Hi Tom.
If I remember rightly the comment in It comes just after Bill and company
meet up with the title character, and Bill remarks that though he'll never
feel the same way about spiders, at least knowing that the monster behind
all the disguises is a spider is a lot better than what he imagines.
As regards grue, well interestingly enough i believe Infocom got the name
from some books by Jack vance. This wouldn't surprise me sinse Vance's
books have been the source for a lot of ideas in modern rp and other games,
for example the D&D magic system where by wizards need to first memorize a
spell to absorb it's energy each morning, then speak the encantation to
release the energy when they want the spell is apparently from Vance's dying
earth series.
Interestingly enough however, the term "grue" actually occurs in a problem
of philosophy of science from the mid 60's, (my friend had a good laugh when
we had a lecture on the Grue problem).
Broardly speaking the problem is to do with observable properties that
resemble another property at one point in time, but are entirely different
at another and comes from putting the words "green" and "blue" together,
sinse a "grue" object would appear green at one point, and blue at another,
so it would be impossible to know at any given time whether the object was
actually green or blue, or was grue.
The point to all this is that the word "grue" and it's association with
things that change and are a bit mysterious at least for me, goes slightly
further than the Zork universe.
I personally like the idea of "Grues" being completely unseen and unknown
creatures that only appear in darkness, but that is just a preference,
similar to Tolkien's preference for dipicting elves as noble, wise and
artistic rather than capricious and fairy like as they occur in some
legends.
so, as far as I'm concerned, conceptually the grue is up for grabs! :D.
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a huge fan of the Zork
games (which is probably odd for someone who likes grues so much), so it's
likely my respect for their universe boundaries is slightly less than
someone who is a major fan.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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