I’m not confused necessarily but I certainly have a lot of theories. Not new theories, per se…more like old theories validated somewhat.
And a few that aren’t necessarily validated, but that are still plausible given what we know about hexenbiests now (they’re separate from Wesen, they’re an opposing force to Wesen and Grimms, etc).
Man, I can feel my fanfiction wheels a-turning…
Juliette’s transformation has been referred to, both in canon and by the cast and writers–and in fandom too, for that matter–as a “side effect” or “side effects” since it happened. David is the master of being coy in interviews, so again it’s possible that she’s still a hexenbiest. But I don’t personally find it very likely based on that choice of words alone, just because there’s so much precedent already for simply referring to Juliette’s whole hexenbiest transformation, with rather comically gross understatement, as “side effects.”
Also, the writers have kind of written themselves into a corner by constantly insisting via both Adalind and Eve this season that being a hexenbiest or a zauberbiest does make a person homicidal, cruel, and evil (and power-hungry), whether they want to be that way or not, unless there’s some kind of outside intervention (i.e. HW brainwashing or a suppressant).
Granted, the writers have yet to explain how that jives with Adalind’s current behavior or all of her previous bad behavior while she didn’t have her powers, but that doesn’t unwrite what they’ve written so much as make me go:
Actually, we have no way of knowing that for sure, for two reasons:
Finally, we do have this tidbit in an interview with David Giuntoli that suggests she is indeed not a hexenbiest anymore:
“Yeah, that stick is to hexenbiests what penicillin is to human beings. It just kind of cures all. The stick looks like it cured Juliette of her mortal wounds, or would-have-been mortal wounds, and in the meantime also kind of cured her of her hexenbiest side effects, I suppose. And we see that with Juliette, and I think that if that moment had happened at any other moment, it would have been a much longer moment, but we were in the process of being ambushed so Nick didn’t have a lot of time to process that. But it’s in the back of Nick’s mind. “
(Source)
You could still be right. Maybe Juliette is still a hexenbiest, and all it did was break through Eve’s mental block and what Hadrian’s Wall did to her. But if so, all of that woge-ing, convulsing, and de-woge-ing seems a little bit of an odd way to show it.
Either way, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how the team deals with it!
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.
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.
(part 2 of 2) Also Renard is REALLY firm that he isn’t a Hexenbeist so maybe he doesn’t have the same issues with his beist side along with the lack of abilities that we’ve seen. Mind it could simply be a gender thing but still I’d really like the show to clarify either way. Also using their beist as an excuse for hurting/killing reminds me of people using mental illness as an excuse and as a mentally ill person I"m finding it insulting… Am I the only one who noticed that?
Renard realized Rachel and Co. were with Black Claw the minute he found out she was part of the plot to kill Andrew Dixon (near the end of “Into the Schwarzwald”), because he knew, via Eve and Meisner, that the man who killed Dixon was a Black Claw operative, as was Lucien, who met with Renard shortly after he confronted Rachel.
And honestly? I would love for that possibility (that he’s working to take them down) to be correct, because otherwise what he’s doing really doesn’t make much sense to me.
I mean, even if he’s trying to take them down, it doesn’t make much sense, but at least it wouldn’t feel like a slap in the face to four and a half years’ worth of character and relationship development. I’m also fine with the notion that he’s with them in order to get Diana back, except that I can’t figure out why he wouldn’t have just trusted Nick and Hank with that information.
As for the mental illness parallel, you’re not the only one to make the comparison. I’ve definitely seen a few different Grimm fans mention that the way the show treats hexenbiest powers seems like a metaphor for mental illness. Although not a very good or well-handled one.
I think they’ve mixed their metaphors too much on this one, personally. Do hexenbiest powers change who a person is? Or don’t they? Who knows! I mean we’ve seen at least two hexenbiests who weren’t doing damage left and right (Henrietta and Elizabeth) and we’ve also seen Adalind do just as much damage while her powers were completely gone as she did when she had them. Not to mention that at the moment she’s just about the nicest she’s ever been, and she has her powers.
Sometimes it does seem to me like a general (and stigmatizing, and again, poorly-handled) mental illness metaphor. At others it seems like they’re treating it like classic possession…with the whole floating “evil spirit” thing that left Adalind when she was de-powered in season one and then re-entered her when she performed the ritual to get her powers back.
And then at still other times it seems like it’s very specifically a metaphor for addictive disorders, with the powers themselves being the object of the addiction rather than the illness itself. But even that breaks down depending on which hexenbiest we’re talking about, and when.
Then again you have characters insisting that being a hexenbiest fundamentally changes you, while having your two principle hexenbiests treat what they did during that time in totally different ways: Adalind doesn’t shy away from responsibility for the things she did, she apologizes for them and expresses regret and a wish to undo those things.
Eve, on the other hand, has distanced herself from Juliette and the things she did as completely as possible, deflects responsibility, and claims to feel no regret or remorse for any of it, although that in itself could be due to a separate mental illness (PTSD, dissociative identity disorder, maybe both).
All this to say that no, I’ve never thought of the whole “the biest made me do it” thing in that light, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid interpretation or that your feelings about it aren’t valid. It just means the writing around that topic is so gotdamn convoluted that I haven’t been able to draw coherent parallels about it yet.
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