Hey, are you still alive after saw the promo of the next episode ? NICKEVE/JULIETTE KISS, DAMN IT dying inside !!! Okay, now can I be worry with the ship war in the fandom next friday ? Mari.

Nope. I’m dead as a doornail after that, tbh. I’m also really worried about Nick’s reaction, though, as I talked about more in this response to @teamrebecchi‘s gifset on my personal blog.

The rest of the promo also makes me worry it might not really be something Eve/Juliette is doing of her own free will, because it looks like there’s some kind of magic or Wesenness at play in the next episode affecting people’s emotions and actions.

Which would just be…no. Please no. These characters have had their free will and hearts tampered with enough by magic, circumstance, and destiny.

As for the ship wars, my advice is: don’t worry about it. Steer clear of it if you can, and don’t engage trolls and haters on either side. Just enjoy the next episode–and the six after that–as much as possible. These are the last new episodes we will ever have together as a fandom and we should focus on having fun with them, not on ship war silliness.

Crash in your askbox from the ceiling SPEAKING OF WOGE Did you notice how inconsistent Renard woge is across all different seasons it’s driving me up the waaaall 8| CGI dudes y u do dis to us

Honestly…I’ve never noticed it. Like I’ve seen it mentioned a few times by different people and my reaction is always just that: “huh. I never noticed.”

It might have something to do with the woge itself, tbh. I can look at images of Rosalee all day and pick out all the tiny things I’ve always found so pretty about her woge. But Sean’s? I’ve honestly tried not to look too closely at it, because:

Yikes.

(because most of your anons seemed to be about the hexendebate lately (i LOVE this word btw)) I love this blog, thank you so much for running it! Also, am I the only one who thinks that Rosalee’s woge is breath-takingly beautiful?

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.)

I’m not sure if this has been addressed already. But I’ve seen some n*dalind shippers say that Juliette/Eve could also be a rapist (when she turned into Renard and had to sleep with Rachel.) What do you think?

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.

If Nick calls Juliette’s name and she responds I think I’m going to explode with feels. Especially if it’s a dangerous situation and maybe they were both afraid for each other and, “Juliette!” And she would see Nick across the hall and without any hesitation she’d just go, “Nick!” In that cute Jules voice, like in Game Ogre. And she’d run to his side. And there’d be the ‘Are you hurt’ exchange and ‘what-is-person-space?’ A hug is not necessary, but it would be a wonderful bonus 8-)

Assuming she ever leaves the tunnels (like seriously, what the heck was she doing down there that long and why did no one ask where she was all that time???), that would be lovely.

What do we want? Silverhardt! When do we want it? In the next nine episodes, guys, c’mon…you’re running out of time.

even if meisner is only a hallucination i’m just happy that his death is having such a huge impact on sean, i mean the guy is seeing his friend everywhere and its killing him. meisner’s death is killing him

~~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 feel like last nights Wesen was probably one of the saddest. I mean, he has to eat babies that grow up to be evil. I don’t think I could ever do that if I were him

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. I’ve been watching grimm since day one and I’m unhappy about how they forced Nick and Adalind together. Just because they have a kid together doesn’t make it right. Nick gets tricked into sleeping with her and now he loves her? I try to point out to people that no one would ship them if gender roles were reversed. What do you think?

I would like to think you’re right, and that people would at least recognize the very obvious male predator dynamic, but considering there are people who ship things like Jessica Jones/Kilgrave, which is a man preying on a woman and is also very clearly and literally shown/declared to be rape in canon, I’m afraid not.

See, erasure of male victims and the notion that women can’t be rapists is only part of the equation. The other part of it is that rape culture and abuse apologism are so prevalent in our entertainment that people actually think a lot of abusive, stalkery behavior is romantic. Just look at the popularity of Twilight when it came out, which was basically “Abusive Relationships With Vampires: The Saga.”

Or go further back and get out of sci-fi a bit, you’ll still see it everywhere. Take Ross and Rachel from Friends, where Ross was controlling, condescending, dismissive, and all-around a dick but was supposed to be seen as a “nice guy” because he liked to be monogamous. Or how about that creepy-ass scene in the car near the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the guy was like “I love you, you belong to me.”

The elected president of the United States is a known rapist. David Bowie, celebrated rock icon, is a known child rapist. And in both cases supporters will try to make excuses for why those rapes didn’t happen, or don’t count. Ten years ago scores of fans came out of the woodwork to blame Rihanna and adore Chris Brown when the latter beat the former so severely she was unrecognizable. Women tweeted “I would let him beat me up any day” in response. Last year, fans did something similar regarding Johnny Depp’s well-documented abuse of his wife, Amber Heard.

Rape culture and abuse apologism are everywhere. They’re in every romantic comedy where a busy, brilliant, independent woman is secretly lonely and miserable and just needs the “right man” to come show her how to be a woman the “right way.” They’re in bodice-ripper romance novels, where the scenario of a woman saying no to sex is painted as a challenge rather than the end of the conversation. They’re in the notion that men always want sex (or even “need” it) and women never do unless convinced. They’re in the idea that healthy relationships are boring but violent relationships are “passionate.”

That shit is literally all over our entertainment and culture, and so…no, sadly, I don’t think if Nick were a woman and Adalind were a man people would ship it less or not at all. They would just use a slightly different tack to justify it.

Honest question…how can you support Eve when she pretended to be Renard and slept with Rachel (who had no knowledge/gave no consent)? Yet judge Adalind for the same exact thing? AND in Adalind’s case, it was about a mother trying to get her child back. Her baby was stolen from her which is the most horrible thing that can happen to a mother, yet you give her zero understanding but give Eve/Jul a pass…if you are going to judge everyone by equal standards, do the same for both Eve/Adalind.

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.

I just wrote a really long post on one of your response to an ask. I’m really sorry if it offended you or is an inconvenience. It is just that i was getting tired of all the ship wars. Going into the tags becomes exhausting instead of fun. The nadalind shippers going after juliette and the nickette shippers going after adalind. They are both amazing characters whose storylines are not nicely handled by the writers. So anyway i’m so sorry that i high jacked your post.

No worries! Believe me, I feel you on the ship war exhaustion. I don’t even go into the fandom tags for certain characters or ships anymore because I know I’m not going to see anything but wank.

That being said, it’s worth noting that opponents of Nadalind sometimes have very good reasons for why they feel the way they do about that ship. There’s a whole Marianas Trench of difference between “I don’t like this ship, it’s not my bag” and “one of these characters raped the other one and therefore the thought of them in a romantic or sexual relationship squicks me the hell out and sends a terrible message that perpetuates rape culture.” I’ve even heard from multiple fans that they were too triggered by the show taking it canon to continue watching last season. So. Just gonna leave that there.

But in the interest of helping people avoid The Discourse surrounding the whole Juliette/Adalind/Nadalind/Silverhardt mess the show and fans have gotten snarled into, maybe a tag specifically for that would be a good idea? That way if you want to blacklist it you can, and this can at least be one blog where you don’t have to see any more of that ongoing discussion/argument if you don’t want to. Because we really try to stay away from pitting women against each other or engaging with ship wars, but…well, it comes up in the asks a lot (like enough that we started deleting what were basically the same questions/comments being submitted over and over), and I’m an argumentative little shit who can’t not give 5000-word responses when I strongly disagree with something someone has written. So.

The tag will be “hexendebate” (all one word to make sure it’s caught by Tumblr Savior and the like), and it will be added to any posts, reblogs, replies, or ask answers that veer into comparing/contrasting/pitting the two women or ships against one another.