in spite of the typically grim nature of grim reapers, grelle is an eccentric and flamboyant exception. her behaviour is impulsive and lacking too many manners, leading most people who cross her path to give her a wide berth. she simply doesn't care a lick how others perceive her, which grants her the unique freedom of being whoever she wants to be. that person just so happens to be loud, brash, and excitable.

however, grelle's personality isn't without its insecurities. she has a terrible tendency to seek out those who would treat her as less than trash. in life, she was regarded as scum, a disease, an unholy abomination—all because she wanted to wear dresses and do as little girls do—so some deep-rooted part of her psyche now has a masochistic craving for punishment, humiliation, degradation.

her "quest for love", as it were, is one to which there is no destination. love is a gift, something she hasn't earned, and something she can never allow herself to have.

for someone who thinks herself unworthy of love, though, she certainly isn't shy about pursuing her infatuations, often in wildly unhealthy ways. stalking, threatening, and hurting the ones she fancies is all part of her way of showing her affection; her "love language," as she calls it. recently those affections have found their muse in one hell of a butler known as sebastian michaelis. luckily for him, grelle isn't quite strong enough to break him like she's broken so many others.

reapers can withstand significantly more brutal attacks than humans with lessened damage.

reapers can become invisible to the naked human eye, though some humans close to death can still see them.

reapers can collect souls with their death scythes and review the comprehensive events of the lives those people lived.

tw: homophobia, transphobia, slurs, abuse, sexual assault, suicide

like all reapers, grelle was once human. she lived sometime in the early 1700s in germany, born to a tragically unnoteworthy peasant family. for the first seven years of her life, she was raised a perfectly normal lower-class boy. however, it was around her eighth birthday that, when asked what she wanted as her one present that year, she said she wanted a dress.

her parents were baffled and concerned. instead of granting her wish, they went a different route and procured her an apprenticeship with the local gunsmith, perhaps the most lucrative profession in their quaint little village. grelle was disappointed, but happy enough to start working and helping out her family.

she didn't hold her apprenticeship for long, though. her mentor all but dragged her back to her parents' house after only a few short weeks, spitting and raving about how their embarrassment of a son couldn't stay focussed on work long enough without wandering off to pick flowers and play with the other little girls in town.

disappointed in her failure and growing "queer" tendencies, her parents threw her into one apprenticeship after the other, desperately looking for anything that would make her "man up". over the years she was beaten, whipped, locked in her room for days at a time, denied meals—any and every form of punishment her parents could think of.

"it's for your own good," they would say. "you're not normal," they cried. "why can't you just be our son?"

grelle couldn't understand why they hated who she was so much. back then, there were no words like "transgender" or "gender non-conforming"—only insults hurled at her for being a filthy faggot, an affront on god's will, an abomination.

when she turned sixteen, she ran away. packed a bag of the bare essentials and skipped town to find a different place where nobody knew her, where nobody could judge her for deviating from the way she was born. she wore dresses like she had always wanted and she grew out her hair. plenty of men were compelled to comment on her ugly appearance, but nobody suspected that she was a boy underneath her clothes.

that is, until one of those entitled men decided to grope her to prove to his drunken friends that she had no breasts. they laughed at how flat-chested she was, pulled her hair and made jokes about her manly features, pushed her around between them until someone's hand pushed its way between her legs.

one would have thought some horrible, ghoulish devil had materialized in front of them, the way they shouted in disgust as if she were the one who had assaulted them. they chased her back to the house of a farmer who had given her lodging. the farmer warded them off and helped her calm down enough to talk about what had happened. she was terrified to admit the truth to him, but she did anyway, and she was surprised at how...not surprised he was.

he admitted that he had known she was a boy all along, but said that it wasn't his place to judge anyone. all he cared to do was let her stay on his farm in exchange for her work, call her what she wanted to be called, and mind his own business.

now, however, he told her that she must flee. the men who had chased her back here had a local record of making people they didn't like go missing. grelle took his advice and left the town, following a path deep into the woods.

she had come to realise, at twenty-five years old, that there was no hope for her in this life. she could move from town to town and never be free from the hatred. her whole existence was a blemish on god's green earth. there was no escape from the people who would want to hurt her just for daring to live.

her body was never found, left to rot in the tree she had hanged herself on. nobody would carry her memory, let alone come to honour it.

and then—deliverance. she was resurrected, raised from perdition to serve as a grim reaper as so many others before her. she was given a duty, a weapon, a second chance.

the first thing she did was kill those men. all five of them. then she killed the gunsmith.

and then she killed her parents.

she got to watch the events of their lives replay in front of her, got to relish in knowing that their punishment was righteous and just. her superiors weren't terribly pleased with her actions, of course, but it wasn't the first time a newly appointed grim reaper had sought revenge on the ones who made their lives a living hell.

not everyone was exactly kind and accepting of who she was even in her new afterlife, but at least now she had the means to fight back. she would never have to suffer the ignorance and belittlement of anyone else ever again. she was free.

grelle is a shinigami of questionable reputation in 19th century victorian england. she dares to challenge the status quo by being unapologetically queer in a period of time when many were still subject to the penalty of death for even being accused of such behaviour. of course, as a divine being, she no longer fears death. in fact, she doesn't fear very much at all, which sometimes gets her into trouble.

grelle is a naturalized citizen of hell after committing mass murder as a chainsaw-wielding serial killer topside. she's a skeletoid kind of daemon with glowing specks of red in pitch black, empty sockets for eyes and a nasty set of fangs. her long, rich red hair is made of lethal blades and she's always decorated in a flattering red dress and heels. she's no overlord—at least not yet—but collecting souls doesn't really interest her, anyway. she's more in the business of entertainment.