the Philadelphia Flyers introduced Gritty to the world on September 24, 2018. this is a fact. there is documentation. a press release. a debut game. a wikipedia page with citations.
despite all of that, Gritty feels like something that has been watching from behind a wall for a thousand years. something that existed in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. something that PT Barnum would have taxidermied and displayed alongside his “Feejee mermaid.“
the label would read: origin unknown. do not make eye contact.
the thing is, he shouldn’t work as a mascot. he is approximately seven feet tall, covered in shaggy orange fur, with enormous white googly eyes that move independently of his face. his expression is a constant state of barely-suppressed chaos. he looks like someone described a monster to a very confident artist who had never seen a hockey game or a human face, and then that artist made him anyway and said, yeah, this is fine.
he is orange the way something radioactive is orange. not a color so much as a warning. his fur has the energy of something that survived several extinctions by becoming impossible to kill.
and yet from the moment he arrived, the internet collectively recognized him as a being who had simply always been. there was no learning curve. no “who’s the new mascot?” he showed up fully formed and immediately ancient. the jokes weren’t about novelty; they were about eldritchness. about an entity that predates the concept of professional sports.
here is the thing that genuinely unsettles me: Taylor Swift has seven albums that predate his existence. Taylor Swift, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, reputation, and Lover all arrived in this world before Gritty did. he is younger than “Shake It Off.” he is younger than the entire reputation era, which has already aged into cultural artifact. Gritty should also be a cultural artifact. but technically, he was not yet here when Taylor Swift was posting cryptic snake content and building enemies lists. she was doing that without him.
what does it mean that he arrived in 2018 and immediately felt like he had witnessed the fall of Rome?
there’s something in Jungian psychology about archetypes — figures that live in the collective unconscious because they represent something so fundamental to human experience that every culture independently invents them. the trickster. the shadow. the great mother. the hero. Gritty is clearly one of these. somewhere in the human psyche there is a chamber labeled dangerous creature that is also somehow okay, do not trust but do not flee, it might help you, it might eat you, both are acceptable. Gritty unlocked it.
he’s a mascot for a hockey team in Philadelphia. he is also, clearly, something much older than that wearing a Flyers jersey.
i’m not sure those two facts need to be reconciled. some things exist outside of linear time — moldavite sitting in a field for fifteen million years. crows holding grudges across generations. Gritty watching from the shadows since before the concept of sport was invented, finally deciding it was time to put on a jersey and terrorize Pittsburgh.
he is seven years old, he has seen things, and he has my full attention.