You see people learn to cope with the world by adopting funny masks or behavior patterns to make
it easy to deal with the world and these kind of prevent us from making contacts/connection from
others and also prevents us from being our true self. In Grimmer’s case he develops his own way of
functioning in the world through his disturbing childhood of experimentation that suppressed
emotions combined with the steiner show which lead him to suppress his outward emotions but
when punished or encouraged the wrong way it caused him to anger,rage and fury here what he
creates is a theory called Introjection in psychology which means that one unconsciously/
unquestionably takes in external infuences as their own personality, which Grimmer does with the
magnificent steiner.
Another part of Grimmer’s character you see in the anime which is very much similar to the points I
mentioned above and they also differ in some aspects are him being mostly aware of him being
unaware of his emotions for example whenever talked about his past and his child’s death or his
wife leaving him or the horrors of 511 Kinderheim he was always smiling because that’s the only
thing he knows to do, but there’s an other side to Grimmer where when triggered/questioned the
wrong way to his experiences or something related to it he showed emotions but was always
unaware of it be it the scene where he was consoling the child at the bridge who was maniupilated
by Johan or the part where Grimmer finally meets Bonapata, he’s was genuinely angry, sad and
pissed but he never realized it which, now that’s sad, these were some of the things I really loved
about Grimmer’s writing and how psychologically accurate it was.
Apart from Grimmer being a great success of the experiment his motivations and actions clearly
shows that it’s not completely true, he was always able to understand the human nature as one of
the outcast, he was always able to make people understand about feelings and being able to
understand that beauty of existence of being a human being is a suffering i can hardly imagine.
Grimmer as a character very elegantly represents that without an Identity one’s life is pointless and
it can only be known by our reasoning and motives which are very much depended upon the
connections that we form which could be with people, art and much more.
Even though one who gets subjected to things like Grimmer does will eventually go through slow
excruciating process of death, yet Grimmer was a rare case because his character always felt very
opposed to the philosophy of nihilism, despite him not realizing this in the anime but he does make
bonds people(and Lunge being one of them is the most shocking thing to me) he really cared about
the people’s wellbeing and him being able to create some indistinct sense of value from a life that
robbed him from being a human being and still being a person who he was through out the show
really tells us the he was genuinely a good person. He really impacted everyone around him with his
kind soul especially Tenma who was slowly in the verge of loosing his own ideals of “All human lives
are equal”
