Here’s a new picture of Grandpa Gruff and Grandma Grizel as kids. The two were having a flying competition until Grizel lost her balance and ended up throwing herself on a nearby cloud. Gruff can’t help but be slightly amused by his friend’s little mishap. I was originally going to use a generic blue sky, but halfway through the drawing, I decided to play around a bit with some warm colours. And I’m super proud of the result! If you don’t really understand the title, don’t worry. It’s just that I had a hard time finding any synonyms for “flight” that started with “a”. XD Hope you like it! ^^

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Now, since December, I have been doing a little diving into the way I wrote Grizel - a small change to her might be visible in my latest drawings with her. The deeper I dived, the more I noticed that the character’s role had a lot of potential that would go to waste if I continued to write her the way I had. After watching some very well-thought out analysis videos, I decided to change Grizel’s writing almost completely. It would honestly not make any sense for Grandpa Gruff to be attracted to, let alone be friends with, someone who annoys him that much and to make light of WHY Gruff prefers Grizel over other girls interested in him. WAAAY BACK, I had originally written Grizel to be far more arrogant, bossy, and crabby, kinda like Spoiled Rich. Even after I changed this and gave her a nicer personality, it still felt like she acted a lot like Marinette from Miraculous Ladybug when she was around her love interest. At first I thought it was fine, but I later realised that it was anything but. I wanted to give the two characters a healthy relationship and what I had initially in mind was not. So, I rewrote her character as a whole and transferred those negative qualities I had given her to hers and Gruff’s OTHER admirers.

This way, you can see how she stands out from anyone else showing interest in Gruff; her interest, trust, and friendship towards him is GENUINE, she has her own things to do outside of her relationship with Gruff, respects his privacy and boundaries, and will vocalise what Gruff does wrong regardless of her feelings for him and won’t agree with him on everything just to ‘keep him around, because he’s a Griffon’. As a youngster, she does get a little shy around Gruff (as you can see in the picture), but not to the point of not being able to speak normally to him (like a certain Marinette does to a certain Adrien). She’s also viewed as a maternal/grandmaternal figure amongst the Griffons the same way Gruff is.

On a final note, watching the aforementioned analysis videos, something crossed my mind: “If they’re a good match, why am I keeping them from being together?” So, yes, after a few obstacles, Gruff and Grizel begin officially dating. Simply put, 8NICOPINK8 predicted the future. XD