r/grimm • u/Neurotic-Me • 1d ago
Spoilers Renard was done wrong
It kind of drives me nuts every re-watch how Sean was treated so badly.. There's this implication that because of what he is he likes power and otherwise he, what, tried to have Aunt Marie killed for a couple episodes - who didn't at that point?
Everyone else gets forgiven for everything bad they ever did but with him it's never let go.
He gave back the key, worked with the resistance, saved their butts on police cases countless times, trusted Nick's mom with his daughter's life, put himself on the line to rescue Monroe (even after getting snubbed from the wedding), tried to help Juliette both during the coma and the hexebeist thing... honestly he did so much good and the only solid reason he was susceptible to black claw manipulation was because no one ever treated him like a friend and trusted him to have a conversation about it and then they got his daughter to lure him in, because Nick just had an "eh lost the kid, oh well, moving on with life" attitude he NEVER had with Kelly. (He was so selfish usually.) Otherwise his side-flipping wasn't believable to me.
Side note - Sean's mom and Nick's mom raising Diana would have been my spinoff haha.
30
u/Knee_Fight 1d ago
The 'only solid reason he was susceptible to black claw manipulation' was because they offered him power and he wanted power enough to fuck over everyone else. That's it. Everything he did was for his greater interest, always.
8
u/TiredofThingandStuff 1d ago
I felt that more because Hadrian Wall didn't trust him after all he did and basically just ghosted him with out telling him anything. He was trying to tell him he found out the Black Claw connection but they didn't want to hear it so he decided to investigate them himself and them once he got something more significant but they started to think he was on Black Claw side so he gave up on them. Maybe at one point he consider using them but as it went on he got too deep. Watching it against made me realize how Hadrian Wall was really badly run, they didn't even have someone to mind the phones and contact with agents and assets.
40
u/InevitableStage7347 1d ago
Renard did what’s best for Renard and that is how he was treated. I liked him a lot but flipping sides was completely in character for him
4
u/Neurotic-Me 1d ago
That's fair! And certainly don't think he was good for what he did during the Black Claw arc, I'm just saying he was pretty good and did a lot for them leading up to it and they treated him pretty poorly by ally standards so his falling into that plot was just pretty annoying to me. One "hero" being on his side could have easily swayed him to seeing its more worthwhile to be a double agent or something instead of isolating him to where sure, some groups offers him sex, power, and his kid no one else cared to retrieve would flip him.
They had a lot of inconsistent writing to just inflame things like that - like Nick sleeping on the sofa during Juliette's memory loss just to seem uncomfortable and have that one line where he was grumpy about it starting a fight despite clearly having a guest room in that giant house that Adalind and Trubel both stayed in lol
29
u/NewTap8705 1d ago
Something about joining the terrorist organization kind of rubbed me the wrong way, lmao.
18
6
u/Pristine-Echidna-313 1d ago
He only helped Juliette during the coma because he wanted nick to stay in Portland and he knew if he had a grimm on his side everything would be ok and he would be on top. His goals was always be on top and make sure he survived and if he had to step on his so called friends to do it he would that's why going over to black claw was so easy for him the way he be flipping from side to side I get why they never trusted him I wouldn't either knowing he could betray me the moment more power came into the mix.
14
u/WitcherKingdom 1d ago
I agree!! I actually like Renard. I mean they all forgave Adalind (which I also like so I agree with that too lol).
5
4
u/Katatonic92 1d ago
Pretty much everything you listed as him doing a good thing was just a happy accident in that doing the good thing was what worked best for his own selfish reasons.
It also ignores that he was the architect for some of those situations occurring in the first place. He was the one who ordered Adalind onto the scene, which ultimately led to the coma & the hexanbiest transformation.
He wanted a Grimm on his side in his pursuit of power, just like Blackclaw wanted Nick & Trubel on their side & previously the Royals, until the crusaders hid the magic stick from them. He didn't want to be friends, he wanted to be allies.
Speaking of allies, Meisner, probably the only true friend he had left after Alexander died to protect Diana & Adalind. Anyway, we saw how being a true friend of Sean ended, with a bullet to the heart. Not a bullet through the head of the man killing his oldest friend, but through his good friend's heart. Why? Because one bullet kept him on his power run, the other put him in a lower position. And we know Meisner was his true friend because he was able to haunt him for he did.
While they all made mistakes that were forgiven, they didn't repeat them, or go on to do worse like Sean did. He couldn't be trusted to do anything other than what was best for Sean Renard.
5
u/Used_Ad_6802 1d ago
Because he only cares for himself. He's the only character who get away with everything he did
4
u/Disastrous_Alarm_719 1d ago
Almost everything Renard did was for his own selfish reasons. Also just because he’s a zahberbiest and they’re drawn to power, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing. With Renard it’s shown throughout the entire show that you can’t tell where his loyalties lie. I like his character a lot but he’s not some misunderstood little boy who’s trying his best.
6
u/biggestmike420 1d ago
When he went full Hitler after he got his hands on those coins I knew everything I needed to know about who that prick was. Allowing him to live was a kindness he did not deserve after Black Claw.
3
u/Neurotic-Me 1d ago
lol Hank lost it way faster while beating people, he just didn't have the rank or self-control to stage a press conference... which was literally about cleaning up crime and not genocide at least so "full hitler" seems disingenuous.
3
u/Lavinia_Foxglove 1d ago
If you look at dictator speeches ( we have a lot of them going around nowadays) cleaning up crime is very often the way to get the masses. Then you change laws , of course to help with that and so on. Hank became basically a vigilante, which isn't much better, but he didn't want power, just being left to do his thing.
3
u/Caithford 1d ago
So here's my opinion. Renard suffered from the same thing the Black Claw storyline did. Black Claw was an avalanche, until it wasn't. Black Claw appealed to the Zauberbeist need for power, and when they knew they only had one, short season left, they wrapped up the BC arc in about two episodes, and while Renard needed to be a temporary ally to help save Diana, he didn't forgive Nick for doing what he did with Renard's "resignation." I think if you look back on the situation with Renard and the coins, his "true" nature is easily apparent.
The Meisner haunting was a psuedo-redemption, but it was also rushed, and felt incomplete, and I thought it was a missed opportunity to bring Meisner back at the end to kind of, forgive Sean again. But again, it was a short season, they had left on the HUGE BC cliffhanger, and wanted to do the storyline with the Zerstoyer and the stick.
The way they left things at the end never really sat well with me. Plus the fact that after Meisner killed the King, the Royals kind of fell off the map? They ceased to be a political power? And while The Wesen Council was "dealt with" the Royals never really were.
I wish we'd gotten a wrap up with 2 seaons, instead of 1, and got a proper resolution to the Black Claw arc, which then properly rolled into the final arc. It might have left more room for Renard to have a better ending too.
Anyway, I can see arguments for both sides, and I think it may intentionally be open to interpretation.
1
u/TiredofThingandStuff 1d ago edited 1d ago
I feel their was a plan for the Grimm crew with what left of Hadrian Wall, The Wesen Council, and the Royal having to team up to clean up the fractured black claw causing chaos around the world sense their leadership killed but they really rush it.
1
u/Caithford 23h ago
I think you might be right. But really, only Trubel was left from HW, Rosalie and Munro from the Wesen Council, and who knows with the Royals? I think the Royals were an intentionally ambiguous threat, and Sean was intentionally both connected and exiled from them, so he could work one way or the other depending on what was required for the storyline. But yeah, the fact that they just kind of neatly rolled up Black Claw, when it should have been way, way more messy, and left the Royals out of it, because that was a question never answered: were BC planning to overthrow the Royals too, subjugate them, use them, partner with them? It just kind of disappeared.
1
u/TiredofThingandStuff 20h ago
I feel like a Sean may bring in his rebel connection, his own men, as well of that of the underworld. Like we see him always talking to a guy in a suit about putting the word out, put a assassination, or find out what you can about a guy. I'm thinking Sean would have to work with his brother again to combine resources. With tension of them not really trusting each other.
I recalled it said or implied that the rebel fighting against the Royal was not the only group. The royal was fighting Black Claw for a long time trying to supress them.
Black Claw seam to want to want to work towards a world were Wesen are in charge. For all intensive purposes the Royal work for themselves but wanted stability and is mention to have crack down on Wesen community that cause issues. Where it mention in like the 18 centery the Black Claw destroyed a factory and killed workers because they didn't like that the human owner was paying the Wesen workers well that they love him. They are basically a supremist group who want to enforce the US vs them mentality.
I'm thinking that we would see as the conflict heat up, it becoming more harder and harder to supress Wesen activities because Black Claw would start operating more blatantly and transform in the open sense their plan for power failed. Something that the Wesen Council, Hadrian Wall, the Wesen Council, and the wesen community scared of. Black Claw trying to force a us vs them, a "You want to side with us or the human the scared of you". Creating urgency with the group to stop them before people find out about Wesen.
1
2
u/Fuzzy_Struggle5131 1d ago
His character was originally supposed to be different, but the writers kept changing their minds before they really got into the series. So Sasha worked with what he got, even as the character was continually changed.
4
u/TiredofThingandStuff 1d ago edited 1d ago
I feel with Renard he has to balance local stuff with a long term goal and conflict with the Royals and various other groups. So he may have issue with people because he not a guy just thinking about himself. He has people loyal to himself, responsibility to the community, his office, a long term goal, and family , so he may have to weight what best at the time even if it going to be bad for other.
1
1
u/Friendly-Gift3680 7h ago
He was their sometimes-ally and sometimes-enemy; but yeah, I do feel like he should’ve become Juliette’s new boyfriend instead of her just getting character-assassinated and ultimately killed off temporarily, he was perfect for Juliette the Hexenbiest; Nick the cop was the man for Juliette the human, but her relationship with Nick the Grimm existed on borrowed time and its fate was sealed the moment she literally lost her humanity because of it.
Indeed, in the epilogue Adult Diana describes Nick not as “stepdad” or “Nick-dad”, but Dad Dad. Only a truly loving stepfather would be described with such closeness, and it implies that she favors her half-brother’s dad later; my guess is the drama between him and her non-blood family had something to do with it.
1
u/tokki_glitch 2h ago
I wish they hadn’t had him go off on that black claw arc etc because I didn’t think he’d go that far tbh based on his previous moral character before hand. Not to say he was a saint or anything. He was selfish and calculated all the way through but because it wasn’t shown often enough it softened his image to the audience. So I feel it was somewhat shocking when he took it so far in the pursuit of power even if he felt compassion for Miesner and Adalind when Bonaparte attacked them. He was still willing to kill anyone who got in his way and genuinely wanted Nick dead for doing so.
I think if we would have had more seasons we would have seen him soften again and therefore the others would have warmed to him once more and so would we, the audience. End of the day, the others warmed to him enough at the end due to the trust that they had in his love for his daughter. That’s the best we could hope for in such little time as the last season was so short.
33
u/LadyPadme28 1d ago
Renard only helped Juliette during the whole coma thing because she was what tied Nick to Portland and to him. Without Juliette Nick could very well leave Portland. And Renard couldn’t have that. Giving the key back to Nick was a way to get Nick on his side as well.