Tag: juliette silverton

So is Juliette back now? DID THE MAGIC STICK REMOVE HER HEXENBEIST-INESS? I mean I love Juliette but Eve is a bamf in her own right.

It’s not really clear at this point! I mean, if I had to guess I’d say the stick removed her hexen powers and restored all the emotions stripped away from her by HW’s “training.” But we saw so little of her that I’m almost afraid to guess!

At any rate, I think it’s clear that Juliette is definitely back, and I cannot wait to see what the writers have in store for us next year!

Grimm Sneak Peak: 5×21-22, “The Beginning of the End, Parts 1 & 2.″

And here we have three very important photos of…Eve? I mean, the first one is very definitely Eve, but in the second one she appears to be showing a face we’ve never seen before. Is the change in her woge meaningful, or should we just chalk it up to Grimm’s sometimes-inconsistent SFX department?

Oh, and let’s talk about that third photo, shall we? Does anyone else see that very un-Eve-like expression, the lack of a wig, the trusting way she’s leaning toward Monroe in a way Eve never has and probably never would? Someone come yell with me about how Juliette she is in that last photo!!

(Source)

Source: nbc.com

After this ep, I have a feeling Diana is going to kill both her parents’ love interests. But before she can hurt Nick, Adalind intervenes and ends up dying instead. That way she can die a good person, and Nick Juliette and Kelly can be a happy family.

I’m….not sure that’s how that will work, Anon. For one thing, Nick and Juliette still have a lot they need to sort through, and I think it’s pretty clear after this episode that some part of Eve/Juliette feels betrayed by Nick and the team’s continued compassion, support, and understanding for Adalind when they couldn’t offer any of those things to her when she desperately needed them.

For another, I feel like having Adalind die to save Nick would be just as cheap a cop-out way to redeem her character as all this romance and domestic mess they’ve tried to do all year.

Granted, that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. *sigh*

If Adalind can be forgiven & redeemed, Juliette deserves the same. She can come back from this “Eve” thing. Maybe she can’t be completely Juliette again – she’s been traumatized and Eve will always be a part of her. But I think that Juliette can come back, if more broken & layered & I’d like to see that. It’d be a nice character arc. I’d also like to see her & Nick gradually build trust again and… yes, slowly find the love they lost. Maybe that’s silly of me but its what I want. Your thoughts?

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.

im wondering if the royals are going to make any reappearance soon, because if seans family is going to be a public display, then people are going to notice diana. it would be interesting if they came into the scene and took out some of black claw. on another note, it bugs me that monroe & nick as a blutbad & grimm can not act violently despite stereotypically being violent by nature, but biests are apparently doomed to act the way they do and cant rise above it now??

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.