Part of the reason I haven’t talked about this issue yet is that this entire thing has gotten way more complicated with the way they’ve muddied the waters on hexenbiest powers and how they affect a person, and that plus several other factors has given me a lot to sort through before I can adequately address the topic.

On the one hand, about half of the messed up stuff Adalind has done occurred while she was de-powered. She cursed Juliette and Renard, raped Sean, slept with Eric, and tried to sell her baby while she was de-powered.

But on the other hand, we have multiple statements from both Adalind and Eve that who a person is with hexenbiest powers is fundamentally different from who they are without them. And that seems to be supported by the way Juliette completely changed when she became a hexenbiest…like everything about her got flipped around to the opposite.

All of which raises a lot of questions that we don’t necessarily have direct parallels for in the real world: like how responsible do we hold de-powered Juliette and Adalind for their actions while they have powers? Are they even the same people at all, or are they different entities in the same body? If not, what was with the radical change in Juliette? But if so, what was with Adalind in seasons one through three?

Then, too, I don’t agree that what happened between Eve and Rachel was exactly the same as what happened between Nick and Adalind, for one main reason: Adalind had choices, and Eve does not.

I’m not saying that Adalind had easy choices, mind. She believed the royals had her child, and she did what she believed she had to do in order to get Diana back. One could argue that she was under duress, and thus no more capable of giving good consent than Nick at the time. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say whether Adalind would have even looked for another option, given that by that point she’d already shown rape and robbing people of their ability to consent to be her first course of action in almost any situation. And it doesn’t at all change or invalidate the nature of what she actually did to Nick, or its consequences for him, both physically and emotionally.

(I’m not even going to get into the fact that Adalind’s decisions during this time are what led to Juliette’s involuntary transformation.)

But back to Eve and Rachel: it’s not exactly the same situation as Adalind and Nick. Not because what happened in that instance was any more consensual than what happened with Adalind and Nick. It wasn’t. But whereas one situation is a person under duress (but with choices) and a person being lied to…the other is a person who has no choice and a person being lied to.

Eve is not a free individual, and not just because of the hexenbiest powers (which I think we’ve established by now are a giant black hole of WTF GRIMM WRITERS). She is essentially a brainwashed captive of Hadrian’s Wall who has been programmed to do whatever is necessary to get a job done, even when it’s something she herself is deeply uncomfortable with (as she very visibly was in the scenes with Rachel).

She’s also been shown, in various scenes, to follow orders almost as a knee-jerk reaction to being given them. She displays no emotions. She expresses no desires. In short, Eve is pretty firmly established by this point as a person without feelings or intentions of her own, and without individual freedom of choice.

How can that person give good consent to be in a relationship or have sex? Her “yes” and “no” in any given situation have zero to do with what she as a person wants, feels, and needs, and everything to do with what is required of her by Hadrian’s Wall. Not because she chose to devote herself to their cause, but because they made her incapable of doing anything else. Trubel said it right after they showed up: they didn’t just train Juliette to use her powers. They broke her. They erased everything that made her an individual and turned her into a tool. That’s how they see her, and how she sees herself.

Rachel slept with Eve under the impression that she was sleeping with Renard. She was deceived in the same way Nick was deceived by Adalind, and her option to say no to Eve was taken away because she didn’t know it was Eve she was agreeing to sleep with.

One party was acting under false information. The other was acting in the complete absence of choice. Neither could consent. Both were violated. And I think it’s pretty clear afterward that Eve feels that violation. She, a woman who barely displays emotion, shows intense discomfort before and after what happens with Rachel, and continues to do so when she tells Nick about it later.

So the question is: when neither party has the option to say no, do you call either one a rapist? Are they both guilty? Are they both victims? Are they both both? How do we negotiate the multiple consent issues here? Does it change the equation at all that Eve-as-Renard was visibly reluctant and attempted to prevent this from happening, and that Rachel pulled her into bed anyway?

I actually don’t know. I’m still navigating these increasingly murky waters, all the while wishing that the Grimm Writers would all take a goddamn course on the meaning of enthusiastic consent and like, apply it to their writing.

Before I finish this mini-tome I’ve written, I feel I need to add this: none of the magical bullshit has to matter one whit to any of you as viewers if you are upset, squicked, or triggered by any consent issues presented in Grimm–or the way they’re so often very poorly handled within the narrative.

You don’t have to explain or justify why a scene, ship, or character hurts you. You don’t have to keep watching or participate in debates/discussions about these issues. It doesn’t make you a bad fan or indicate anything negative about you if you need to check out for your own mental or emotional well-being.

And obviously, this isn’t me giving you some kind of permission, because you don’t need my permission or anyone else’s. This is just a reminder, in case any of you need to hear it, because I know how overboard-adamant and nasty some people can get when anyone dares to point out that a show or fandom has become problematic to the point of being untenable.