Tag: juliette silverton

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.

I wish the writers hadn’t gone the Nadalind route but I see why some would choose her over Juliette bc the writers made her more sympathetic. While what she did was wrong, she was under duress. She later even says that it wasn’t something she enjoyed, just what she had to do to get her daughter back. She even asked Nick&friends for their help first. She had lost her baby and no one else would help her. It’s different from Juliette, who did the things she did bc of vengeance w the intent to hurt.

[cont] Juliette had a right to be hurt and angry, but the writers made her so irredeemable by having her so thoroughly betray Nick (and his mother, who did nothing to her). Adalind was kinda expected to do bad things, as she was villian for a time, but Juliette was the love interest. The one who was supposed to care about Nick. She was also friends with Rosalee yet she hurt her and tried to have Nick shoot Monroe. I just think the writers made it too easy to hate her.

This is one of those rare cases where I don’t actually think the blame falls completely on the writers for the way Juliette is viewed by a certain (very loud) section of the fandom (although I do blame them entirely for making Nadalind in any way canon even for a moment). Because if you’re not watching Grimm with misogyny goggles on, Juliette is no more hateful or horrible than any other character on the show.

I wrote a post on my personal blog a few seasons ago about the reasons Juliette is hated more avidly and consistently than other character on the show–long before anyone actually had anything like a reason. You can read that post here if you’re interested. In summary, Juliette is hated more than Adalind or Rosalee, or pretty much any recurring female side character, because she commits the apparently unforgivable sin–to a misogynistic audience–of being a female love interest with thoughts, desires, goals, and emotions which occasionally conflict with or challenge those of the male protagonist.

I would also argue that Adalind has done a lot of things before the oft-mentioned season three finale that were not done under duress. She did horrible things for power, for Sean’s attention, literally as part of her daily job, or just because she was told to. The fact that she did one of the many horrible things she’s done under duress doesn’t erase all the other awful things.

Nor does it help her case that she was still attacking one of the people she’d hurt most and taunting them with what she’d done “under duress” a few episodes before she suddenly decided she wanted to change…a growth spurt in character development which coincided suspiciously with needing help from all these people she’d hurt.

Now, consider the situation Juliette was in when she enacted her vengeance in season 4. She was under the thrall of powers that canonically influence people to do terrible things. She was suffering these powers not as someone who was born a hexenbiest, but as a regular human subject to the “side effects” of a completely experimental, untried, unpredictable set of magical circumstances.

Add to that the fact that in the span of a few days she was made to feel unwelcome and unsafe in her own home, lost her boyfriend of seven years and any concept of the future they might have had, and found herself lacking the support of any friends she thought had any hope of understanding what was happening to her. Juliette was in an extremely bad place, both mentally and emotionally, when she did the things she did. And it’s telling that she specifically attacked the things and people that symbolized what she (not incorrectly) saw as the source of all her pain: Nick’s life as a Grimm.

That doesn’t make the things she did okay, but it’s very much up for debate, on both a canonical and also a meta level, at this point whether Juliette can truly be held culpable for all the things she did–or whether the rest of Team Grimm can be truly blameless.

To be fair, Adalind had also lost a lot when she went on her vengeance spree…but recall that she was not under the influence of hexenbiest powers when she put Juliette in a coma. A coma that resulted in her losing all memories of Nick and developing a dangerous magical obsession with Sean that could have killed them both.

Juliette did the things she did because she was scared, angry, alone, grieving, and under the influence of dangerous, uncharted magic. Arguably, her emotions directed her destructive behavior’s targets but did not cause the destructive behavior itself. After all, Juliette has been all of those things before, and has never attacked the people she cares about or blamed them for her own pain. In fact, before the hexenbiest powers it was much more in-character for Juliette to put aside her own concerns in favor of what her friends might need at any point in time.

Adalind, on the other hand, did what she did because she was scared, angry, alone, grieving, and that was her pure human reaction: to lash out and hurt people, including innocent people who’d never done anything to her. Her emotions may have directed her destructive behavior’s targets, but Adalind herself caused the destructive behavior. She had no powers to be her excuse or explanation.

The reason fandom finds the one lovable and the other unacceptable is that Adalind was introduced as a villain and thus allowed to do her villain thing with audience impunity, whereas Juliette was introduced as a love interest and vilified by the audience every time she dared to do anything that wasn’t 100% sycophantically in line with whatever Nick might want or need. Add in a heaping dose of rape culture encouraging audiences to see healthy relationships as “boring” and aggressive, violent ones as “passionate,” and there you have it: the main reason many fans prefer Adalind over Juliette as Nick’s endgame love interest.

resistpoisontangface
replied to your post “OH LOOK AT THAT. MONROE IS FINALLY ACKNOWLEDGING THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO…”

It was her fault. Her turning into a Hexenbeist didn’t make her burn down the Grimmabago, help kill Nick’s mom and several of Nick’s neighbors; sleep w/other guys (and in Nick’s bed). Those were choices she made as a Hexenbeist. This just whitewashes her actions. Eh. But hey, they can do it for Adalind, they can for Juliette, right?

Actually, in season 5 they established–however badly it was explained or thought out–that hexenbiests and zauberbiests are heavily influenced or even controlled by their powers. So yes, turning into a hexenbiest did in fact make her do all of those things.

And even if it didn’t, this post was specifically talking about what happened to Juliette, i.e. her becoming a hexenbiest in the first place. Which was in fact not her fault.

mygeekculture:

fuckyeahnickburkhardt:

scoundrels-in-love
replied to your post “A WILD MEISNER APPEARS”

The only person I ever shipped Adalind with.

SAAAAME. Is it sad I have this glimmer of hope suddenly that now that he’s back, all this nonsense will be righted and they’ll end up together after all somehow?

I mean I just feel like…they brought out the best in each other, really.

How did they bring out the best in each other? They spent hardly any time together. Furthermore, Adalind resisted her Hexenbiest nature because of her love for Nick. Yes she has done some pretty awful stuff, but so has Juliette. I’d say that Juliette has done even worse stuff. She burned down the trailer, she got Kelly killed. Also, no way Meisner is just back. Unless there are a bunch of Meisner clones or something.

It’s true, they only spent a few days together. But those few days were packed with a lot. Meisner took care of Adalind. He helped her when she needed it the most, and asked her for nothing in return. I wonder how often she’s come across that in her life? Probably not often.

In the short time they spent together, they brought out a soft side in each other that we hadn’t seen before from either of them. Adalind trusted him with her life, and he didn’t let her down. I think it would be hard to say they didn’t leave a lasting impression with each other, too, considering he was thinking about her two years later, and the way she reacted when she heard his name.

As for the rest…I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Adalind resisted her Hexenbiest nature for Nick. She specifically said she wanted to be better for her unborn child. And to say that Juliette did worse things than Adalind is just…Juliette never raped anyone, I’ll leave it at that.

Here’s the thing about culpability: if Juliette is fully to blame for everything she did as a hexenbiest, then so is Adalind. But if you go with what the writers have done as of last season, being a hexenbiest in general–not just under the weird magical circumstances that led to Juliette’s transformation–causes a person to do horrible things that they would never do without that destructive influence. Which means if Adalind isn’t culpable for her actions while she was a hexenbiest, neither is Juliette.

But Adalind is still culpable for everything she did while she wasn’t a hexenbiest. Which included, in case anyone has forgotten, putting that gross spell on Juliette and Sean that, if it hadn’t been reversed, would have literally caused them to basically rape each other to death against their will. Oh, and also planning to sell her baby to people she didn’t know and who would do god knows what to it in order to get those powers back.

Juliette is no perfect saint, but there is both textual and subtextual proof that she is not fully culpable for her actions after she was transformed into a hexenbiest. Whereas Adalind? Lost her powers and kept right on doing things just as bad as she did when she had them.

But far more interesting to me is why comments about Adalind always, always end up getting replies that are about how Juliette is somehow worse. Even when the comment that was made isn’t remotely derogatory, accusatory, or otherwise negative toward Adalind. Like seriously…why is that?

teamrebecchi:

story: after juliette turns into a hexenbiest and gets taken by hadrian’s wall, whilst everyone thinks she is dead, hank starts hearing her cries for help all the while fighting eve for control (red!juliette scenes). hank can hear something but doesn’t know what it is but knows that there is someone out there who needs his help. unfortunately, it starts to take it’s toll on him.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Why did they have to make Juliette evil? And why did they have to make nick get with his rapist. It’s so gross.

I don’t think they really made Juliette evil, per se. Can someone be evil when they’re not in control of their own mind or actions? I think of Juliette’s actions in late season four as more sickness than evil, and in season five and six so far she’s definitely been an ally and asset to Nick and Team Grimm. And, more and more, we’re seeing glimpses of the old Juliette, the one who loved Nick and would do anything to protect him.

The getting-with-his-rapist thing though, yeah…that’s really gross. There’s no excuse for that and I will always wish the writers hadn’t gone there. There had to be better ways to deal with Claire getting pregnant than to have Adalind have a baby with Nick, and even if they chose to do that, they didn’t have to manufacture this stilted romance between them like none of the last five years of antagonism, violence, rape, and hatred ever happened between them.