All right, another character I wanted to talk about from Grimm Fairy Tales is Slander. He’s a dragon who shows up in Snow White vs. Snow White, and there’s a little more going o…

All right, another character I wanted to talk about from Grimm Fairy Tales is Slander. He’s a dragon who shows up in Snow White vs. Snow White, and there’s a little more going on with him than you might expect from that description. When we first see him in that story, he’s carrying Binder. Then he lands and turns into a red-haired man wearing a green suit. So you’ve got this huge creature flying somebody around, and a moment later he’s standing there having a conversation. That ability alone opens up a lot of possibilities. You could walk past him in that form without having any idea what you were looking at. But the bigger thing with Slander is where he comes from. He’s connected to the book, and he recognizes that Dark White is too. That raises some interesting questions about what being part of one of these stories actually means once you’re outside of it. How much of your life is your own? How much of it still comes back to whoever has control of that book? With Slander, we get a pretty clear answer about at least one part of that. Dark White kills Binder, takes control, and Slander offers her his service. He serves whoever controls the book. So that relationship you see at the beginning has a condition attached to it. Binder being gone doesn’t leave Slander without somebody to answer to. The person in charge has changed. And that’s something worth talking about with him. Is that loyalty? An obligation? How much choice does he actually have? I wouldn’t automatically read that scene the same way I would somebody freely turning on a friend. The book is involved, and that changes the question. Grimm has a hell of a lot of characters to keep up with, and Slander is one of those smaller pieces that opens up a much bigger conversation. You start with another dragon, then end up talking about control, identity, and what happens when the people inside a story can step outside of it.