesn't get to split the discomfort off onto a separate self. It keeps the tragedy internal and personal, but it also means writing him requires holding both tones in the same character depending on which "layer" you're showing.

Scenario B: The Alaya-Timeline Alter (a divergent self)

In this version, the deconstruction gets its own separate identity entirely — a proper Alter, born from a different timeline/possibility rather than a second role within the same one.

The premise: in this other timeline, it was never Athena at all. What looked like divine favor to a Bronze Age mind was actually Alaya's intervention from the start, full stop — dressed in the shape of a goddess's blessing because that's the only frame the era could understand it through. In that timeline, Diomedes eventually understands what he actually was. Not chosen. Not beloved. Deployed. Every moment that felt like being favored by a goddess was a system doing what systems do, and when the war ended, there was no reward, no glory — just a mechanism quietly disengaging because the threat had been handled.

This Alter carries everything the base Servant is spared:

• The specific, ugly paranoia about his father Tydeus — not fear of an omen, but the fear that the same capacity for violence that made Tydeus devour his enemy's brain in front of a horrified goddess is sitting in him too, and the only thing that ever kept it leashed was a purpose he never chose to have.
• A war-forged reluctance so total that, absent the compulsion of duty, he would never have picked up a spear at all. Not a warrior who happens to also be traumatized — a fundamentally gentle person who was made extremely good at violence by something that needed him to be, and never asked.
• The hollowed-out version of "no tragedy": no dramatic downfall, no death, no curse. Just the much quieter horror of realizing his own history was never really his to begin with.

He still does what needs doing, in this version too — that's the whole point, and it's true of both scenarios. He's not a Berserker, and he doesn't break. He understands his purpose, and does it anyway, fully aware of what it costs him, just without the base Servant's composure available to soften any of it.

The tradeoff between the two, as I see it: Scenario A keeps everything inside one continuous person, which I think is more thematically elegant (the legend and the truth are literally the same guy, at different points), but it's harder to write cleanly since the tonal shift has to happen within a single character rather than being externalized. Scenario B is easier to actually use in a roster/story sense — two distinct summonable identities, cleaner mechanical and narrative separation — but it does mean the "wound" technically happened to a different version of him, which is a slightly more distanced tragedy than one guy carrying the whole thing himself.

Why I think this works as a Fate character

Fate's best Servants live in the gap between the legend and the person underneath it — that's basically the entire Emiya/Archer thesis, and it's why that character works as well as it does. Diomedes is one of the clearest untouched cases in all of Greek myth where that same gap is worth exploring, because he's remembered as competent and clean specifically because nobody ever stopped to ask what that competence and cleanliness actually cost him.

Would genuinely love input on this one — which deconstruction structure (A or B) do you think plays better, does the Alaya-instead-of-Athena twist feel earned or like it's doing too much, and is Lancer the right call over Rider given the horse-theft angle?

I enjoyed the webcomic so much that I started the webnovel. I’m 200 chapters in, and I really hope the comic eventually explores Ketal’s psyche more deeply. It’s mentioned that he always dreamed of a fantasy realm, but what kind of person is actually willing to go to such extremes? Since he quit his job to travel the world, he clearly had the means and lacked responsibilities, yet he still treats this new world like a moral-free playground. While other characters eventually notice his twisted mindset, the story hasn’t fully addressed the "why" yet. I’d love to see the series dig into those roots—though I might be overthinking it, given the genre.

Did the wrong thing before but here is it now