Tag: hexendebate

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.