I guess I never got the memo that grues have fur. I always imagined them as a big black sluglike creature.
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Oh, in Spellbreaker you’re not still relying on the BERZIO potion—it wears off after 800 turns or so in Sorcerer, it’s just a long enough time limit that most players never run into it.
But in both games you do get a glimpse of them, which I think mentions slavering fangs, arms of some sort, stringy fur, and nothing else.
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I like that concept - like they are made of darkness and cannot exist without it so if you turn on lights they’re not running away, they just cease to exist.
That makes them multidimensional quantum beings. They can only poke into three dimensional space in the absence of light. Sort of how Weeping Angels cannot move when observed.
Not quite, but sort of like Smilers in the Backrooms. You can see a Smiler’s face by looking into the darkness, but a grue has no such physical or perceivable features.
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I don’t think of grues as being conventional physical creatures. More like unknowable horrors from beyond. They couldn’t be represented in an illustration.
Grues and darkness are like hounds of Tindalos and acute angles. Darkness is their way in…
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I tend to imagine grues as being like giant slugs until they detect food, then open their mouths wide to reveal themselves as whatever shape is most likely to scare that specific food item into paralysis. So in a way, all of you could be correct.
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So, at the end of the day, it comes down to this…
From Spike Milligan (The Goons)
“It’s all in the mind, you know.”
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I love Bill Plympton’s ‘Your Face’, but I can’t honestly say it’s ever reminded me of grues!
(I try not to think what grues look like in case they’re like Weeping Angels in that, if you think about one long enough, you start to become one.)
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So… no more singing acapella? No longer lonely?
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The Calvin & Hobbes poem “A Nauseous Nocturne” is pretty close to how I imagine them. These two (fittingly vague) images in particular:
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I LOVE that poem! I once performed it in front of my class. And exactly what I think of it as (except a little hairier IMO). Is it odd that I still remember all of the lines off by heart?
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That poem kind of reminds me of “Lullaby” by The Cure. (“Spiderman is having me for dinner tonight.”) Which is gruesome in a way, too.
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I picture Grues to be like largish Tribbles, but with very short fur… and with wide mouths and enormous and multitudinous needle-like teeth (i.e., fangs). Oh, and slavering with sulphuric-acid saliva.
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I always imagine grues as the Japanese mascot character Domo-kun, and I’ve realised it’s entirely because I first heard about grues from the Uncyclopedia article. CW for a gore joke and a sex assault joke on that webpage. I am reading it again for the first time in 15 years, and boy howdy, it has not aged well. Almost feels reassuring to see a Chuck Norris joke in the wild, like when scientists record an animal that we thought went extinct 50 years ago.
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I always saw it as looking like the Groke from Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, probably because the Groke scared me as a kid and I was about 10 the first time I encountered a grue, not long after reading those books. Although the Groke wasn’t violent, she was dark and cold and awful.
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