When We Were Younger

And now, the girliest, most sappy thing ever!
...Okay, maybe not ever, but darn near close for these two.
I think it may be the most OOC, vomit-inducing thing I've done in at least a month. Maybe.

For a couple of months now, I've been sketching little storyboard pictures every now and then, having to do with some Quest for Camelot backstory, which I felt these two characters lacked.

Unfortunately, because I came up with most of it at about four in the morning and while under the influence of sappy music, most of the story idea was realised later to be completely awful and devoid of any sense ( like me! BA-ZING! ).
I also gave up on it a little after reading a truly amazing fanfiction which went about the opposite direction and made me rethink things.

A few thoughts stuck, however, and one was the idea that maybe, just maybe, Ruber and the Griffin knew each other for quite some time before the events of the movie.

My first, and totally terrible, idea had been that a young, misunderstood but somewhat violent Ruber had rescued him as an egg after finding the mother griffin dead in a trap, being that mythological creatures were in this instance hunted and treated as completely evil whether they were or not.
This idea became too "a boy and his blah-blah insert animal here" so I've scrapped it for now, but I also had some little thoughts about Lionel, Juliana and a possible connection between the three of them which might have better explained what I thought seemed like a familiarity in the film.

I also wanted to illustrate a man's descent into madness, while at the same time showing that he might have aspired to being good- hence being allowed to become a knight. How else would a guy like the one we see in the movie make it into an order with such a strict and pious code?

My best guess is that he was different once- a better person- but that life finally got to him and he snapped. It happens, after all.
Later, the Griffin remains loyal and holds out hope that his master is still the friend he once was, even though he's changed.

The ideas flitted around; I'm not really sure that they'll ever go anywhere, but it's been fun to try and come up with something and it makes watching the movie so many times even more interesting.

So, here we see a younger Ruber and Griffin after a night flight, enjoying the very limited freedom that they've managed to attain.
One is hunted as a vicious creature, which at heart he really can't manage to be despite his hopes to live up to his species' standards; the other is bullied for the physical and mental attributes of a [childhood?] disease, lashes out violently at times, and is unable to escape the fact that he is slowly falling away from the boyhood naivetes of a perfect society or of loyal ( human ) companions.
That, and the girl he's got his confused young eyes set on is interested in a certain other knight and not him in the slightest. *wink wink, hint hint LIONEL wink wink IT'S JULIANA cough BECAUSE I'M PRETTY SURE THEY SEEMED TOO FAMILIAR IN THE MOVIE AND IT WAS AWKWARD cough hack sneeze giant wink*

Here, for a moment, they are away from all of that.
( ...and it's very girly. >_>;; )
Maybe in this particular instance, young Ruber still holds out hope for turning his previously totally crappy life around and becoming a powerful knight capable of really changing things and being respected.

I actually did some similar things, but mostly only in writing, for Ratcliffe and Wiggins, many of which survived but some of which, again, were just... Yeah, let's just say they were pretty bad.

BLAH BLAH BLAH I TALK TOO MUCH BLAAAAHhhh.

Characters are (c) WB!