So the next Grimm Fairy Tales group I want to talk about is the Hunters, specifically the group in Hunters: The Shadowlands. There are some familiar faces from the Realm Knights…

So the next Grimm Fairy Tales group I want to talk about is the Hunters, specifically the group in Hunters: The Shadowlands. There are some familiar faces from the Realm Knights, although they're in a very different situation here. The Shadowlands group I'm talking about is Sela Mathers, Liesel Van Helsing, Roman Asher, Masumi Yamamoto and Elijah Jones. Five people with experience fighting supernatural threats, stuck in a place that is a problem even before you get to the things living in it. The five-issue Hunters: The Shadowlands series is connected to Unleashed and fills in the Shadowlands side of that event. Because the setup is worth talking about. You have people who are used to hunting monsters, and then you put them somewhere full of monsters that have every reason to want them dead. The hunters still have their experience and their weapons. What they don't have is the comfort of dealing with everything on familiar ground. And they don't even get to begin with the simple advantage of everybody standing together. Roman arrives alone, separated from the others. That gives the situation a much more immediate problem than just, okay, here's the team, let's go fight the villain. Before you can coordinate anything, you have to work out where you are and what happened to everybody else. I think a setting like this gives you a good way to find out what a character actually knows. Somebody can seem extremely capable when they're handling the kind of danger they've spent years studying. Put that same person into an unfamiliar place, and suddenly they have to figure out how much of that knowledge still applies. Roman Asher is the werewolf hunter of the group. That gives him a particular place in the lineup and also gives you a way into the broader monster side of this universe. He isn't just there because the writer needed one more person holding a weapon. There is a category of threat that belongs to his experience. But even being the person who hunts werewolves doesn't make a whole dimension manageable. You might know what you're looking for when you're tracking one creature. That doesn't tell you how the place itself works, what else is nearby, or whether the thing you thought you were tracking is part of something much bigger. That is where I think having several hunters together becomes useful. Their expertise overlaps enough that they understand the general danger, but they aren't all copies of the same person. Roman can bring something to the conversation that the others don't, and the same is true in the other direction. Liesel Van Helsing is the vampire hunter. Obviously, the name gives you a starting point, but this is also a chance to see her working alongside people who know other kinds of monsters as well as she knows vampires. Her presence gives the group somebody with experience facing an enemy that can be dangerous in ways beyond a straightforward physical attack. Even the basic idea of vampire hunting involves being prepared for rules an ordinary person may not know. Walking into a supernatural conflict without understanding what you're facing is a good way to make a bad situation worse. And when the opposition includes Samira, the vampire queen, Liesel's place in this particular group makes sense immediately. There is a direct connection between the sort of threat we're dealing with and the experience one of these hunters brings to it. Masumi Yamamoto is the demon hunter, and she brings the swords and a different corner of the supernatural world into the group. It would be easy to put all of these enemies into one general monster category and move on, but I think that would miss part of what the lineup is doing. A demon, a vampire, a werewolf and a zombie can all be dangerous without being interchangeable. You wouldn't automatically assume the same approach works on all of them. Having Masumi there broadens what the group can deal with, and it gives you another person whose experience matters when they start facing threats together. There is also something about putting a close-range fighter in a setting like the Shadowlands that makes the danger easy to understand. Whatever else you know, getting close enough to use a blade puts you within reach of the thing trying to kill you. The supernatural scale can get enormous, but that part of a fight stays very immediate. Elijah Jones is the zombie hunter, which gives the group another specialty again. The Unleashed material also gives him his own focus in Zombies: The Cursed, just as Roman has Werewolves: The Hunger and Masumi has Demons: The Unseen. I think that is useful when you're reading through a shared universe. You can meet someone as part of a group, then spend more time with the kind of threat that explains why that person belongs there. The individual stories give you room to look at things a team book may have to move past more quickly. With Elijah, even that basic zombie-hunting role brings a different kind of problem to mind. A single opponent and a crowd of attackers are different situations. So when these hunters are dealing with a place full of hostile creatures, there is room for experience that goes beyond finding the biggest enemy and charging directly at it. Sela is the connection back to the larger Grimm Fairy Tales story. She's already someone I've been following, and putting her with these four hunters gives me a familiar person in a situation that is expanding the world around her. She's dealing with more than one kind of danger here, too. There is the immediate question of survival, but there is also the question of what this place and its inhabitants can do to Earth. Getting out matters. So does understanding what might follow you out. That's a pretty effective way to complicate an escape story. If the only goal is to reach an exit, then finding the exit answers a lot. If something dangerous is also trying to escape, the way out becomes part of the threat. You have to think about what happens beyond your own survival. The Shadowlands are important for that reason. This dark dimension is its own setting for the story, separate from the four main Realms of Power: Myst, Wonderland, Oz and Neverland. The environment affects the group before anybody gets a chance to settle into the usual rhythm of a mission. They have to find one another, learn what they're facing and deal with the fact that the people opposing them have their own plans for getting out. And the opposition has recognizable figures of its own. Samira is there, Ravenous is there, and behind the larger danger is the Being. Ravenous connects the werewolf side of the threat to what Roman knows, while Samira brings the vampire side. That gives the conflict more shape than a stream of unrelated creatures coming at the heroes. As the story develops, the Being's attempt to leave the Shadowlands becomes a direct threat to the world outside. The hunters are also targets. By the later part of the series, they are facing enemies being sent after them, so waiting quietly for somebody else to solve the problem isn't much of an option. These five are working together because of the danger they're in. They haven't been given the same kind of government-backed arrangement as the Realm Knights. They're stuck with one another, and their different areas of experience give them a reason to cooperate. It also changes what I look for in their interactions. With a formally assembled team, I want to know how they handle leadership and orders. With these people, I'm more interested in how quickly they can understand one another well enough to survive, especially when they haven't been given a comfortable place to do it. You can be very good at your own work and still be difficult to work beside. And when the consequences are this immediate, there isn't much room to spend forever sorting that out. Somebody else may know something you need, whether or not you particularly enjoy being stuck with them. One of the reasons I wanted to include this group in the Grimm posts is that they show another direction the line can take. We started with fairy-tale connections, but here we're spending time with vampire hunting, werewolves, demons, zombies and a dimension full of threats. Sela is still part of it, so the connection to the main story stays there while the kind of story changes around her. What I keep coming back to with this setup is how much harder it is to be the expert once the familiar rules stop being enough. Every person in this group knows how to fight something. In the Shadowlands, they have to figure out what all that experience amounts to when they're stuck there together and the trouble isn't going to stay there with them.