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iamthescalesofjustice · 2 days

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I’ve been thinking about Grue lately. (Big spoilers)

I hear a lot when he comes up about how he’s an under-developed character, even to the point where people question how his trigger event lines up with his power. (yes I’m aware that Wildbow has said that he lied about his trigger, I’m referring to people who claim that he made up the entire thing) And honestly, I’m thinking that his character building is a lot more subtle than people give him credit for, and a good portion of that character building ties right in to the details of his power and the story he told about his trigger event.

So I guess this has been a long time coming, it’s time for me to give Grue the treatment I gave his sister.

First off, I want to establish an idea. Brian Laborn has what you could possibly call two distinct “personalities”, not in the traditional sense, but rather that he has two distinct sides to him that actually don’t overlap much but yet compliment each other in an interesting way.

There is Brian, the relatively laid back, hard working, compassionate, guy who learns quickly, and gets bored once he starts hitting diminishing returns. The guy who would do anything for his family members, and gets offended when Taylor says he sounds noble for saying so. The guy who is willing to become a career criminal in order to get into the position to become his sister Aisha’s legal guardian.

The guy who gives that “boyish smile” that Taylor fell in love with.

And then there is Grue, the methodical, practiced supervillain who thinks nothing of breaking the jaw of someone who was unwillingly recruited into the ABB. The guy who uses intimidation tactics and is concerned with his reputation and always votes for the plan that minimizes the risk to their team, even if the reward is a fraction of the other option. The guy who takes charge of his team and will go after any weakness that he sees in a confrontation. The “macho” guy who would cover up any weakness he sees in himself or else it will end up being taken advantage of in a confrontation.

The guy who can calmly have a verbal sparring match with supervillains who have multiple kills under their belt, and then lash out as soon as no one is looking.

These two sides of him don’t really clash, but instead sort of flow between each other. This isn’t too surprising, after all, just about every cape has some form of crisis of identity, after all Taylor herself has issues with blending the ruthless nature of “Skitter” and the heroism of “Weaver” when she joins the wards.

But Brian had this identity crisis a while ago, he’s been a cape for 3 years before the story began. He found his “middle ground” between these two personas, but the thing is… this “middle ground” is actually fairly lopsided. In the battle between his identities, Grue seems to have won.

He seems like a fairly open guy at the beginning of he story, but the truth is that he’s not always telling the truth. He hedges when Taylor mentions his combat training, he trails off when he can tell he’s outnumbered in his team, he doesn’t really share his feelings, and he avoids his problems.

In fact, he avoids a lot of things, his emotions, discussing his family, risks in his career, and the eyes of those who hold any sort of power over him. And he forgets that people can see how much he’s avoiding being seen. Taylor does note after all that when he’s at meetings among villains and when he’s stressed out by the attention of someone that he produces visibly more darkness around his body. She says it’s to make himself look bigger, I say it’s to hide.

Let’s look at his trigger event, or rather, what he said his trigger event was.

“We weren’t close. It wasn’t really possible, since I was living at the south end of the city and she was up here. But one night, I got a text from her. Two words: ‘Help me’. I called, but the line was busy. To this day, I don’t know why I took it so seriously, but I got over to my mom’s place as fast as was humanly possible. Ran out the front door, sprinted two blocks to Lord Street, downtown, and grabbed a cab. Left the cab driver shouting for his money as I charged through the front door of my mom’s place and found my sister.

“She’d been crying, but she wasn’t saying what was wrong. I didn’t bother asking a second time. I gave her a hug, picked her up and started to leave. A man I didn’t recognize got in my way. My mom’s new boyfriend.

“I knew he was the reason she had texted me for help, from the moment I saw her reaction. Maybe I’d suspected there was something going on even before that, from the way her emails and texts had changed in tone. It would explain that gut feeling I’d had that made me get over there as fast as I did. I saw her shrink back, I felt her hold me tighter, and I went cold inside.

Immediately after this line, Brian pauses for a long enough period of time that Taylor thinks that he had finished his story already before he starts on a tangent for “context”, describing how his father taught him to fight. That pause was meaningful, he was stopping to think about how continuing to talk would make him appear weak, because he just conveniently sounds very bad-ass when he gets back to his story.

I didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound. I put my sister down and beat my mother’s boyfriend within an inch of his life, my mother screaming and wailing the entire time. When I was done, I picked my sister up and returned to the cab. We went to my father’s that night, and we went to the police station in the morning.”

“When you throw a punch barehanded, it doesn’t leave your hands pristine. A few good swings, you connect solidly with someone’s face, someone’s teeth, and it tears the fuck out of your knuckles. It was at my father’s place that night, washing and cleaning my hands, when I saw it. It wasn’t just blood leaking out of my torn up knuckles, but there was the darkness too, like wisps of really black smoke. You hear about the trigger event, you might think it’s all about rage or fear. But I’m a testament that it can be just the opposite. I didn’t feel a fucking thing.”

Now let me just go ahead and say, those lines in bold are all lies. According to Wildbow himself, Brian was abused as a kid by one of his mom’s boyfriends, and when he came to help Aisha, he saw the exact same man and knew that he had done to Aisha what he had done to Brian.

Now let’s look at some details about his power. He generates clouds of darkness that block out all light and sound and muck with your sense of touch and these clouds do not affect him at all. But there’s also another detail that gets forgotten due to how rarely it comes up.

Scentless man makes Brutus nervous because he is big but he has no smell. But he is Master’s alpha so Master stops and listens.

-Brutus

Darkness boy isn’t around anymore or I’d be able to smell him.”

-Stormtiger

I could smell his sweat, with the faint traces of his deodorant beneath. It was funny, because when we’d settled in, I hadn’t been able to smell anything.

-Taylor

When Brian is using, or has recently used his power, he has no scent. But the thing is, that all 3 of those people have displayed being able to smell things inside his darkness, only Brian’s scent is gone when his power is being used, no other smell is affected. It also just happens that the first person to bring this up is a dog who throughout the chapter repeatedly mentions smelling emotions from other characters.

So when faced with the person who had hurt him when he was a kid, who had been hurting his sister, he gets a power that lets him hide himself. A power that means people can’t see him shrink back or flinch, a power that means you can’t hear him scream or whimper, a power that means you can’t feel how badly he’s shaking, and a power that means no one can smell his fear. He’s a perfect stranger trigger….

But there’s more to it, He’s not the one who needs to hide, not really. He’s a fit teenager, he’s had experience in the boxing ring, he doesn’t just know how to throw a punch, he knows how to take a punch. But above all else he wants to keep those close to him from experiencing the things he has, which is the perfect stress for a shaker trigger. So of course his power doesn’t blind him, he still hears the screams, he still sees the violence, he still feels every tremble of his body perfectly, but everyone else is shielded from it. He didn’t break when his mom’s boyfriend beat him, he broke when his mom’s boyfriend moved on to beating his sister.

He didn’t break when Bonesaw had cut his chest open and crucified him in a walk-in freezer with his organs on display and added nerve endings stretched across the room, making him feel immense pain any time someone even entered the room. He even remained stubborn and refused to use his power to keep Bonesaw from getting the data on his power that she wanted, it didn’t matter how badly she tortured him, he could take it.

But the second his team are dragged out in front of him, with taylor’s skull cut open and Bonesaw straddling Aisha while holding a circular saw?

Then it stopped. I could hear a strangled noise.

“Aw. Look at his heart beating! So fast!”

…

Another strangled noise, trying and failing to form words. It was so forced and ragged that it made my own throat seize up in sympathy.

Then Bonesaw starts taunting him. She tells him about how much suffering they have already put his sister through, how they had her begging them for help a while ago and he only just found out about it.

He made a sound that might have been a growl or a howl of rage, but there was no volume to it, and it was more high-pitched than anything else.

Once he finds out how his sister has been hurt badly by those who have hurt him, he howls in rage.

I felt a hand pat my cheek.

…

“It’s just so funny, watching him react. His heart beat faster when I touched her.”

and then she calls out him reacting to her threats and Burnscar readies to attack his friends and his darkness pools out and he has a second trigger.

Now compare this to his first trigger. My interpretation of the exact scene would be that Brian recognized the man who had abused them both, and he taunted them, talking down about them both. Brian most certainly reacted to how he talked about Aisha. Brian was terrified of the situation, But he wanted to be a shield, he trusted his body and knew what he wanted to do, to beat the abuser’s face in, like how he punched his mom’s boyfriend in the face until his knuckles bled, and how he pulped burnscar’s skull against a counter-top, and above all else he didn’t want people to see any sign of weakness from him, and he wanted to shield those he cared about from the violence around them. And most importantly he wanted them to not see how violent/abusive HE was capable of being. Which I believe is part of one of the biggest details about a line that he says in arc 2 and expands on in arc 5. A line that I actually have never seen anyone bring up in discussions about him.

“I hate this, Rachel. That you make me do shit like this. That when I say things like that, I sound like everything I hate most in this world.

That right there. His issues with abusive family members aren’t just limited to his trigger event, this at times leads to extreme self hatred, because he is aware of how similar he is to the people who haunt him at times, he’s even caught himself lashing out at Aisha in similar ways before, and that was a pivotal moment in his life.

“I know, but you’re not getting it. I was the type to go after someone if they showed a vulnerability. Wasn’t until I’d had my powers about a year, Aisha tells me I was being an asshole, just like one of her stepdads used to be. So I tried to be better, but I always wanted to protect her, always wanted to help others.

He’s deeply afraid of being like other people in his family, and it’s not just his mom’s boyfriends that bother him. He seems to have other traumas specifically related to his mom that eat at him that he doesn’t tell anyone about, even to the point where Aisha is less bothered by their mom’s issues than he is.

“And mommy’s on a bender,” Aisha said. “Don’t think it’ll end anytime soon.”

It was odd, but Brian looked more upset at hearing that than Aisha was about saying it aloud. Hadn’t he grown up with his dad?

15.1

“Look, Mr. Laborn, we have to consider Aisha’s perspective. She’s a serial runaway. She clearly doesn’t see your father’s place as a home. Extra care should be given to ensure she sees this as one. Assuming she winds up here and not at her mother’s.”

“My mother’s,” Brian’s expression took on a more serious cast.

“I’m aware of your concerns on the subject of Aisha’s mother, Mr. Laborn.”

6.3

All together it’s clear that even pre-Bonesaw, Brian was a deeply traumatized individual who was just good enough at putting up a false face and avoiding his traumas enough that no one could use it against him. Good enough even that us readers could barely see a sign of it.

Except his fears still get expressed notably no matter how much he hides them, in fact, they get noticed because he hides them. Every time he is faced with his traumas and fears he defaults to “orders, rules and self-discipline” according to tattletale’s power, and he is always noted to make himself appear larger to the point where his body language is impossible to read.

When faced with the members of Empire-88 accusing him of being aggressive on neutral ground, he swells up to “look more imposing” or possibly to hide his body language from the neo-nazi’s who have a history of attacking his family and have almost certainly targeted him in his civilian identity at some point. When he is spit up by Echidna he becomes a blob of shadow so shapeless that Taylor can’t tell what position he was sitting in. And then when he sees Bonesaw standing across from him at a meeting between major cape groups, his darkness was literally writhing as he struggled to not look at her, which his teammates immediately knew was him withdrawing and burying all of his emotions, every time he does it, his team notices and quickly figures out the reason.

The one time he doesn’t do this is after his second trigger, where he is on his knees, visibly sobbing in front of his entire team, the one time where the pain is so raw that he can’t hide, his default instincts of self discipline fail.

His power helps him hide, but not well enough to keep those close to him from knowing his reactions. But still well enough to keep everyone, including the readers, from seeing too much of the traumatized scared teenager who knows he is in way over his head named Brian, and instead to see the intimidating supervillain with an impressive track-record named Grue.

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