Do you think Grimm is going to kill off Hank? Rusell wasn’t in the picture for the last day of filming for season 5 and a main character is supposed to be be dying this season aren’t they?

fuckyeahnickburkhardt:

Hi Anon – Admin Liz here.

I really hope they don’t kill off Hank because he’s been with us since season one, and I, personally, absolutely adore him. Russell not being in the wrap photo doesn’t necessarily mean he was killed off – I think they’d actually make a point to include him if that was the case. He may just not have been around when it was taken.

Every year there are rumors that a main character is going to be killed off, and we’ve come close few times, but I try to not let those rumors stress me out until something actually happens.

Hi Anon! Liza chiming in as well.

Every season so far has indeed ended with a member of the main cast (Nick, Hank, Monroe, Rosalee, Juliette, Sean, and Wu) seemingly dead, nearly dead, or in mortal peril. In season one, it was Juliette. In season two, it was Nick. In season three, it was Renard. In season four, it was Juliette again. And thus far all of those characters are still around (even if some of them don’t go by the same name).

So to me, I’m fine with Hank ending up in mortal peril like so many other characters have, just as long as they don’t try to “raise the stakes” by breaking tradition and killing him off permanently.

I feel it would be a huge slap in the face to have the first main cast death that sticks be one of only two characters of color in that main cast. Particularly a Black man and particular right now, with all the outrage over how many PoC, female, and queer characters have been killed off recently on TV, to say nothing of it happening against a backdrop of increased public hate speech towards these groups and unceasing police violence against PoC, especially Black men and women.

So…I really really hope they won’t kill Hank off but I’m also really worried that they will.

I love reading your opinions and wanted to ask, what do you think of what Grimm have done with Renhardt over the seasons and where they are now?

fuckyeahnickburkhardt:

Hi Anon – Admin Liz here. I think that Sean and Nick have had a very tense relationship (however you want to define it, romantic, friend, coworkers, etc) ever since Nick presented as a Grimm.

Team Grimm has always been sort of suspicious of Renard, and who can blame them? His motivations have never been obvious, and we really have no idea where his loyalties lie (nowhere in my opinion, I think he’s out for himself, which is one of the reasons I love him).

Ever since S1, they’ve relied on each other out of necessity – they know a lot of secrets about each other. The conflict we’re seeing between them this season is something that seems to have been building for a while now, and I’m excited to see how it gets resolved (whether it ends in Renard being our Big Bad, or in him tellng Nick he has a plan, or something completely out of left field).

Hi Anon! Admin Liza here with my own two cents.

I actually find the tension between them now a little sudden and oddly contrived, given the events of the last two seasons in particular.

Renard definitely did not have the team’s trust in the beginning, but since season two they’ve relied heavily on him to go about their business, and in season three he actually trusted them enough to not only allow them to, but assist them in making off with his infant daughter. That’s a lot of faith to put in anyone.

Not to mention that he was the one who originally figured out what Adalind had done to Nick, and tried desperately to get the antidote to him in time–in fact died trying to do so.

Then, on the team’s side, they have worked very closely with Renard and trusted him with a lot up until this season, and showed real concern and caring when he was shot…not to mention that they went way out of their way to save him when he was possessed by Jack the Ripper, endangering themselves in order to help him.

In fact, Renard’s been involved in one way or another in everything they’ve done up until the magic stick’s discovery. And while the fandom has certainly had its questions about his true motives and trustworthiness over the years, the actual characters haven’t questioned his place as a part of their team in a long time. Moreover, there’s very clearly been a level of mutual respect and understanding there, and an ability to talk about things, even things that were difficult or personal.

So it just seems…odd to me, this sudden turn of events, with none of them talking to each other or trusting each other. Renard suddenly doesn’t trust Nick and Co. enough to tell them what’s going on with Black Claw (specifically that his main reason for siding with them is that they have his daughter)? Nick and Hank suddenly don’t trust him enough to ask him point-blank what’s going on? Monroe and Rosalee suddenly have never trusted him at all, despite two seasons’ worth of evidence to the contrary? It just…doesn’t add up for me.

Honestly, it reminds me a little too much of the way things went with Juliette last season. The writers were determined to sever her ties with the team, and they weren’t overly concerned with how much sense that process actually made in light of everything that came before so long as they got to the ending they wanted.

Never mind that this course of action (and certain other poorly-developed and ill-conceived plot developments) have led to the first real renewal scare this show has had since its first season. They’re still gonna do it again.

(If I sound a little bitter and disappointed, Nonny, it’s because I am.)

How do you all feel about the entire Juliette/Eve situation? Personally I’m hoping Juliette doesn’t come back for various reasons that have nothing to do with disliking the character or Bitsie (I love both of them so so much) and I’ve been meaning to make some long posts about it on my Grimm blog but while I’m not currently up for that, I thought I’d ask what your opinions are

fuckyeahnickburkhardt:

Hey there – Admin Liz here. I, personally, am just happy Bitise is around. I hope at some point the writers respect the characters of Eve and Juliette and give us some more information on how she was resurrected/changed/broken. I think there is still some Juliette in there (we see glimpses of her, now and again), and I’d like Eve to be able to find a nice halfway point between who Juliette was, pre-hexen, and who Eve is. It terrifies me that she refers to herself as a tool and an asset rather than a human being and I hope she eventually gains some autonomy and personal agency. Do I think that Eve could ever get back the relationships that Juliette lost? Not necessarily, but I think that Eve truly sees herself as a completely separate person, so it wouldn’t be a huge emotional loss for her.

I think Eve is here to stay, but that we might see more Juliette coming out from under the surface the more time she spends around Team Grimm.

Hi, Admin Liza here! Oh boy, do I have thoughts on Eve and Juliette and what’s going on there.

I agree that I’m happy to see Bitsie still in the show in (almost) any form. I also do share Liz’s need to know exactly what went on with her resurrection and transformation. Juliette was a very strong-willed person and an incredibly powerful Hexenbiest, and so far as we’ve seen HW had nothing and no one as powerful before they “broke” her to create Eve…so how did they even manager to do that?

Did they dampen her powers somehow? We know there’s only one spell that can really suppress them, but Hexenbiests are still susceptible to regular controlled substances, and I feel like any amount of brainwashing, let alone something that thorough, would almost certainly involve the use of drugs at some point. *shudder*

What I find most horrifying is the possibility–slightly suggested in one of Bitsie’s early season 5 interviews–that Juliette actually chose at some point to just lose herself in whatever they were putting her through in order to escape the feelings of abandonment, betrayal, anger, isolation, loss, and regret over everything that had happened to her. The idea that her existence was so painful that it was easier to just completely shut down and voluntarily dehumanize herself…it’s painful to think about, but would also make perfect sense with the way we’ve seen Eve behave so far.

See, I not only think Juliette is still in there, I’m like 90% certain that’s what the writers want us to think.

Moreover, I don’t think Juliette ever really left, and while I do think Eve is a separate personality, I also think she’s something of a way for Juliette to protect herself, rather than a replacement that’s edged her out or locked her down.

Eve tries a little too hard, in my opinion, to stay detached whenever she’s outside the HW base–wearing the wigs, avoiding direct interaction, avoiding eye contact, keeping physical distance unless absolutely necessary when she does interact–for someone who’s just completely severed themselves from any of the emotions associated with their old life and memories.

Her interactions with regards to Nick, in particular, make me think Juliette and all her emotions have been there the whole time, ready to kick up a fuss the second “Eve” lets her guard down.

We’ve seen Eve get up close and personal with only a few people (that she wasn’t directly attacking): Nick, Adalind, and Rosalee. In both the Adalind and Rosalee instances, she was displaying very un-Eve-like behavior: showing concern for Nick, expressing protectiveness toward him.

Of the times she gets really close to Nick, two were because he approached her first, and one was because they were in close quarters and she couldn’t get further away.

In the scenes where he approaches her, she either avoids eye contact all together or completely shuts down: stares blankly, talks business-only: short, to-the-point sentences, no more information than he asks for. She doesn’t make eye contact with him in the restaurant until he demands it, and even then it seems more like a knee-jerk reaction to being given an order than something she wants to do. When she tells him she regrets that he never got the chance to bury Juliette, she does it looking away from him. And in both instances, she leaves almost immediately after.

More recently, when she’s in the car with him, she barely looks at him, glancing at him a few times but never maintaining the kind of sustained, attentive eye contact he maintains as he talks to her. She also never shifts toward him, maintaining a distance between them even though he shifts and turns to be closer to her several times.

She doesn’t seem to need quite this level of emotional distance if other people are around, or if there’s a physical distance in place between them. But the fact remains that Eve is extra-careful about that distance when it comes to Nick, more so than with any other character.

And all of this taken together with her sudden displays of protectiveness point, for me, to Juliette’s emotional connection to Nick in particular not being completely gone, and Eve having to work a lot harder to keep contact with him from breaching that protective exterior.

(I’m also unabashedly and unashamedly dying to see that exterior just crack open, because while I find Eve interesting I miss Juliette like you would not believe, and I want to see her return and all of the mess from last season really get dealt with by everyone.)

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

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 even going to get into the fact that Adalind’s decisions during this time are what led to Juliette’s involuntary transformation.)

Twitter user @MarvClowder had an interesting question during our liveblog/livetweet of “Inugami,” with regards to why it’s the involuntary emotional reaction that only Grimms and other Wesen can see, versus the intentional, controlled reaction. Since the Wesen is out of control in the first instance, shouldn’t anyone be able to see the woge?

I confess I was drawing a blank on this one, but Admin D (@irreverentcatalyst) has, once again, come through with an answer (which I have typed up because she doesn’t feel like it).

The answer is that it has less to do with what the Wesen is intending in the first (emotional, involuntary) instance, and more to do with the biology of a Grimm. To make it a little clearer, let’s put it in terms that make a little more sense in our world.

Think of it in terms of pheromones. Imagine a living creature (a Wesen) that gives off a pheromone. Now imagine that only certain other living creatures have the genetic marker that allows them to perceive it (Grimms).

It’s an involuntary action, something done without intention and without control, but it’s still also something unnoticeable unless you have the biology that allows you to pick up on it (like the extra cones in a Grimm’s eyes, for instance).

A good example might be certain animals being able to sniff out our fear. Our adrenaline gives off an odor they can perceive, but that doesn’t mean any of the people in the room can smell that we’re afraid.

On the other hand, imagine a creature (Wesen) can intentionally give off a very pungent scent (like a skunk, for example) that anyone with a sense of smell can and will notice. Not a particularly flattering comparison for Wesen, but I think it gets the point across?

rutrexing15:

fuckyeahnickburkhardt:

DONT U DARE HURT WU, GRIMM. NOT AGAIN. LEAVE OUR WU ALONE.

And now it looks like he might be a Lycanthrope if that is possible.

Initially after watching this, I thought it seemed weird that it would suddenly be possible for Wu to end up a lycanthrope, considering Monroe said earlier in the episode that the disease that causes lycanthropes is specific to blutbaden. It actually bothered me a lot…it just didn’t seem to fit with what information we’d been given, and I was annoyed at the thought of the writers creating drama that didn’t fit within their own stated facts about their universe.

But then I talked to Admin D ( @irreverentcatalyst ), and as always she shed some light on the possibilities.

Consider what we know about lycanthropes: they’re incredibly violent and completely out of control, to the point that blutbaden who are even suspected of suffering from the condition are usually killed before they even reach adulthood. Which would make them incredibly rare and unlikely to be encountered by anyone, much less a human.

Now also remember that Nick and his friends aren’t just rare, they’re unheard of. Some humans might know about the Wesen world, sure, but humans, Wesen, and Grimms fighting alongside one another? That just does not happen. Ever. They’ve broken like a thousand different written and unwritten rules of their world, and a lot of times in order to solve these cases they’re breaking entirely new ground in one way or another. Which means a team of skilled and capable humans, Wesen, and a Grimm working together have never faced off against a lycanthrope the way Team Grimm did.

So it’s incredibly likely that no one has ever had the opportunity to observe what a lycanthrope’s scratch or bite would actually do to a survivor of their attacks, because it’s very unlikely that anyone, much less an ordinary human, has ever survived such an encounter.

Or, if it has happened, it was so long ago that it’s morphed into the stories we now have of werewolves, which of course Wesen would write off as sensationalism in the same way that Monroe has previously scoffed at some fairy tales depicting blutbaden as “the big bad wolf.”

Not hating but you really see the difference between domestic MR and domestic NA. MR is something that is beneficial to the plot and the characters. It is usual, you can’t miss those scenes because you lose the plot but NA can be skipped in every episode and no plot is missed.

Well…as much as I hate to say it, and as much as I really want to skip those scenes, lately they are actually weaving into the plot a little more. The scene between them in this episode definitely set things up for some conflict later on, for instance.

Although I’d argue that most of what’s in the actual NA scenes themselves is about character development rather than plot. You can watch Nick’s conversation with Monroe in “Into the Schwarzwald” and know everything that happened in that scene and that Nick doesn’t know how he feels about it.

But you’d miss the completely candid look on Nick’s face when he wakes up beside Adalind and there’s no one there to school his emotions for, the way he kept flashing back to their awful history and how simultaneously numb and conflicted he looks…and how he covers all of that up and pretends to be okay when she wakes up.

Similarly, you could find out from the scene last ep with Adalind and Rosalee that Adalind didn’t want to tell Nick about her powers returning, and from the scene in the spice shop this week that Nick wasn’t supposed to tell anyone outside of Team Grimm about the stick.

But there’s a special kind of emphasis on seeing them actually in a room together and lying their asses off to each other’s faces, clearly uncomfortable and not trusting each other with vital secrets. Even though those secrets could have a profound effect on their child, the other person, and their…relationship, such as it is.

So I will agree with you that MR’s scenes are more about being helpful and proactive and figuring things out than NA scenes, but I don’t skip the NA scenes (although I would never judge or even look askance at anyone who wanted to, for obvious reasons), because they are telling us things about Nick and Adalind as people–and, in my opinion, about why they can never work as a couple (since apparently the blatantly obvious reason isn’t good enough for the writers).

istanfortoadie:

The problem I have with Nick’s ‘burying Juliette’ line is the fact that that is what he does with everything in his life. He buries his problems and his issues, all of them and rarely deals with them because there is always something bigger going on in his life that he needs to focus on so he buries the actual problem and lets it fester and then eventually, something happens that brings all of that to the surface which sends him out of control and I am starting to wonder if something like this is going to happen again with this Juliette/Eve thing. He never really dealt with her turning into a Hexenbiest, what happened with Kelly and Juliette’s supposed death and now her being alive but being a different person and that eventually it is going to come to a head and he is going to completely lose control.

istanfortoadie:

Every time I see those posts about characters going through hell and still being loving and kind and not letting what they have been through turn them heartless or cold, I think of Juliette. Juliette went through so much in those first three and a half seasons of Grimm and never let her struggles or pain change her in any way. She was strong enough to get through them and still be the same person. She was more aware and had a better understanding of everything but more or less, she was the same, and then the Hexenbiest took over and I think the thing that I liked the most about this is that Grimm showed us that Juliette would never have just changed like that on her own. She wouldn’t have just turned against Nick, against her friends or hurt innocent people if she was in control because that was not who she was. That was the Hexenbiest and they essentially had to turn Juliette into something that was poisoning her, something that was killing her humanity in order to show that the only way she wouldn’t come out the other side stronger and better person is if Juliette wasn’t even there anymore, if she had no control over what was happening.