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ichorblossoms · 5 days

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hi Mintt hiiiiii can you tell me more abt how you conceptualized Grimm I love them and their church grim inspiration soooooo much (obvious) (fellow barghest my beloved) how did they get to be a beast person and how do they feel abt it ... is their identity something they struggle with bc of it ??

HELLO VIN HI!!! thank you for the question this is. ehehe there's a lot of stuff here that has just been In My Brain for the past year and i haven't talked about a lot of this in-depth so! welcoem to my can of worms

on conceptualizing grimm:

okay so i wrote about how grimm came to be a bit here and here, but basically the springboard for them was nezumi from no.6 not only in design but also in surface-level personality. the ideas of this person with a hard life meeting kindness for the first time in a long time and not knowing what to do about it is just. tasty. delectable. and of course i love me a good dog motif and haven't really tied that to any of my ocs that existed before that, so i wanted to do something with that plus some of my signature coyote flavoring and came to a conclusion of "this character feels they don't deserve that kindess and thus loves like a loyal dog to make up for it". it's about the devotion, it's about the purpose, it's driving me nuts!!

when i first made them, they weren't going to be humod (in-universe name for the beastpeople) and wrench (robot coyote) was going to be the anchoring point for the coyote motif, but then it crossed my mind that they could be humod and really good at hiding it, and i feel like that not only fed into their character but the whole coyote motif as well

i can go. on and on and on forever and a half about my personal attachment to coyotes, but part of it is this sort of in-between existence between being wild animals and inhabiting cities regularly, they're dogs but they're not dogs, they've been exterminated but can't die, and i really wanted their character to embodies these sorts of things (leon is also coyote-coded, but i wanted something a bit more literal bc it's fun to draw monsterpeople). it's naturally a very trans-coded existence and a sort of wellspirng i draw from in pretty much all of my work, but yeah! this also feeds into grimm being nonbinary and overall just having a weird gender.

their identity and the whole "church grimm" motif (which is more just like. a flavoring than something overt) ties in more with their backstory and yarrow so i will get to that. as i wrote this all out i realized that. it's a lot of words. i can't ever be concise about things. this is an essay.

so! under the cut is basically grimm's backstory plus some character analysis yeehaw

WHY IS THE CUT MOVING. I PUT IT HERE. BITCH i think it's fixed for now but if it's not just know tumblr's being a bitch and it's supposed to go. Here. vvv

and oh yes grimm struggles a lot with their identity, especially when it comes to forming relationships and attachment to other people but first: backstory

up until the age of ~13 or so they lived with their family in what was basically a traveling musical caravan that i'm calling the gardner family band for now (lots of names still need to be figured out but). most of the people who live in the desert that all of honeybee takes place in live in small pockets of civilization that are essentially company towns. both the people who live there and the desert itself are exploited for the resources and labor and basically no one really gives a shit about what happens in the desert, slightly more on that later. anyways their family travels from town to town and plays music in exchange for whatever people feel they can give (a place to sleep, meals, etc.), the gardner family band is well-loved across the region as one of the few traveling caravans because they bring some levity to people's lives. grimm (who will not go by that name for about five more years) is part of this and plays the violin with their family

i haven't determined what exactly happens (or if grimm even knows what happened bc they were barely a teen) but somehow the gardners as a whole or one member of the band earns the ire of one of the few wealthy families that controls the region and basically everyone but the few children are killed. rather than let some kids die out in the desert, grimm and their sibling(? or sibling-adjacent kid) get taken in to basically serve as indentured servants bc people with money and power can do whatever they want. understandably, grimm's fucking miserable and alone, they don't know where the other kid went, and after a few months they're offered a choice: continue to be an indentured servant and be stuck here or become a humod experimentation subject before being let go. they choose the latter

which brings me to: human modification (humodification). technology-wise the overall world of honeybee is more advanced than ours and genetic modification (or something like that) is a developing branch of science that sees a lot of success with animal fusion and modification. but like i said, people don't give a shit about what happens in the desert. it's a free-for-all, so scientists and companies with less moral qualms began to fuck around with more extreme experiments (that's why this universe has carnivorous doghorses), which worked its way from animal-animal stuff to human-animal stuff.

(full disclaimer i don't know the science here and neither do my characters really, this is the in-universe justification for me getting to draw monsterpeople)

despite having the tech to do gene splicing shit, machines are scarce and nobody really cares enough to outfit their workforce with them bc the desert is tough on machines and requires specialization which requires more money spent and maximizing profits yadda yaddda. this requires a large human workforce instead, and there's financial incentive for modifying humans with animal traits that create advantages in different labor fields (copper mining is a big one) and the overall fucking hot climate bc it's still cheaper than machines. people go along with modification bc companies pay people to let them experiment on their bodies. yeah sure you'll come out of it permanently altered and there's a chance your organs will get scrambled, but if you're down on your luck and out with a work injury and a family you still need to feed, is there anything else you can do? capitalism is shit and kills people.

by the time the story starts a lot of modifications are more standardized with higher success rates, but this was naturally paved by plenty of experimentation with horrific results for both humans and animals. experimental modification is still a higher-paying option for the especially desperate as well. certain animals also lend themselves to easier modification on humans, so mammalian humods are the most commonplace. it's also not a surgical procedure but rather smthin along the lines of "we're gonna implement weird shit and see what animal parts your body starts growing" and it uses....some gene shit rather than frankenstein-style fusing animals and people

BACK to grimm who is in the most dogshit period of their life atm, their own modification was semi-experimental in that the people behind it went "yeah you're gonna be stable by the end of this but we don't know what's going to happen". different bodies take to modification in different ways, so it's never fully predictable

humodification takes time, and in that time, grimm ends up befriending the daughter of the family and by the end of everything they realize they actually don't want to strike out on their own after this. they're at most 14, they have someone resembling a friend now and nothing else otherwise (and also they might be a bit in love with her), so they stay. they're still under people's thumb, but over the years they're trained to be more of a infiltrator/bodyguard for the family and are gifted wrench alongside a few other coyote humods. the idea there is the family (i need to come up with a surname for them) has a specialized team for carrying out some of their dirty work and because they're rich and can do whatever they want who cares if you have a literal teenager in there. grimm predictably and loyally falls in love with the daughter, who is......more in love with the power she holds over them than grimm themself. at this point they're more or less a human attack dog, they get treated okay, they don't know any better, this is what life is going to be and it's alright

eventually...something happens by the time grimm is 17 or so. i haven't figure out the specifics yet and i feel like it'll become more clear to me as i write things (again, this is all backstory, at most everything here is alluded to within the actual written story). their charge/girlfriend dies or is killed (possibly by grimm's hand) and afterwards it takes wrench and runs the fuck away. that's when they start doing the outlaw stuff, start actually going by grimm, figure out the gender stuff a bit, part 0 happens etc. etc.

looping back to humodification, humods (or humutts if someone's trying to be more derogatory with it) aren't usually looked kindly upon. at best non-humods ignore it, some pity them as people who were desperate and out of options, some look down upon them for trying to take an "easy way out". regardless of who they are as people or the actual circumstances of their modification, humods are seen as desperate, making it difficult for humods to get certain jobs and forces them into a cycle of poverty, possibly even worse than when they started. the intent of the people behind this in the first place is to save money at the expense of human lives, but the unintended consequence benefits them too, so they're not going to intervene

it's with that knowledge that grimm hides their coyote traits: they shave their face daily, hide their tail, never open their mouth wide enough to let anyone see their extra teeth, clip their nails and paint them to tell when they need to cut them again, always wear socks. and they pass as fully human very well! up until part three only a small handful of people actually know they're humod

bc of both the humodification and years spent essentially as an attack dog on a leash, grimm doesn't see themself as human. not inherently lesser than humans or better than animals just. not human (for the record, humods are still people). it's a dog, it's an outlaw, it's too animal to be human and too human to be an animal and it doesn't take solace in the company of other humods because it doesn't trust people. they don't yearn for domesticity because it's not something they've ever unconditionally had

i have a lot of thoughts about coyotes as animals with fission-fusion societies

it goes without saying, but for the sake of reiteration: grimm is Very traumatized. i talked a bit about how this butts up against yarrow in part 2 especially here. yarrow doesn't and cannot fix this, but what he does do is offer grimm kindness, and patience, and love (sometimes at his own expense or against his better judgement, esp at the beginning of part 2). grimm feels like it cannot ever repay this (on the inverse yarrow feels like he cannot do enough to be worthy of love), and after a lot of snags, the two of them fall into a comfortable life with one another, that grimm never thought it would have. of course grimm's an outlaw with a messy past that breathes down its neck, so when yarrow gets kidnapped grimm kinda just. turns into an animal for lack of better way of putting it. they don't have any needs of their own, until they have yarrow back they only have one goal

i also have a lot of thoughts of coyotes as both predator and prey animals

part 3 begins with grimm finding and reuniting with yarrow, who is at this point humod. grimm is naturally overcome with grief because this is indirectly because of their past decisions and they refuse to believe it's even remotely yarrow's fault (even though yarrow did in fact, shoot and kill a guy), it got yarrow back but it still failed because he got hurt and is marked by grimm's mistake irreversibly. meanwhile yarrow finds peace with it pretty quickly, like yeah he's in pain, but he's also kind of a little freak who enjoys not being all-human (this is also something he finds very hot about grimm lol), and also now he wants people to bleed for this so he's not going down without causing some damage first. grimm didn't give enough of a shit about itself to make much of an effort to hide being humod in the year it took to find yarrow, and with yarrow's own modification is impossible to hide, it stops really caring about hiding that part of itself unless it needs to

at this point, grimm takes it upon itself to become yarrow's guard dog, in its own view that's the best way it can show its love to someone, something it knows it's good at and there are several posts in the grimmyarrow tag that touch on this in way more poetic ways than i can. if you feel like going on a further rabbit hole hdgklhdf

unlike grimm's past, this time it's purely of its own volition that it gives its metaphorical leash over to someone. yarrow would/could never ask that of anyone and it makes him uncomfortable in a way, because he doesn't feel worthy of someone's devotion like that. at the same time though, yarrow wants to severely fuck up the people who did this not only to him and grimm, but to a lot of other people, and grimm has the knowledge, skills, and bloodthirst to help him reach his goals. and thus grimm gives its trust and body to yarrow, who holds these things with no small consideration because he knows there's an old part of grimm that's resurfacing and doesn't like that, but also both of their actions mean that they can't go back home safely (ei: without bringing destruction with them) unless they leave damage of their own in their wake

at the end of the day, honeybee is a deeply queer romance story and both grimm and yarrow exist outside of the binaries of male/female and human/animal, so that drives not only the story but just. a lot of my work in general. i feel like overall they're both characters who have accepted who and what they are, but in contrasting ways. for instance for most of the story grimm knows being visibly humod can harm it, so it hides that about itself from others, whereas yarrow has this love and appreciation for the not-fully-human and despite the pain is excited by their body and. i have so many thoughts about the two of them and how they contrast one another and i'll call it here for this post hdklgfhlkhg

#can you tell that i think about them so much. all the time #also don't mind the typos i'm certain there are some in there #thank you again for the ask btw!! this is all really core stuff to grimm's character and i feel like i've hinted at a lot of this either #in writing or my art but now you guys can all have Context #tbh i feel weird talking about grimm's backstory on my own bc i don't want to come across as like. edgy for the sake of being edgy #a lot of it was reverse engineered from this point of 'okay this is how this character behaves in the present. what the fuck made them #this way' but i spend a lot of time around preteens who are in the 'cool tragic edgy oc' phase that i absolutely had too #and they're having fun and that's great. however i am an adult and want to put more thought into my stories hdglkfdh #and with stuff like that especially but also anything on this blog i don't mean to be coy and only half-heartedly mention things #it's just a lot of it is mostly up in my head or as jotted down notes that /i/ understand but just don't. talk about any of it unless asked #mostly bc i don't know where to start #asks #vvindication #grimm #honeybee #honeybee worldbuilding #< guess i should start that tag huh

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