True! But we got some major answers this week with regards to the symbols on the cloth (granted, that just raised even more questions). I’m hopeful that although we may never get everything answered, we’ll at least have a satisfying ending that answers all the important stuff.
And for the rest? Well, that’s what meta and fanfic is for, right?
Well in this specific case, I say I’m not using it any more because this particular wesen feeds on it.
I use melatonin because I suffer from insomnia. My brain doesn’t release enough melatonin to make me sleep soundly. I prefer melatonin supplements to chemical sleep aids because it’s something my body creates naturally.
This is in no way a recommendation to use melatonin. If you are experiencing difficulty sleeping, or staying asleep, consult your physician.
Sweet lord, thank you for a message about literally anything else.
Also thanks for the compliment! I’m glad you enjoy the blog. And no, you are definitely not the only one. I love Rosalee’s woge, she’s so pretty:
I think this was the first time I noticed how adorable she is in woge form. It might also have had something to do with the expression on her face, but. Still.
What I love even more is how her face when she woges for someone new has changed over the years. Like at first she seemed very shy and timid about it, or defiant depending on who it was. But now she just seems very graceful and secure in herself with it.
(Also two of my favorite details are the little tufts on her ears and the way her eyes go from deep brown to bright gold.)
Hi Anon! Yes, we’ve addressed this twice now at FYNB: here and here.
Look, a lot of people in fandom seem to want to make this some kind of weird reverse competition: my ship isn’t that bad because this other ship is just as unhealthy! My fave isn’t problematic because look at the awful things your fave has done!
The implied goal of these kinds of questions and arguments seems to be “gotcha! see! you can’t criticize my faves anymore because you like this character who has done bad things as well!”
But it doesn’t work like that. One character’s evil actions do not become less abhorrent because another character committed similar actions. One relationship does not become healthier because another unhealthy relationship exists.
And that’s even if you assume we’re comparing like situations and dynamics, which 90% of the time when these things come up, we’re not.
You can’t look at someone with free will and someone without it committing the same action and say they’re equally culpable. You can’t discount one character’s canonical history of sexual violence and erase another’s canonical history of kindness and selflessness and then imply someone else is being “unfair” to the characters.
Just like you can’t excuse one character’s actions while under the influence of dark magic and condemn another character for their actions while under the influence of the same dark magic.
Well, I mean…you can, but it becomes pretty clear at that point that the goal is not to reach some kind of internal fandom character treatment consistency, but rather to shame or confound anyone who doesn’t like your problematic fave into silence.
One can only hope.
I’m sorry, that was mean. But I am very frustrated with Sean right now. I am glad to see that he has at least the capacity for remorse still, but I wanted to hit something when he tried to justify Meisner’s murder with “I was putting you out of your misery.” Like what the fuck, Sean?!
I think if I were him I would ask more questions.
Like…what would happen if maybe he didn’t kidnap tiny children from their parents and then bring them back when he changed his mind? Because by the time he kidnaps them, he’s already altered their lives even if he does bring them back later. He can’t guarantee that his actions didn’t set them on the very course he thought he could avoid. And yes, eating them would avoid that fate but…what if he just stayed the hell out of their business and saw what happened then?
Sometimes I wish the people in sci-fi and fantasy shows actually watched sci-fi and fantasy shows, you know?
Hi Anon! That’s a very good question, and one I’ve already answered in this blog post last year.
To sum up: Adalind did what she did while grieving and scared and under duress, but she did still have choices. Not good ones, maybe, not easy ones, but they were there. At no point was it impossible, literally impossible, for her to say no. And yet she went to Nick’s house disguised as Juliette with the full intention of raping him, and did not hesitate even once.
Whereas when Eve slept with Rachel, she did not have choices. She did not have emotions, or wants, or needs, or an identity of her own. She literally had all of that beaten out of her and replaced with Hadrian’s Wall’s mission and orders. She went to Rachel for information, not with the intention of sleeping with her. And when she did, it was because that is what HW needed her to do to get the information they needed, and what HW needed was her only choice. She couldn’t say no. She couldn’t make another decision. She was literally brainwashed.
As for understanding…I don’t think it’s fair to say I give Adalind zero understanding. I remember the way she grieved when she lost Diana, and how she looked everywhere for help and found none, and I felt for her. I really did.
But feeling for her plight as a mother didn’t make me forget for one second how she got to that point in the first place: how Diana was the result of Adalind sleeping with Sean while he was under the influence of a spell that she set into motion, which compromised his ability to give consent.
How she had already attacked Nick, his family, and his friends multiple times. Including Juliette, who had been nothing but kind to her, and Hank, who she also raped back in season one, by that point.
How they were entirely unwilling to help her for very good reasons, however pitiful she might have looked in that moment, because they also remember how everything got to this point.
How it was her own unspeakably selfish, heartless plan to sell her child that put the royals and the Resistance onto Diana in the first place. How Diana only has the powers she does because of the dangerous magical rituals Adalind underwent while pregnant with her.
How it’s the fallout and consequences of Adalind’s own scheming and lashing out that has caused the most pain for her, for Nick, and for Juliette throughout this entire show. And how whatever the show says about hexenbiest powers and how they affect people, she did quite a lot of those things while she had no powers at all.
So I do have understanding for Adalind, just no excuses. And I do judge Adalind and Juliette by the same rules. People just don’t like it when I point out that Adalind is to blame for her own bad behavior and its consequences, whereas Juliette is not to blame for things she did while literally brainwashed out of her mind as Eve.
Thank YOU for being awesome! I started this blog with a friend six years ago because I loved Grimm and wanted to find more people who did, and here you all are. ❤ ❤
Hi Anon! So sorry it took me so long to fill this request. I swear I wasn’t ignoring it on purpose, I just had a lot of computer issues that made it hard to make gifs for a while. Anyway, here it is! ❤
[cont] Juliette had a right to be hurt and angry, but the writers made her so irredeemable by having her so thoroughly betray Nick (and his mother, who did nothing to her). Adalind was kinda expected to do bad things, as she was villian for a time, but Juliette was the love interest. The one who was supposed to care about Nick. She was also friends with Rosalee yet she hurt her and tried to have Nick shoot Monroe. I just think the writers made it too easy to hate her.
This is one of those rare cases where I don’t actually think the blame falls completely on the writers for the way Juliette is viewed by a certain (very loud) section of the fandom (although I do blame them entirely for making Nadalind in any way canon even for a moment). Because if you’re not watching Grimm with misogyny goggles on, Juliette is no more hateful or horrible than any other character on the show.
I wrote a post on my personal blog a few seasons ago about the reasons Juliette is hated more avidly and consistently than other character on the show–long before anyone actually had anything like a reason. You can read that post here if you’re interested. In summary, Juliette is hated more than Adalind or Rosalee, or pretty much any recurring female side character, because she commits the apparently unforgivable sin–to a misogynistic audience–of being a female love interest with thoughts, desires, goals, and emotions which occasionally conflict with or challenge those of the male protagonist.
I would also argue that Adalind has done a lot of things before the oft-mentioned season three finale that were not done under duress. She did horrible things for power, for Sean’s attention, literally as part of her daily job, or just because she was told to. The fact that she did one of the many horrible things she’s done under duress doesn’t erase all the other awful things.
Nor does it help her case that she was still attacking one of the people she’d hurt most and taunting them with what she’d done “under duress” a few episodes before she suddenly decided she wanted to change…a growth spurt in character development which coincided suspiciously with needing help from all these people she’d hurt.
Now, consider the situation Juliette was in when she enacted her vengeance in season 4. She was under the thrall of powers that canonically influence people to do terrible things. She was suffering these powers not as someone who was born a hexenbiest, but as a regular human subject to the “side effects” of a completely experimental, untried, unpredictable set of magical circumstances.
Add to that the fact that in the span of a few days she was made to feel unwelcome and unsafe in her own home, lost her boyfriend of seven years and any concept of the future they might have had, and found herself lacking the support of any friends she thought had any hope of understanding what was happening to her. Juliette was in an extremely bad place, both mentally and emotionally, when she did the things she did. And it’s telling that she specifically attacked the things and people that symbolized what she (not incorrectly) saw as the source of all her pain: Nick’s life as a Grimm.
That doesn’t make the things she did okay, but it’s very much up for debate, on both a canonical and also a meta level, at this point whether Juliette can truly be held culpable for all the things she did–or whether the rest of Team Grimm can be truly blameless.
To be fair, Adalind had also lost a lot when she went on her vengeance spree…but recall that she was not under the influence of hexenbiest powers when she put Juliette in a coma. A coma that resulted in her losing all memories of Nick and developing a dangerous magical obsession with Sean that could have killed them both.
Juliette did the things she did because she was scared, angry, alone, grieving, and under the influence of dangerous, uncharted magic. Arguably, her emotions directed her destructive behavior’s targets but did not cause the destructive behavior itself. After all, Juliette has been all of those things before, and has never attacked the people she cares about or blamed them for her own pain. In fact, before the hexenbiest powers it was much more in-character for Juliette to put aside her own concerns in favor of what her friends might need at any point in time.
Adalind, on the other hand, did what she did because she was scared, angry, alone, grieving, and that was her pure human reaction: to lash out and hurt people, including innocent people who’d never done anything to her. Her emotions may have directed her destructive behavior’s targets, but Adalind herself caused the destructive behavior. She had no powers to be her excuse or explanation.
The reason fandom finds the one lovable and the other unacceptable is that Adalind was introduced as a villain and thus allowed to do her villain thing with audience impunity, whereas Juliette was introduced as a love interest and vilified by the audience every time she dared to do anything that wasn’t 100% sycophantically in line with whatever Nick might want or need. Add in a heaping dose of rape culture encouraging audiences to see healthy relationships as “boring” and aggressive, violent ones as “passionate,” and there you have it: the main reason many fans prefer Adalind over Juliette as Nick’s endgame love interest.
FYeahNickBurkhardt (Tumblr Backup) 