sources of damage, trauma, and evil in grendel’s early life / developmental stages:
humanity as a whole; particularly humanity’s inherent hatred and violent distrust of anything visually unlike them.
the dragon, who lied to grendel multiple times about his purpose in life just because it found his confusion and self-hatred amusing, and took advantage of grendel’s need for a friend / some kind of authority figure to tell him the truth and look out for him because ... telling grendel that the only reason he exists + the only reason he will ever exist is to be hideous and cruel was ... funny, i guess.
his mother, who actively neglected him despite later turning up in TWAU to be much more intelligent than anticipated ... and still refusing to love her son, or even to acknowledge his existence beyond using him as a means of garnering pity and fooling those around her into trusting her. he basically raised her and that shit just isn’t fucking okay. he was a baby, and in the novel he expresses discomfort at how she used to touch him, which i really don’t ... like. at all.
beowulf, who carried a legacy of half-truths with him overseas because he wanted power and was willing to kill for it.
the rest of grendel’s family, who were simply too unintelligent to offer him any relief from his seemingly eternal lonesomeness.
hrothgar; grendel was disgusted by the concept of royalty and greed from day one, but to see hrothgar take an underaged bride for his own was just too much, especially given how grendel empathized with her and her martyrdom. he recognized these things as Wrong from an early, early age, and while he satirized the situation in the movie, he was still completely fucking repulsed.
religion, which taught the rest of society that grendel was inherently evil due to his blood-relation to the biblical cain.
himself. whilst understandable considering everything he’d been through up unto that point, his insistent self-isolation -- and eventual lean towards self-harm / suicide -- did him Zero favors.
sources of love, friendship, hope, and healing in grendel’s early life / developmental stages ( and how they came to hurt him worse, or how the world ruined them for him ):
unferth, who grendel empathized deeply with but, ultimately, realized that neither of them were allowed / able to pursue a relationship beyond rivalry. they were pushed into circumstances that forced them to conflict with each other, robbing both of them of a very significant Potential Friend.
wealthow; another person grendel empathized with and, in a very objective sense, thought beautiful. she was blinded by the insistent tales of grendel’s monsterhood. he wept often at the notion that she suffered similarly to him, and grew to resent her when the sympathies turned out to be one-sided. still, he never could bring himself to kill her. she was his angel from afar. he felt protective of the girl, whether he wants to admit to it or not.
nature, grendel’s only true home. he stopped feeling safe anywhere when even his roots turned on him. what began as blissful, childish appreciation of life became disgust and jealousy as he grew older + more knowledgeable of the honest workings of the world. he both envied and despised the grand simplicity of it all -- life as a complex accident, & nothing more.
the shaper, whose talents moved grendel long before any other man could reach his heart. i do believe he was in love with him -- or, at the very least, in love with what the shaper could create; towns paved in gold formed of nothing but syllables, songs like dry sticks. the shaper shaped reality, and grendel loved this until the reality the shaper shaped was one in which grendel was the villain.
art / writing / music, which grendel had a similar affinity for as his liking to the shaper, and still does to this day. he has always recognized the impact of creation on the human perception of life. while he’s since reclaimed these skills as coping mechanisms of his own, there was a time where this thing that awed and delighted him was used to further the ‘bogeyman’ narrative, attracting beowulf to heorot & assisting in grendel’s demise.
fellow societal outcasts, though all human, whom grendel attempted many times to befriend only for said friends to allow fear to get the better of them. he ended up eating these men, after awhile. their attempts to slay him when he’d curl around them to keep them warm at night were as piteous as they were traumatic. eventually, he stopped trying at all.
himself, again; all the kindness, compassion, and sentiment he holds ... and, of course, the time he lost his grasp on it -- a blossoming slip-of-self that killed him, in the end.
