Tag: ask box

I always wondered about Adalind and Nick, if the show runners wanted them together, why not have that in the beginning? Or let Juliette off the hook in S01 or 2 and then let those two have whatever it is they have? Seriously, why did showrunners do that ?

My understanding from old articles and tumblr discussion is that Adalind was never supposed to be a long-term character. She was basically written in for a few episodes in season one, and then they liked Claire so much that they wrote more for her.

Which I get. What’s not to love about Claire?

But then they didn’t really know what to do with her. That’s nothing I heard, just an observation. They had no clue.

She spends most of seasons two and three “meanwhile in Vienna,” then comes back in seasons three and four only when they need a stronger villain to make the plot move. They spend very little time developing her but put a LOT on the character’s shoulders.

I also don’t think the writers necessarily wanted or planned to put Nick and Adalind together until a vocal minority of fans began demanding it. They certainly failed to set it up at all in seasons one through four if that’s not the case.

Then once they got together, Adalind became a background player for the most part. She got one or two good episodes in seasons five and six, but those were all when she was stuck in the mayor’s mansion with Renard. Otherwise, she became a very passive character with little agency after season five.

Even the single “I love you” Nick ever says to her happens in the Other Place, in a reality that gets erased. As far as Adalind is concerned, it never happened. And that’s where they end the show.

Looking at all of that, I honestly can’t believe they planned or wanted that ship to happen. Which begs the question: why did they never fix it?

This may sound petty, but the only thing i could think of when i read about the spin-off was the dark possibility for anything ooc!Adalind or yet more rape-treated-as-romance. All the people involved never addressed their mistakes as far as i’m aware. I doubt they care. It makes me more sad than hopeful. :(

It’s not petty. It’s understandable. Those writing decisions hurt a lot of fans, and angered many more. I had friends who had to leave the fandom completely over the choices the writers made in seasons 5-6.

And in my opinion the route they chose to go with Adalind and Nick will always be the worst decision the writers made. It killed the ratings, and quite probably killed the show itself. Without that, I honestly think we would be starting season seven right now, with no end in sight.

All of that being said, we have some things going into this spinoff that we didn’t have last time around:

A woman on the show’s creative team. Although I loved them, the Grimm writers were a total boys club.

And I’m not saying that men are automatically less sensitive than women when it comes to matters surrounding sexual assault, or that women are automatically moreso, but statistically speaking they can be.

The #MeToo movement. Grimm lived and died before #MeToo and #TimesUp had gained a solid foothold in Hollywood. It was easy to ignore or write poorly about sexual assault. It was easy to be maliciously sexist or just lazy and uninformed.

Those days are gone, at least for the moment. Even people who somehow don’t care about the issues still have to care about the optics.

Now, whether these things will translate into better handling of sexual assault on Grimm 2.0 is anyone’s guess. But personally, I choose to hope that a group of creators who failed us in one respect have gotten better and will not fail us again.

That may be naive of me. We’ll just have to wait and see.

What’s the 20 year gap and trailer you spoke of in the Grimm spinoff post? Did I miss the spinoff already having a trailer!?

Ha, no. Sadly…no.

I was talking about the epilogue at the end of the Grimm series finale. It’s set 20 years after the last scene we see of Nick and Team Grimm, and takes place in a new trailer similar to the one Aunt Marie had. Thus “20 year gap” and “trailer epilogue.”

Sorry if my wording confused people!

They’re doing a Grimm spin off. The writer and executive producer worked on Iron Fist. Any thoughts to make this sound okay?

Okay so first of all, thank you for this!

I haven’t been as vigilant as I’d like about keeping up with Grimm news since the show ended, so your ask was the first I had heard that they were moving forward with anything spin-offy!

As for your worries, a few things:

  • Iron Fist is only the most recent thing Melissa Glenn has worked on. She’s also worked on Leverage, Falling Skies, Zoo, Revolution, Hawaii Five-0, and Beauty and the Beast.
  • At least some of those are damn good shows with excellent writing, characters, and production values.
  • Everyone writes on something crappy at some point in their career, so take heart from that.
  • Sean Hayes and Todd Milliner, who were the executive producers of Grimm, will be executive producers on the spin-off as well.
  • David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf, also from Grimm, will be consulting producers on the spin-off.
  • That means all of the folks responsible for the continuity and “big M mythology” of the original series will be back to make sure it’s true to the world we know and love.
  • Some characters from the original will make appearances in the spin-off.
  • The spin-off’s lead character will reportedly be a female Grimm.
  • New mysteries! Expanded mythology! New Grimm content, okay. New. Grimm. Content. Our little show that could is all grown up and becoming a ‘verse!

That’s all of the official stuff. Now here are a few wishful things a spin-off could mean:

  • Answers to questions that the original series never answered, like how Grimm powers get activated, how magic works, whether Kelly has powers, whatever happened to Roddy Geiger, etc.
  • More of Trubel, Bud, and others we never got to see enough of.
  • A chance for the writers to include better representation for minorities than they had last time around.
  • More backstory and mythology about the Grimms and the Wesen world.
  • A chance to see what happened with the Royals, the Resistance, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Wesen Council after Black Claw decimated them and then was itself decimated.
  • A chance to address some of the wtf-y stuff they never got to, like ghosts, gods, etc.
  • More info about what happens to our faves during that 20-year gap between the end of Nick’s story and the trailer epilogue.
  • A chance to meet the triplets and learn their names.
  • A chance to see teenage Kelly and Diana bickering like siblings do (levitate him, Di!).
  • Executive producers who’ve (hopefully) learned from the mistakes they made in seasons 4-5.
  • If we’re very, very lucky…more shirtless rage.

And if that’s not enough to get you excited, consider this: this show is only in the very early stages of development. A lot of things can happen to trap a show indefinitely in development hell. So…it may never happen.

But I hope it does. Because honestly, the news that Grimm was getting a spin-off made my entire week.

Sources: https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/grimm-spinoff-nbc-1202981306/

https://deadline.com/2018/10/grimm-spinoff-female-lead-nbc-from-melissa-glenn-hazy-mills-1202483529/

Does Diana being used as constant plot device annoy you?

Honestly I never thought of it that way.

I mean, she definitely became the majority of what drove and motivated Adalind from mid-season 3 to the end of the show, and I have issues with basically all tropes hovering in that area of “motherhood as motivator.” Shows (and action movies) love to do this to women: give them a kid to motivate them or further/change the course of their development. Because apparently nothing else works for us ladies, right?

I kind of see Grimm as all one long-game plot, though, of which Diana is only one part. Granted, in some ways it’s not a very well-executed one. I feel like they stretched it out way too much in the name of mystery, and then had to squeeze everything in those last two seasons when their ratings dropped…to the point that an endgame which really started with the very first episode ended up feeling less tied together than it could have in the end.

I mean, think about it: Nick, one of the last remaining Grimms, gets that first key in the pilot, one of seven created and scattered by the Knights Templar, who were apparently supposed to be Grimms. And then he continues to gather keys throughout the seasons, until he has enough to get a partial map.

Those keys lead to the Black Forest and the Stick of Destiny, which turns out to be a piece of the magic staff that Zerstorer holds, and which Nick eventually becomes the protector of after defeating Zerstorer. Meanwhile Zerstorer’s goal was to control Diana, who only existed via Adalind’s personal plotline, which was set in motion back in season one when Nick took her powers…or, arguably, in the pilot itself, when Renard sent Adalind to kill Marie as part of his ploy to get the key.

So many little things could not have happened without so many other little things happening, to the point that when you step back and look at it, it looks much tighter story-wise than it seems in the show. There’s definitely an element of destiny running throughout it, like everything that happened was meant to happen in one way or another. Unfortunately, we don’t really get the full impact of that in the execution.

So…I guess the idea of Diana being a plot device never bothered me because that’s not how I saw it, so much as that she was clearly a key player in whatever events were going to unfold, for better or worse.

That being said, I still have a lot of questions. Like how did Zerstorer end up in the other world anyway? Did he originate there? If so, how did he get the staff? Did it originate there or in our world? Did he once cross to our world and have to be banished? Did he originate here and have to be banished? Can I please get a comic series telling me the story behind those damn knights and the damn stick and Zerstorer and how it all ties together, PRETTY PLEASE?

juliette got a bad rap because she was nick’s girlfriend and not a grimm or wessen, so fans just hated her. but she was sweet and supportive and goodhearted and has the worst most traumatizing story of all the grimm characters and I think its rotten that adalind got her happy ending and her boyfriend AND her baby like… wow (and fans liked meechy sweet adalind and hated sincere sweet juliette and that’s just hypocritical) if they ever make a s7 or movie they should fix her story – Bella

But where is the lie?

One of these days I’m going to finish my season 7 fanfic in which Juliette’s story gets a happier ending, Adalind gets to be the big bad she was always meant to be from Day 1, and Sean Renard gets squished like a bug under her stylish heels during her Path of Destruction. Not because I hate Sean, but because let’s face it: if Adalind went Full Bad someone would have to die for Dramatic Effect, and there is no way I’m killing any other member of Team Grimm (or any of the babies) because they have done nothing to deserve it but like…Sean really messed up and he never showed a single ounce of remorse about it. Maybe he sees Meisner one last time, as he’s dying (maybe while saving/protecting someone else), and they go into the light together or whatever (or something way less sappy).

Ahem. Anyway. Yeah. Some things need fixing in that ending.

(EDIT: I finally wrote it and am in the process of editing it. Chapter 1 is here.)

I theorized that Kelly was born with Grimm abilities already awoken, like he could already see Wessen woged and be just aware of it, and is okay with it. I remember a Wessen woging in front of him and he was smiling. I don’t know if that was what they were going for or that was just “Look at the cute baby.” Thoughts?

Hmmm…that’s an interesting theory! I actually kind of like that idea: that he grew up seeing Wesen from Day One so it was never strange to him. Although it would certainly make him unique in his world, as from what little we get in the show it seems like almost all Wesen get their first woge as teenagers, kind of like puberty, and Grimms don’t necessarily have it from birth either though it’s unclear exactly when the onset is or how consistent it is.

I wonder what about having a Hexenbiest mother and a Grimm father would do that? Or could it have something to do with the twinning spell somehow? The rules of magic in this world are murky. :/

I was rewatching grimm and Monroe was translating a page on the wesen that aunt Marie was said to be with in that episode, and said something about them having “very large sausages” and I suddenly realized why Nick was making the very dismayed “I don’t want to be here for this, why” kind of face that he did. He looked so done with everything at that moment.

Oh…my god. Really?! How have I seen that episode like six times and missed the innuendo in that!?

“Just a second, this is interesting. Steinadlers seem to be involved with the military. Like, heroic, noble… Apparently with very large… sausages? I don’t think I’m translating that correctly.”
 – Monroe in “Three Coins in a Fuchsbau”

Aunt Marie.