Tag: adalind schade

If Adalind can be forgiven & redeemed, Juliette deserves the same. She can come back from this “Eve” thing. Maybe she can’t be completely Juliette again – she’s been traumatized and Eve will always be a part of her. But I think that Juliette can come back, if more broken & layered & I’d like to see that. It’d be a nice character arc. I’d also like to see her & Nick gradually build trust again and… yes, slowly find the love they lost. Maybe that’s silly of me but its what I want. Your thoughts?

Well, first let me say that I don’t buy that Adalind has been forgiven and redeemed, not completely and even if in the eyes of the characters, certainly not in the eyes of the fandom. There are many who still have a huge problem with Adalind, don’t trust her, don’t believe she’s done anything real to make up for everything she did before, and don’t want to see her with Nick.

That being said, I absolutely believe Juliette can be redeemed, if only because the writers, directors, and Bitsie have done a much better job in her case of showing the conflict and lack of control during her downward spiral as well as the complete disconnect and lack of personal identity within Eve. Every step of the way we have been reminded of these things.

Plus, it was pretty obvious to anyone who didn’t absolutely hate Juliette and want her dead already that the back half of season four was completely beyond her control. That’s how it was acted. That’s how it was written.

That’s why it was so tragic: she was spiraling down into this abyss of uncontrollable rage and pain and reacting without being able to control it, then suddenly coming to the surface and seeing what she’d done and being horrified by it. And she could see it and feel herself being lost, and we as the audience could, but none of the other characters seemed to understand it or care that much unless she was causing them a direct problem, and then they only cared about stopping her, not truly helping her.

So based on the job they did writing that arc, and based on the person Juliette was before all of this, I think redemption is definitely possible for her and something I am also absolutely hoping for, even though I too think Eve will always be a part of who she is (just as the things she did in season four will, no matter how in or out of control she was, always haunt her). You’re right that it would likely make for a much more layered, nuanced character and it would be amazing to watch.

I’m not sure I would want to see anything romantic between her and Nick, at least not for a long time (and we’re no longer as certain as we once were that we have many more seasons to look forward to, unfortunately), but I do think there’s potential there for something, especially since all of the interactions in which Eve seems most like Juliette center around Nick and protecting him.

Now here’s where I have an issue with Adalind’s arc, and forgive me for using your ask to jump on a soap box, but this thing the writers have done with her character really bugs me.

Adalind’s supposed 180 this season is a much more difficult redemption arc for me to swallow than any possible redemption for Juliette. They’ve used a massive retcon (more on that in a moment) and tried a lot of the “pat the dog” technique this season to try and rehabilitate her character (more on that term and what it means here), but to me that’s just…not nearly enough.

It’s all well and good to start saying now that all hexenbiests and zauberbiests (not just the one completely unique case of an ordinary human turned into one overnight by experimental magic’s side effects) are out of control and destructive, but the fact is we have direct evidence to the contrary spanning the entire show.

The retcon is so obvious it’s almost laughable. It’s kind of difficult to bring that explanation in at the eleventh hour, just when they want us to like and forgive this character for all she’s done, and make it believable. Not to mention it robs Adalind of all her agency, calls her entire character and arc into question, and takes away any chance of real redemption for her in the future.

It’s especially difficult to buy when the way Adalind’s arc was written showed her, up until the very end of season four, not only reveling in the chaos she caused with no remorse or conflicted feelings whatsoever, but gloating about the pain she inflicted on others repeatedly.

In fact, mere episodes before she was suddenly all contrite and wanting to help save Juliette and give up her own powers for her child’s sake, she was attacking Juliette in her home, bragging to Juliette about how much fun she had raping Nick, and using the pregnancy that resulted from that rape to coerce and manipulate Nick into helping her.

It was so disingenuous a switch that even fans who adored Adalind didn’t fully buy it. Many of them were sure she was running some kind of long game of her own, for god knows what purpose.

Not only that, but a lot of the messed up things Adalind did, as has been pointed out again and again by so many people in this fandom, she did while she had no powers at all to blame her actions on.

So it’s just…harder to make that explanation stick when you apply it to all hexenbiests and zauberbiests, especially when that runs directly counter to literally every core theme of the show, than if they had just confined it to Juliette’s ultra-unique circumstances. And I think the net result has been a fundamental fucking up of both characters’ arcs that I’m not sure how the writers plan to fix.

So TL;DR: While I definitely think Juliette is redeemable and moreover deserves that redemptive arc, I also think the writers screwed up royally with trying to use the same mechanism that made Juliette’s downward spiral forgivable to also retcon Adalind’s entire character arc, because it just doesn’t make any sense with everything else we already know from previous seasons.

im wondering if the royals are going to make any reappearance soon, because if seans family is going to be a public display, then people are going to notice diana. it would be interesting if they came into the scene and took out some of black claw. on another note, it bugs me that monroe & nick as a blutbad & grimm can not act violently despite stereotypically being violent by nature, but biests are apparently doomed to act the way they do and cant rise above it now??

I feel like the Royals have to make an appearance soon, assuming they’re done licking their wounds from having now lost several members of their line of succession. Because they really wanted Diana, for one thing. I actually kind of wonder if we’re headed toward Renard taking his place as head of House Kronenberg eventually. I mean, they’ve gotta be running short on princes at this point.

As for the hexenbiest/zauberbiest thing, I am totally with you. Although I don’t necessarily think that they can’t rise above it. If that’s what the writers are really going for they’ve screwed up big time, because we have seen several hexenbiests who are perfectly capable of controlling their powers and themselves (Elizabeth, Henrietta, Eve although that’s a weird case). And Adalind doesn’t seem to have gone spontaneously darkside again with the return of her powers, so I dunno…it may be one of those cases of that being what is believed but not what is actually true.

And if you think about it, it makes sense considering the sources that information is coming from: Adalind, who’s only ever known the dark side of being a hexenbiest and who only recently found the resolve to really want to change, is terrified of what those powers may do to that resolve. And Eve, who’s also only ever known the dark side of hexenbiest powers, was “broken” in order to bring them under control. That doesn’t necessarily mean she couldn’t have learned to control them any other way, but that’s what her experience–with herself and with Adalind–tells her.

I mean think about it: if hexenbiests were as all-out destructive and dangerous and out of control normally as Adalind and Eve seem to think, they would have been hunted down and eradicated, or nearly eradicated, by now. We’ve seen this with plenty of other Wesen being murdered in droves by Grimms, by the Verrat, by the Wesen Council, or even by their own parents as small children because they exhibited some trait that was considered “too dangerous.” So I think that on the whole, hexenbiests must manage to figure their shit out somehow, or they wouldn’t still be around.

That happens a lot on this show: something will be considered common knowledge or indisputable truth, and then it will be revealed that it’s actually not or there’s some kind of exception/loophole. Like Juliette becoming a hexenbiest, or there being a cure for Grausen, or Lycanthropia being exclusive to blutbaden. A lot of times, it’s just a matter of “these exact and very specific circumstances to create this anomaly have never happened before.” Team Grimm encounters a lot of that, but because their main sources of information are Wesen who were raised with certain beliefs, it sometimes takes them a while to get to that “aha” moment.

Sneak Peak: The Schade-Renard family (plus Conrad and Kelly’s worryingly empty carrier) in 5×20: “Bad Night”

(Source)

A few things to say about this:

  • Conrad Bonaparte is not amused, Schade-Renards.
  • Diana is adorable but I’m kind of terrified of her now.
  • Can I get the number of Black Claw’s decorator? Because damn.
  • Also is it just me or must Black Claw membership come with a helluva personal shopper, too? I am 88% sure Renard has never looked so good in a suit.
  • Did I give you the impression any of these were serious things?
  • Actually on a Very Serious Note: where the sweet fresh honey-baked hell is Kelly?!
  • Okay but Diana’s princess bedroom though.
Source: nbc.com

This understanding for Adalind is actually making me so mad. Like how dare you, you’re all such hypocrites! Your BEST FRIEND lost her way & asked you for help & you treated her like a monster & when it was clear she needed you the most & the stupid Hexenbeist had clearly taken over, you guys all just ABANDONED her & plotted to KILL her. THEN ACTED LIKE IT WAS A SHOCK. Like what the heck Grimm writers? These are not the characters I fell in love with! IT WAS SO OUT OF CHARACTER FOR ALL OF THEM

Jesus tap-dancing Christ yes, it makes me furious.

It’d be one thing if they ever framed it in the context of learning from their MONUMENTAL fuck-ups last season, but they’ve never really acknowledged that they did fuck up.

And you’re absolutely right, even as bad as Nick “lies and emotional avoidance” Burkhardt can be with confronting problems sometimes, it was massively out of character for literally ALL of them to suddenly behave that way.

I doubt I’ll ever completely forgive the writers for that utter lack of character continuity and just overall lazy fucking writing, because instead of showing a believable arc in which the characters lose Juliette to this new power in a way that makes sense and really earning that pain, they just forced all their characters to react in ways that were so ridiculously OOC as to be almost comical. Which, don’t get me wrong, is still painful. But like…it was season four of Glee painful, not season five of Supernatural painful. So…epic fail.

Hi all. Admin D informed me that due to the read more on the original question, the whole post can’t be viewed on mobile. So I’ve posted the full thing here under a read more along with the original question so it can be viewed on mobile as well as on a desktop.

Anon Asked:

I’m curious.. so many people have been so passionate about calling what Adalind did to Nick rape (I’ve been one of them), but Julieve does THE EXACT SAME THING and… radio silence. I really enjoyed some of the posts you made about the Adalind/Nick thing, so I want to know your feelings about Eve now being a rapist too (which she is). I for one, am disgusted that the writers went there, but also annoyed that all the people who were so fired up when it was Adalind don’t seem to care now it’s Eve.

Part of the reason I haven’t talked about this issue yet is that this entire thing has gotten way more complicated with the way they’ve muddied the waters on hexenbiest powers and how they affect a person, and that plus several other factors has given me a lot to sort through before I can adequately address the topic.

On the one hand, about half of the messed up stuff Adalind has done occurred while she was de-powered. She cursed Juliette and Renard, raped Sean, slept with Eric, and tried to sell her baby while she was de-powered.

But on the other hand, we have multiple statements from both Adalind and Eve that who a person is with hexenbiest powers is fundamentally different from who they are without them. And that seems to be supported by the way Juliette completely changed when she became a hexenbiest…like everything about her got flipped around to the opposite.

All of which raises a lot of questions that we don’t necessarily have direct parallels for in the real world: like how responsible do we hold de-powered Juliette and Adalind for their actions while they have powers? Are they even the same people at all, or are they different entities in the same body? If not, what was with the radical change in Juliette? But if so, what was with Adalind in seasons one through three?

Then, too, I don’t agree that what happened between Eve and Rachel was exactly the same as what happened between Nick and Adalind, for one main reason: Adalind had choices, and Eve does not.

I’m not saying that Adalind had easy choices, mind. She believed the royals had her child, and she did what she believed she had to do in order to get Diana back. One could argue that she was under duress, and thus no more capable of giving good consent than Nick at the time. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say whether Adalind would have even looked for another option, given that by that point she’d already shown rape and robbing people of their ability to consent to be her first course of action in almost any situation. And it doesn’t at all change or invalidate the nature of what she actually did to Nick, or its consequences for him, both physically and emotionally.

(I’m not even going to get into the fact that Adalind’s decisions during this time are what led to Juliette’s involuntary transformation.)

But back to Eve and Rachel: it’s not exactly the same situation as Adalind and Nick. Not because what happened in that instance was any more consensual than what happened with Adalind and Nick. It wasn’t. But whereas one situation is a person under duress (but with choices) and a person being lied to…the other is a person who has no choice and a person being lied to.

Eve is not a free individual, and not just because of the hexenbiest powers (which I think we’ve established by now are a giant black hole of WTF GRIMM WRITERS). She is essentially a brainwashed captive of Hadrian’s Wall who has been programmed to do whatever is necessary to get a job done, even when it’s something she herself is deeply uncomfortable with (as she very visibly was in the scenes with Rachel).

She’s also been shown, in various scenes, to follow orders almost as a knee-jerk reaction to being given them. She displays no emotions. She expresses no desires. In short, Eve is pretty firmly established by this point as a person without feelings or intentions of her own, and without individual freedom of choice.

How can that person give good consent to be in a relationship or have sex? Her “yes” and “no” in any given situation have zero to do with what she as a person wants, feels, and needs, and everything to do with what is required of her by Hadrian’s Wall. Not because she chose to devote herself to their cause, but because they made her incapable of doing anything else. Trubel said it right after they showed up: they didn’t just train Juliette to use her powers. They broke her. They erased everything that made her an individual and turned her into a tool. That’s how they see her, and how she seesherself.

Rachel slept with Eve under the impression that she was sleeping with Renard. She was deceived in the same way Nick was deceived by Adalind, and her option to say no to Eve was taken away because she didn’t know it was Eve she was agreeing to sleep with.

One party was acting under false information. The other was acting in the complete absence of choice. Neither could consent. Both were violated. And I think it’s pretty clear afterward that Eve feels that violation. She, a woman who barely displays emotion, shows intense discomfort before and after what happens with Rachel, and continues to do so when she tells Nick about it later.

So the question is: when neither party has the option to say no, do you call either one a rapist? Are they both guilty? Are they both victims? Are they both both? How do we negotiate the multiple consent issues here? Does it change the equation at all that Eve-as-Renard was visibly reluctant and attempted to prevent this from happening, and that Rachel pulled her into bed anyway?

I actually don’t know. I’m still navigating these increasingly murky waters, all the while wishing that the Grimm Writers would all take a goddamn course on the meaning of enthusiastic consent and like, apply it to their writing.

Before I finish this mini-tome I’ve written, I feel I need to add this: none of the magical bullshit has to matter one whit to any of you as viewers if you are upset, squicked, or triggered by any consent issues presented in Grimm–or the way they’re so often very poorly handled within the narrative.

You don’t have to explain or justify why a scene, ship, or character hurts you. You don’t have to keep watching or participate in debates/discussions about these issues. It doesn’t make you a bad fan or indicate anything negative about you if you need to check out for your own mental or emotional well-being.

And obviously, this isn’t me giving you some kind of permission, because you don’t need my permission or anyone else’s. This is just a reminder, in case any of you need to hear it, because I know how overboard-adamant and nasty some people can get when anyone dares to point out that a show or fandom has become problematic to the point of being untenable.

I’m curious.. so many people have been so passionate about calling what Adalind did to Nick rape (I’ve been one of them), but Julieve does THE EXACT SAME THING and… radio silence. I really enjoyed some of the posts you made about the Adalind/Nick thing, so I want to know your feelings about Eve now being a rapist too (which she is). I for one, am disgusted that the writers went there, but also annoyed that all the people who were so fired up when it was Adalind don’t seem to care now it’s Eve

Part of the reason I haven’t talked about this issue yet is that this entire thing has gotten way more complicated with the way they’ve muddied the waters on hexenbiest powers and how they affect a person, and that plus several other factors has given me a lot to sort through before I can adequately address the topic.

On the one hand, about half of the messed up stuff Adalind has done occurred while she was de-powered. She cursed Juliette and Renard, raped Sean, slept with Eric, and tried to sell her baby while she was de-powered.

But on the other hand, we have multiple statements from both Adalind and Eve that who a person is with hexenbiest powers is fundamentally different from who they are without them. And that seems to be supported by the way Juliette completely changed when she became a hexenbiest…like everything about her got flipped around to the opposite.

All of which raises a lot of questions that we don’t necessarily have direct parallels for in the real world: like how responsible do we hold de-powered Juliette and Adalind for their actions while they have powers? Are they even the same people at all, or are they different entities in the same body? If not, what was with the radical change in Juliette? But if so, what was with Adalind in seasons one through three?

Then, too, I don’t agree that what happened between Eve and Rachel was exactly the same as what happened between Nick and Adalind, for one main reason: Adalind had choices, and Eve does not.

I’m not saying that Adalind had easy choices, mind. She believed the royals had her child, and she did what she believed she had to do in order to get Diana back. One could argue that she was under duress, and thus no more capable of giving good consent than Nick at the time. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say whether Adalind would have even looked for another option, given that by that point she’d already shown rape and robbing people of their ability to consent to be her first course of action in almost any situation. And it doesn’t at all change or invalidate the nature of what she actually did to Nick, or its consequences for him, both physically and emotionally.

(I’m not even going to get into the fact that Adalind’s decisions during this time are what led to Juliette’s involuntary transformation.)

But back to Eve and Rachel: it’s not exactly the same situation as Adalind and Nick. Not because what happened in that instance was any more consensual than what happened with Adalind and Nick. It wasn’t. But whereas one situation is a person under duress (but with choices) and a person being lied to…the other is a person who has no choice and a person being lied to.

Eve is not a free individual, and not just because of the hexenbiest powers (which I think we’ve established by now are a giant black hole of WTF GRIMM WRITERS). She is essentially a brainwashed captive of Hadrian’s Wall who has been programmed to do whatever is necessary to get a job done, even when it’s something she herself is deeply uncomfortable with (as she very visibly was in the scenes with Rachel).

She’s also been shown, in various scenes, to follow orders almost as a knee-jerk reaction to being given them. She displays no emotions. She expresses no desires. In short, Eve is pretty firmly established by this point as a person without feelings or intentions of her own, and without individual freedom of choice.

How can that person give good consent to be in a relationship or have sex? Her “yes” and “no” in any given situation have zero to do with what she as a person wants, feels, and needs, and everything to do with what is required of her by Hadrian’s Wall. Not because she chose to devote herself to their cause, but because they made her incapable of doing anything else. Trubel said it right after they showed up: they didn’t just train Juliette to use her powers. They broke her. They erased everything that made her an individual and turned her into a tool. That’s how they see her, and how she sees herself.

Rachel slept with Eve under the impression that she was sleeping with Renard. She was deceived in the same way Nick was deceived by Adalind, and her option to say no to Eve was taken away because she didn’t know it was Eve she was agreeing to sleep with.

One party was acting under false information. The other was acting in the complete absence of choice. Neither could consent. Both were violated. And I think it’s pretty clear afterward that Eve feels that violation. She, a woman who barely displays emotion, shows intense discomfort before and after what happens with Rachel, and continues to do so when she tells Nick about it later.

So the question is: when neither party has the option to say no, do you call either one a rapist? Are they both guilty? Are they both victims? Are they both both? How do we negotiate the multiple consent issues here? Does it change the equation at all that Eve-as-Renard was visibly reluctant and attempted to prevent this from happening, and that Rachel pulled her into bed anyway?

I actually don’t know. I’m still navigating these increasingly murky waters, all the while wishing that the Grimm Writers would all take a goddamn course on the meaning of enthusiastic consent and like, apply it to their writing.

Before I finish this mini-tome I’ve written, I feel I need to add this: none of the magical bullshit has to matter one whit to any of you as viewers if you are upset, squicked, or triggered by any consent issues presented in Grimm–or the way they’re so often very poorly handled within the narrative.

You don’t have to explain or justify why a scene, ship, or character hurts you. You don’t have to keep watching or participate in debates/discussions about these issues. It doesn’t make you a bad fan or indicate anything negative about you if you need to check out for your own mental or emotional well-being.

And obviously, this isn’t me giving you some kind of permission, because you don’t need my permission or anyone else’s. This is just a reminder, in case any of you need to hear it, because I know how overboard-adamant and nasty some people can get when anyone dares to point out that a show or fandom has become problematic to the point of being untenable.