Hi. I’ve been watching grimm since day one and I’m unhappy about how they forced Nick and Adalind together. Just because they have a kid together doesn’t make it right. Nick gets tricked into sleeping with her and now he loves her? I try to point out to people that no one would ship them if gender roles were reversed. What do you think?

I would like to think you’re right, and that people would at least recognize the very obvious male predator dynamic, but considering there are people who ship things like Jessica Jones/Kilgrave, which is a man preying on a woman and is also very clearly and literally shown/declared to be rape in canon, I’m afraid not.

See, erasure of male victims and the notion that women can’t be rapists is only part of the equation. The other part of it is that rape culture and abuse apologism are so prevalent in our entertainment that people actually think a lot of abusive, stalkery behavior is romantic. Just look at the popularity of Twilight when it came out, which was basically “Abusive Relationships With Vampires: The Saga.”

Or go further back and get out of sci-fi a bit, you’ll still see it everywhere. Take Ross and Rachel from Friends, where Ross was controlling, condescending, dismissive, and all-around a dick but was supposed to be seen as a “nice guy” because he liked to be monogamous. Or how about that creepy-ass scene in the car near the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the guy was like “I love you, you belong to me.”

The elected president of the United States is a known rapist. David Bowie, celebrated rock icon, is a known child rapist. And in both cases supporters will try to make excuses for why those rapes didn’t happen, or don’t count. Ten years ago scores of fans came out of the woodwork to blame Rihanna and adore Chris Brown when the latter beat the former so severely she was unrecognizable. Women tweeted “I would let him beat me up any day” in response. Last year, fans did something similar regarding Johnny Depp’s well-documented abuse of his wife, Amber Heard.

Rape culture and abuse apologism are everywhere. They’re in every romantic comedy where a busy, brilliant, independent woman is secretly lonely and miserable and just needs the “right man” to come show her how to be a woman the “right way.” They’re in bodice-ripper romance novels, where the scenario of a woman saying no to sex is painted as a challenge rather than the end of the conversation. They’re in the notion that men always want sex (or even “need” it) and women never do unless convinced. They’re in the idea that healthy relationships are boring but violent relationships are “passionate.”

That shit is literally all over our entertainment and culture, and so…no, sadly, I don’t think if Nick were a woman and Adalind were a man people would ship it less or not at all. They would just use a slightly different tack to justify it.

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.

aboutnici
replied to your post “If Nick and Adalind do become a thing I might end up dying of laughter…”

Luke and Laura did it on General Hospital!

Which was also gross. Listen, I don’t care how many times it has been done (way too fucking many) or how successful it proved to be with viewers, having a rape victim fall in love with his/her rapist is fucked up in the extreme.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that possibly part of the reason this trope does have success with viewers is that like 95% of the things we’re conditioned to find romantic are part of rape culture. Sexual violence and nonconsent are endemic to heterosexual romance tropes.

That’s why people find Adalind and Nick’s behavior toward one another erotic and romantic. Not because it is in any way either, but because our cultural attitude towards sex conditions us to see violence and interpret it as passion, and to forgive/excuse/erase rapists’ crimes easily.

I also think heteronormativity comes into play in the way people ship Nick and Adalind in spite of all the very good reasons not to (and it’s not the only ship in Grimm where this is a problem, mind…just the example at hand and possibly one of the more egregious ones). Just as we’re trained to ignore sexual and romantic cues between same-sex couples and view these as exclusively platonic, we’re also trained to view all interactions between men and women in light of their romantic potential.

Intertwine heternormativity with rape culture, and we’re not trained to shut that “everything between men/women is romance or could be romance” lens off when rape becomes a part of the narrative. If anything, we’re trained to throw that right in there with all this other stuff (fighting, grabbing someone’s arm during an argument, threatening violence, enjoying causing each other pain/discomfort, etc) that should not, by any reasonable or healthy definition, be viewed as romantic.

And that. is. seriously. fucked. up.