grendel made a stone carving of his mother that was smaller than him because it made her more approachable and him talking to the carving instead of to her directly is because he frankly doesn’t feel at ease around her

beowulf and the dragon are, if not the exact same person, similar enough in behavior and ideology to which they both clearly demonstrate the dangers of romanticizing and blindly having faith in the word of a militant hero / the teachings of a society that does not and cannot understand you

grendel only hates authority in TWAU because authority abused him and ruined his life when he was far too young to fight against it or realize he was being manipulated until it was much too late to turn back.  of course he distrusts authority.  look at what the shaper, the dragon, and his mother all did to him.

beowulf left unferth’s body out there for grendel to find because he knew grendel and unferth had a connection.  he knew it would enrage grendel.  he knew it would make grendel lose whatever faith he had left in us.  it was a trap to lure him inside.  it was intended to catch him off-guard and emotionally vulnerable.  it worked.

grendel and wealthow also empathized with each other because they were wholly unable to make any choices in their own lives / fates.  everyone around them told them what to do, how to do it  --  what their purpose was  --  and made them feel helpless.  made them feel like they couldn’t retaliate.  like they were only half-person.  subhuman.  like their identities werent their own  --  like they existed only to serve as entertainment for men and nothing more

beowulf and hrothgar are the biggest slimebags to ever walk the fucking earth.  grendel isn’t evil or greedy;  grendel is inherently gentle.  it’s the men in power who should carry the title of monster, but they don’t, and it’s infuriating

he can draw and paint with watercolors, canonically!   i have  examples of his art from the comics  [ 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 ] ;   his humor here is super crude, but don’t let it be mistaken as grendel expressing his own opinions  –  he’s just trying to paint bigby and woody as opportunistic creeps.     ( gren and little red get along fine.  he wouldn’t jab at her like that if it weren’t all in good fun. )    –  and yes, the idea behind these panels are that they represent grendel’s own art style.  personally,  i  think it’s super cute.

he began creating illustrations back in the days of heorot / hart, where he’d scratch runes and jagged representations of people and animals he knew into sea-stones and the walls of his cave.

as for CM gren and unferth  –  grendel steps into the place of the crooked man because he actually wants to do all the good that the crooked man promised to the people he was manipulating.  he’s crooked in a true robin-hood sort of way;  he wants to help, and he favors people he’s familiar with even if he doesn’t Mean to favor them, i.e. all the extra cash that mysteriously seems to appear in the trip trap’s renovation funds.

unferth gets a job offer.

On the chance, however, that he reunites with Unferth and/or Wealthow, it is  ...  going to be melancholic.  I feel like he’d finally let himself cry.

and is promptly  boinked  on the nose, drawing blood.

it falls to the floor with an unceremonious thud.  grendel, after a moment of speculation, drags his massive palm over the bar floor.  picks it up.  tosses it in the air once, catches it, polishes it on the scales of his thigh  –  where a few bristling strands of winter-down have begun to prematurely sprout.

big, half-blind eyes follow the path of trajectory.  they land on unferth.grendel  doesn’t  look amused.

…  at least, not until he rears that gangling limb and  pelts  it back into the face of his old foe  –  hard.  he’s a little drunk, more than a little high, and even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t spare his strength for unferth’s sake;  he’s a grown-ass ginger, yeah?  man can handle himself.

   “ hehe … ”

          snort.

when grendel is drunk or high one night, he turns to unferth, with his head on his shoulder, and just says some braindead shit like,  “you were always somebody.  something.  to me.”   doesn’t explain it any further than that, but gren thinks of unferth as an  “almost.”  an almost-friend, an almost-loved-one, an almost-love.  not as a nothing, but as a piece:  one single step forward, worth more than he gives himself credit for.  they have these talks in choppy sentences;  grendel hardly ever remembers them.  he just hopes the message resonates.

unferth is one of those people that grendel doesn’t mind crying around, which is very, very rare.  his tough-guy act is necessary when he’s uncomfortable with someone  --  he feels the need to protect himself, and emotional vulnerability is just as mortifying to him as physical vulnerability  --  but unferth, as far as gren’s concerned, is so depressingly similar to him that it’s like crying into a mirror, rather than crying in front of another man.  he also has a hard time seeking out comfort when he’s upset, but feels safe enough to lean on unferth’s upper arm and, sometimes, hide his face in his chest.  unferth can insist all he wants that he wouldn’t be a good friend  ...  but grendel’s a gigantic baby, clingier than he’ll admit, so.  it’s not like the poor old man’s got a  choice.

twenty-below-zero  –  that’s what the windchill says, anyway.  and maybe unferth’s fine with it, man.  maybe that danish blood still runs thick.  

grendel, though?  grendel’s got that  reptile  blood, and he’s been shivering all goddamned day.  doesn’t matter how high they got the heat up. neither, ‘cause holly’s heater’s half-broken anyway, and where the hell else does he got to go?  one side of the bar’s lukewarm, the other side’s got a draft running through it like seabiscuit on a kentucky afternoon, grendel’s suddenly got this weight on his shoulders and he turns around and it’s  …  it’s fuckin’  unferth.

( unlikely hero indeed. )

   “ where the hell you get this, old man? ”    it doesn’t look like any of holly’s quilts  –    but unferth never struck him as the type    to carry a  blankie  around.

he’s grateful enough to give him a smile, though.  shoots him them puppydog eyes.  takes him a little longer to cocoon himself the way he likes, with one arm ‘n all, but he manages.  always manages.

he didn’t grasp this, then;  the concept was with him, but the gravity of it escaped his mind.  couldn’t process that level of damage when he was already aching so, so much.  he was a vessel of the evil in the world, manipulated by evil things to do their bidding for them because he was easy to scapegoat.  easy to frame.  gullible, naive, brute.

Grendel understands it now.  it fucking keeps him up at night.

that’s  ...  why  i think he would attempt to befriend, or at least find closure and make amends with, Unferth and Wealthow  --  should he ever come across either of them again.  Grendel believes those two deserve closure more than anyone else he’s ever wronged.  he would want them to see that he’s different, now  --  that they can be different, too.  that he wants to be happy.  that he’s trying.  that it’s hard, but he’s trying:  struggling daily just to will himself to stay alive, but not succumbing to his residual demons.

he wants them to know why he did what he did, and that they saved him from being a monster forever, however inadvertently  ...  he wants them to know that there’s hope.  that he isn’t going to hurt them anymore.  that they all have  ...  a second chance, an opportunity to fucking  heal,  and that he’s had so many years to reflect on what he’d done  ...  that he’s sorry, he’s so fucking sorry, he hopes they’re better than they were.  hopes they  all  learn how to let themselves be okay.