Or, How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Whoever The Potion Told Me To.
We are far from
done picking apart Grimm for its Arthurian and Grail parallels, but
we've been waiting to get more of a mytharc for this season before
combing through it again. I think, at this point, you can safely expect a
flurry of Arthuriana at mid-season hiatus and/or at season finale
times, followed by long stretches of accumulating data. However! We have
at this point two instances of love potions used in the show, and I
judge it only a matter of time before we get a third for Rule of Three
reasons - though I wouldn't put it past the writers to include that in
backstory rather than dropping it into a season arc. At this point I'd
rather prefer it, because love potions get very old, very fast. Unless
you want to count Juliette's coma and Renard's pure of heart potion as
two instances, which I don't, really. We saw in SotH that Adalind's was
fairly surprised that Renard took the pure of heart potion, which
implies a whole lot of things, up to and including that she thought he
knew more about how the potion(s) worked than he did. At any rate! Two
for-sure instances of love potions, which means it's time for a brief
refresher on love potions in Arthurian legends.
The
one everyone probably knows offhand is Uther and Igraine, so let's
start there. The son of the Pendragon must be born to these specific
parents only OH LOOK, Igraine's already married. This doesn't end well
for Gorlois, who gets dead so that he's out of the way. Depending on the
version of the myth you read (along with your preferred
reinterpretation), the Uther-and-Igraine story reads many many different
ways, though. Most commonly, Merlin casts a spell on Uther so he looks
like Gorlois (yeah, that doesn't sound familiar) and brings him to
Igraine while Gorlois is off being ambushed and killed. What Igraine
thinks of all this is generally left up to reinterpretations, since the
important part from early writers' point of view was the part where
Igraine got pregnant with Arthur and thereby gave birth to the Golden
Age of England. That said, I've seen modern retellings that have Igraine
complicit in the deception, that have her and Uther whammied into love
by who-knows-what (the gods, Merlin, the Christian God, the Lady of
Avalon/the Lake, take your pick), and that have Igraine resigned to her
fate or furious about it but taking care to shield her daughters. And
let's not forget those daughters, of course, who alternately give birth
to some of Arthur's greatest knights or, in the end, bring about
Arthur's downfall. Though we don't have any exact parallels so far to
this legend, we can see the writers cherrypicking the detail of a
potion/spell which alters a lover's appearance to that of someone else.
It's a common enough trope in love potions that normally I'd ignore it
as an explicitly pulled detail, except they've shown indications that
they're playing around in the Arthurian sandbox for awhile now.
Next
most common, and one we've tossed around some in comments, is Merlin
and Nimue. (Or Vivien, or whatever name you want to give her out of the
multitudes she has in the legends. I think those are the two most
common, though.) Morgan's protegee in most stories, Nimue comes to bring
about Merlin's downfall and thence rid Arthur of his most trusted
advisor. Generally she accomplishes this by playing his protegee,
then weaving a spell of enchantment around him and locking him in a
cave until he dies/falls into a coma. (Or a tree, or a rock, or a tower,
or... well, you know how medieval legends vary.) In none of the legends
do they outright state that she cast a love spell on him, merely that
he became 'infatuated' with her and agreed to teach her magic because
she feared he would entrap her and leave her defenseless. Little did he
know, etc. And other versions have her as the Lady of the Lake, not
Morgan's protegee. Just to confuse allegiances utterly. (Hey, that sounds
familiar too.) Now, the problem with the infinite versions and the
question of who Nimue is gives us too many options to pick just one, but
there's a lot of clear parallels between what Adalind's done to Renard
and what Nimue did to Merlin. Removing his power in a less direct way by
removing his ability to function and placing him in a state of mental
near-paralysis? Check. Probably learned some of her powers from him as
well as from her mother? Check. Was infatuated with him... hey, wait a
minute. So, no, not a perfect parallel, but damn close. There's also
certain parallels with what happened to Hank, insofar as Hank was an
even closer advisor to Nick and Adalind's potion was intended to kill
him. And he damn sure was in a coma-like state for awhile, there.
Now we come to one that needs even more explication
at the outset due to the number of Elaines in Arthurian legend. The one
we want is Elaine of Corbenic, not Elaine of Astolat. (Bonus points:
Lancelot's mother was also an Elaine. Sometimes there's an Elaine in
with the daughters of Igraine and Gorlois. THEN there are the minor
Elaines.) True story: I didn't realize for years that
she of Astolat was the more famous, because I grew up on Pyle and
Malory, and Pyle emphasizes Elaine of Corbenic so that we understand
where the hell Galahad comes from. At any rate, Lancelot and Elaine
comes about due to Lancelot and Guinevere falling in love. (This, too,
has overtones of 'someone made them do it' in certain versions, though
at least there's some long term association between the two of them
before they ever act on their feelings. Hormones. Both.) He's tricked
into believing that Guinevere has sent for him and yay sex! Only he's
given 'wine' and a ring of Guinevere's and sleeps with Elaine instead.
(Yeah, what else was
in that wine.) Depending on your version, he's pissed off the next
morning (sometimes enough to kill her) but she Knows She's Pregnant.
How, after less than 24 hours? MAGIC. Also there may or may not be some
stuff about fated parents of a Very Important Person again, echoing the
Uther-Igraine cycle, because why come up with new shit when there's all
this old shit conveniently waiting for you to yank it into the next
generation! Frequently, she ends up raising Galahad with Lancelot after
his period of insanity, and is sometimes known by the epithet of Grail
Maiden (or Grail Bearer) for restoring Lancelot's sanity by showing him
the Grail. She is not a
simple, black-and-white good-or-evil character in the stories, being
that she first coerces a man into an unwanted relationship and then
proceeds to take care of him after his rejection by his Twu Wuv. She
also chews Guinevere the hell out for driving Lancelot insane in the
first place. While by courtly love standards Lancelot was fucking
up with Guinevere, by modern standards I have to cheer that. And we can
read the text any way we please, from Elaine honestly championing
Lancelot to Elaine trying to get him into a dependent relationship with
her. You remember how I muttered about Lancelot and Elaine and wondering
if Renard had been born out of an unwanted union? Well, that does seem
possible, at this point, given that nobody in the family (except maybe
papa Renard) knew that Renard's mother was a Hexenbiest for a number of
years. Of course, this assumes Eric was telling the truth, which is
always a nebulous assumption. Adalind may yet develop some moral
ambiguity, too, though I don't foresee that happening anytime soon.
She's too ingrained in the learned behaviors from her mother and Renard
to want anything other than the negative interpretation, the one where
Renard is dependent on her for all things. We can also, of course,
interpret this in light of what was done to Hank, with Renard playing
the part of Adalind's nursemaid. (I know, right?) One of the joys of the
way Grimm plays with the roles is that many of them end up
genderswapped, but unfortunately it's often the minor ones.
I
want to touch very briefly on a final story: that of Tristan and
Iseult. It's this that I feel the writers are drawing most heavily from
for the Renard-Juliette arc, and it's this that worries me deeply about
the direction the show is going. Unlike the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot
triangle, or the Uther-Igraine-Gorlois one, or even
Elaine-Lancelot-Guinevere, we have an honest-to-god love potion with
horrible, horrible repercussions for all involved. There is swooning of
grief and dying of grief and poisons and potions and trickery and
scheming and, well. Next week I'll get into it in a great deal more
detail! For now, just note that as with other star-crossed lovers, both
of them end up dead.
And
really, that's what it boils down to. Death, madness, possible drastic
success of your children who themselves end in death or madness or both.
Love potions always, ALWAYS end badly, and if we're keeping all the
characters around for a presumed third season, I cannot for the life of
me think how they're going to write their way out of this so that it
doesn't feel like a cop-out. We should be seeing some long term
repercussions for Hank, who was raped both mentally and physically even
if he doesn't quite want
to call it that (the closest we've gotten on screen is 'being
roofied'), and I don't count going through the Delirium of coming to
realize Wesen exist as a repercussion. (There should be repercussions
from that,
too, but that's neither here nor there.) Elaine often ends up
committing suicide after Lancelot dies. Lancelot is usually the last to
die, after Arthur at Camlann and Guinevere in the years following, with
both of them dying of old age and/or regret and/or grief and/or a broken
heart. Nimue kills Merlin and is often never heard from again due (or
so it's implied) to her fae nature. Gorlois is killed, sometimes as part
of a deliberate David-and-Bathsheba callback and sometimes
accidentally. Uther dies in battle without ever seeing his kingdom
united. Igraine either fades out of the stories entirely or dies shortly
after him. And both Tristan and Iseult die. Granted, none of these
characters die until after many, many adventures and mishaps along the
way, but somehow I just don't have a great deal of faith that Renard and
Juliette are both making it out of this alive. Certainly they won't
make it out unscathed.
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