Spirit Rider - The Grim Reaper

WARNING! SPOILERS AHOY! READ CHAPTER 5 OF ‘THE ROYAL PROBLEM’ BEFORE YOU PROCEED!

The. Grim. Reaper. It doesn’t get much better than that.  From the off, she’s introduced as charismatic, sharp-witted, and sarcastic. She’s most definitely not the dark, fearful being that Paralex’s legends paint her as. In all situations she will try words before force, often using people’s fear or unease to her advantage. She’s over a hundred years old, with four thousand plus years’ worth of memories from previous Reapers. She’s too old to be concerned with people. It’s all she’s ever known. She’s entirely care-free, doing what she wants, when she wants. Not even The Queen can give her an order most of the time.

But when the situation calls for it, she can change in an instant, calling on eons of experience as a fighter and magic-user. Her brain is endlessly brilliant, a master of many things from advanced mathematics to a working knowledge of almost every creature on the planet.

From a young age, I was fascinated by the concept of a Grim Reaper, helped greatly of course, by the Discworld series. Long before Spirit Rider, when I wanted to be a Game Designer, one of the first games I devised was one where a man became a universal Grim Reaper and went from dimension to dimension reaping the souls of demons.

As far as Spirit Rider is concerned, never, at any point was Grim anything but female. It was one of the earliest parts of Spirit Rider that I was sure of. Before I started writing it, I had been reading a book with a powerful, commanding female character, which offered quite some inspiration. I read it and thought ‘ooh that’s pretty cool, I might do something a bit like that’.

Of course having her as an ‘it’ for the first few chapters is very deliberate. Naturally you assume that if anything, she’s male. But whilst in the ‘expected’ persona, I show her as a likeable and intelligent character interacting with Sam and a powerful fighter facing off against Acheron. Then the gender reveal.

I call it the ‘L Principal’. Just like in Death Note they showed L to be a brilliant detective, before we see he’s a weedy, weird little man who loves sweets, so I showed Grim as brilliant before the gender reveal. Now don’t get me wrong, I'm no misogynist! But I think I know if I were reading the book for the first time and was immediately confronted with a female Grim Reaper, I would question it. Some part of me just wouldn’t be sure. So I show the before, just to be sure.

With the amount of interaction between her and Acheron, it could easily be argued that she sometimes edges in on Sam’s territory as the main character. There was a very brief time when I considered dropping Sam altogether and just having the adventures of Grim! But this was very brief indeed. Sam is a very necessary character.