A Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls: Your Favorite Authors on The Vampire Diaries

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A Visitor ’ s Guide to

Mystic Falls

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A Visitor ’ s Guide to

Mystic Falls avorite authors on your f the vam p i r e diarie s edited by and

red

vee

of Vampire-Diaries.Net with leah wilson

an imprint of benbella books, inc. • dallas, texas

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THIS PUBLICATION HAS NOT BEEN PREPARED, APPROVED, OR LICENSED BY ANY ENTITY THAT CREATED OR PRODUCED THE WELL-KNOWN TELEVISION SHOW THE VAMPIRE DIARIES OR THE VAMPIRE DIARIES BOOK SERIES.

“Women Who Love Vampires Who Eat Women” Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Rees Brennan “Bonnie Bennett: A New Kind of Best Friend” Copyright © 2010 by Bree Despain “The War between the States” Copyright © 2010 by Claudia Gray “Ladies of the Night, Unite!” Copyright © 2010 by Jon Skovron “In Which Our Intrepid Heroines . . .” Copyright © 2010 by Alexandra Harvey “You’re My Obsession” Copyright © 2010 by Vera Nazarian “Don’t Be Fooled By That Noble Chin: Stefan Sucks” Copyright © 2010 by Kiersten Brazier “Case Notes: Salvatore, Stefan and Salvatore, Damon” Copyright © 2010 by Heidi R. Kling “Damon Salvatore: Vampire Hunter” Copyright © 2010 by Mary Borsellino “Sweet Caroline” Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Lynn Barnes “Dear Diary . . .” Copyright © 2010 by Karen Mahoney “Introduction,” “A Visitor’s Guide to Fell’s Church,” and Other Materials Copyright © 2010 by Heather Cordova All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Smart Pop is an Imprint of BenBella Books, Inc. 10300 N. Central Expressway, Suite 400 Dallas, TX 75231 www.benbellabooks.com www.smartpopbooks.com Send feedback to [email protected] Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title. ISBN 978-1-935251-99-6

Copyediting by Erica Lovett and Kellie Grant

Proofreading by Michael Fedison Cover design by The Book Designers Text design and composition by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc. Printed by Bang Printing

Distributed by Perseus Distribution http://www.perseusdistribution.com/ To place orders through Perseus Distribution: Tel: (800) 343-4499 Fax: (800) 351-5073 E-mail: [email protected] Significant discounts for bulk sales are available. Please contact Glenn Yeffeth at [email protected] or (214) 750-3628.

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For Vampire Diaries fans, old and new

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Contents

Introduction

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red and vee

Women Who Love Vampires Who Eat Women

1

Sarah Rees Brennan

Bonnie Bennett: A New Kind of Best Friend

21

Bree Despain

The War between the States

35

Claudia Gray

Ladies of the Night, Unite!

51

Jon Skovron

In Which Our Intrepid Heroines Discuss the Merits of the Bad Boy Versus the Reformed Bad Boy with the Help of a Couple of Dead Women Who Know About Such Things.

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Alyxandra Harvey

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You're My Obsession

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Vera Nazarian

Don't Be Fooled by that Noble Chin: Stefan Sucks

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Kiersten White

Case Notes: Salvatore, Stefan and Salvatore, Damon

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Heidi R. Kling

Damon Salvatore: Vampire Hunter

129

Mary Borsellino

Sweet Caroline

143

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Dear Diary . . .

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Karen Mahoney

A Visitor's Guide to Fell's Church A Book Series Primer for TV Series Fans

175

Red and Vee

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Introduction • red and vee •

I

f you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve seen more than a few episodes of The Vampire Diaries, and chances are you’ve used the tried-and-true “vampire love triangle” oneliner when attempting to woo your hold-out friends to the pleasures of Thursday nights on the CW. Maybe you added a comment about Ian Somerhalder’s wicked smirk, Paul Wesley’s abs, or the sex—yes, the sex—as the cherry on top. But does that really describe the show you’re watching every week? While editing A Visitor’s Guide to Mystic Falls, we attempted an experiment: we asked our Twitter followers to sum up Vampire Diaries as thoroughly as they could . . . in 140 characters. For every response that contained the word “shirtless,” there was another making a valiant attempt at condensing the show into a bite-sized hook. Sure, the love triangle between Elena Gilbert and Stefan and Damon Salvatore was the focal point (as one person quite memorably put it, “a love triangle told with eyebrows”), but just as many brought up the town of Mystic Falls itself. ix

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TVD is about a town with a supernatural history. It’s centered around a woman who’s brought chaos to the town, past and present. @GroundedSouls In a small town, descendants of the Founding Families are plagued by secrets & mysteries, suffering the sins of their fathers. @thetelevixen In the months leading up to the show’s premiere, executive producer Kevin Williamson repeatedly stressed that The Vampire Diaries was also the story of Mystic Falls; the town isn’t merely a backdrop, but a character in and of itself. While the pilot episode may not have supported that description, each episode following did, right up to the season one finale, “Founder’s Day.” In her essay on the titular diaries, Karen Mahoney expresses surprise that Stefan begins the pilot with the declaration that “this is my story.” And yes, the story of the Salvatore brothers is inextricably linked with Mystic Falls, but the brothers are almost treated as collateral damage within a much, much bigger arc of the town’s history. In The Vampire Diaries, the plot is not merely driven by a first-class case of history repeating. The past, as Claudia Gray and Vera Nazarian argue, is a perpetual shadow over everything that happens in the present. The past and present are emphasized equally and this colors almost every interaction, instigating life-changing events and personal growth amongst our diverse cast of characters. And a diverse group it is: humans, vampires, vampire hunters, witches, and—dare we say it?—werewolves make

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for a supernatural melting pot of epic proportions. Not only are these characters diverse in their species and roles, they’re also complicated, defying the definitions of what we’ve come to expect from such character types in the past. The sidekick best friend is a kick-ass leading lady in her own right, the high school “mean girl” has a heart of gold, and the man we thought was the villain of the tale turns out to be a victim himself. The characters in The Vampire Diaries cannot be filed into simple boxes labeled with stereotypical character traits; they frequently say and do the last thing we anticipate. And, as in life, they refuse to be pigeon-holed as “good” or “evil.” Even the show’s most clear-cut villains—John Gilbert, Isobel—are firmly in the gray, driven by a twisted sense of duty or humbled (however briefly) in the face of those they have caused so much pain. As Mary Borsellino points out in her essay, a lot of what drives everyone on both sides of the vampire/antivampire fight is as simple as the wish to protect their own from a genuine threat. By the end of the first season, it’s Bonnie Bennett—Elena’s loyal best friend turned powerful witch—who has come to personify this dichotomy. Though she’s inherited her role as protector of the town, she occupies it fully, and not even friendship can stop her from doing what she feels is right. A lot of people think they’re “right” in Mystic Falls. And that’s why a lot of people die. It’s also why the relationships on the show are so complex. The issues between Stefan and Damon alone could provide more than enough entertainment week to week. But almost

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every pair of characters you can think of has a particular dynamic worth exploring. Sarah Rees Brennan looks at Elena’s with Stefan and Damon, and uses it as a springboard for considering the relationships between humans and vampires, and males and females, in the show as a whole. It’s a subject Jon Skovron picks up on, when he presents The Vampire Diaries as the latest battleground for the struggle between male and female vampires in pop culture. After all, The Vampire Diaries is but the most recent vampire tale to grace our screens; it’s only natural to compare it to what came before. As such, you’ll find a lot of references to other vampire media on the following pages, ranging from old favorites such as Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Stoker’s Dracula, to more beloved modern fare like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ultimately, what all of these essays have in common is that they highlight how The Vampire Diaries is not just another teenage vampire show. It’s so much more than that, with unexpected depth, an intricate plot, and a town instilled with a mythology that fascinates and engages. When Smart Pop’s Leah Wilson approached us about editing a book of essays centered around The Vampire Diaries TV series, we didn’t wonder if a show in its first season could sustain an entire volume; we wondered if twelve essays could possibly be enough to encompass everything thrown at us each week. As the anthology progressed, it became clear that this was the case, as more themes and subjects came to light and the phrase “we can include this next time” was bandied back and forth. For a show on a small network with a young

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target audience, The Vampire Diaries continually astounds us with its complexity and fearlessness. Maybe some of these essays will resonate with you, or perhaps you’ll find yourself shaking your head in disagreement with others. Either way we hope not only that you will enjoy reading what The Vampire Diaries has inspired these authors to write about, but also that they might well set the gears turning in your own mind and help you explore the themes within this TV series in even greater depth.

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A Visitor ’ s Guide to

Mystic Falls

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Women Who Love Vampires Who Eat Women gender dynamics and interspecies dating in mystic falls • Sarah Rees Brennan •

The nutshell summary of The Vampires Diaries—a human girl torn between two vampire brothers—belies the complicated dynamics at work amongst the varied citizens of Mystic Falls, both male and female and human and vampire. Sarah Rees Brennan explores what distinguishes Elena Gilbert within a sea of vampire media heroines, her complicated relationships with her friends and the Salvatore brothers, and laments a disturbing trend amongst the vampire ladies of Mystic Falls.

1

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uffy Summers and Bella Swan. What do they have in common? I know, they have the same initials. Isn’t that weird? Oh, and they both date vampires. Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired in 1997, and Twilight was published in 2005. But in 1991, before these fanged giants appeared on the scene, a series called The Vampire Diaries was already wooing the teen set. And by the teen set, I mean me. L.J. Smith was my Stephenie Meyer. When I was fourteen, I read The Vampire Diaries and immediately had to read all her other books, too. Vampires with diaries. Vampires fighting the apocalypse. Psychic vampires. You may well ask: what is a psychic vampire? He drank psychic power, I don’t know. What I do know is, he had to kiss her neck to drink her psychic power, and it was awesome. And it wasn’t cheating on her boyfriend either, because he had to drink her psychic powers or he would die. Save a life! Do the noble thing and let a hot boy suck on your neck! Therein lies the innate appeal of the vampire boyfriend. He’s dangerous, but he is lonely. He needs you, and by sheer virtue of the fact he wants and needs you so much, your companionship after hundreds of lonely years combined with the delicious blood he cannot help but want, you have a certain power over him. He is a beautiful path to death and at the 2

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same time a promise of eternal life. It’s easy to see—and thousands have—the allure of a vampire boyfriend. But what kind of woman is both able and willing to forge a relationship with a vampire? Buffy had superpowers, and could pose a bigger threat to vampires than they did to her. Bella was willing to become a vampire, to submerge her human self completely in the experience of vampiric love. The Vampire Diaries’ Elena Gilbert is balancing between Buffy and Bella, and I think doing a pretty damn good job. Elena is a more normal girl than Buffy or Bella. Buffy by her very nature was part of the vampire world already, and able to protect herself within it. Bella embraced the vampire world and insisted on becoming part of it. Elena is so far resolutely human and thus fragile, but she has to deal with the complications of living in a world where the supernatural is real. So does almost everyone in Mystic Falls, but Elena is the first teenager to learn about the vampires. She is the one most often in danger and the one most aware of the fact that she and everyone else are in danger. To be loved by a vampire is to be hugely vulnerable, perilously close to the things that go bump in the night. It is also to have great power, but it is kind of a problematic power, as you get a lot of it through your vampire boyfriend. The Vampire Diaries acknowledges this while never losing sight of who Elena is as a person, by making her vulnerable but never entirely helpless. The Vampire Diaries is a show that’s obviously very aware of its heritage— not just the books it’s loosely based on, but the other hugely successful vampire media that came

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before it. At first—let’s all face it—we saw the promotional materials, the girl with the sad face and the salon-perfect long brown hair staring off into the distance as if communing with an invisible angsty vampire boyfriend, and we said unto ourselves, “Selves! Shameless Twilight rip-off, twelve o’clock.” We were soon to find out that The Vampire Diaries is not imitating but building on the foundations of its predecessors, constantly turning the tropes of vampire fiction on their heads. Unlike Buffy or Bella, Elena is not the new girl in school. She is pretty, popular, and in no way an outcast, but she has been changed by her parents’ recent death. Through it, she became one acquainted with death both literally and figuratively, as we learn later, because the day her parents died was also the day Stefan saved Elena and saw her for the first time. Having lost her parents, she’s been made both more mature and more restless, seeking for answers and meaning in life, ready for a challenge. It’s easy to see how someone immortal could appeal to her. Having shaken loose her sweet, decent boyfriend Matt, it’s even easier to see that she might be wanting someone a little dangerous. She is in a place where a vampire boyfriend might appeal to her, but she also has the roots and support system to deal with a vampire boyfriend without losing her sense of self. Unlike Buffy, with her slayer destiny, or Bella, uprooted from her home and swept into Edward’s arms, Elena has a choice. She has her own life to lead, and solid ground to stand on while she chooses either to be with Stefan or not—and since her choice is so clearly her own, once made, we believe in it.

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Like Buffy and unlike Bella, Elena has a strong friend group. From the start we see her as very actively involved in their lives: one episode centered on a girls’ night in which Bonnie, Caroline, and Elena concentrated on mending their relationships with each other. At one point Damon insulted Caroline, and Elena made it clear she would not put up with disrespect to her friends. Elena’s relationship with Caroline and Bonnie isn’t perfect: Bonnie blamed Elena’s vampire beau for her grandmother’s death and ended up betraying Elena’s trust to try and get rid of the vampires once and for all. Caroline and Elena’s relationship was strained even before that, in a really thoughtful look at what it must be like to be the protagonist’s sidekick. Caroline: You know that girl in a book or a movie? You know, the IT girl? Who all the boys go nuts for, the center of attention even though she doesn’t really want to be, everyone’s first choice? Everyone: Sure. The main character. Caroline: Being friends with that girl gives you a hella inferiority complex. And it kinda sucks.

The problems within these relationships make them seem real, however—just as real as the romance. We believe Caroline and Bonnie love Elena, and she loves them back. Bonnie loves Elena so much that Elena was kidnapped so Bonnie would do anything to save the hostage, and in the finale Bonnie’s love for Elena triumphed over her horror of vampires, and she used magic to save Damon and Stefan.

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Likewise, when Bonnie revealed her magic to Elena, Elena was filled with joy and wonder for her. In Elena we see someone whose capacity for love and loyalty can encompass even a creature of the night: we believe Elena loves fiercely and irrevocably because we see her fiercely loving a great many more people than just Stefan. We see enough of Elena’s capacity for love and loyalty that we can even envision it extending to Damon. Of course, it is always a question of Damon, as well as Stefan. Because the show has two attractive vampire boys for the price of one, it can do very interesting things with the entire concept of a vampire boyfriend. Stefan is the good vampire boyfriend, and Damon is the bad one. By separating out the two sides we can see even more clearly how very alluring, but also how very disturbing, a vampire boyfriend can be. We see Stefan, as the good vampire boyfriend, controlling his bloodlust to such a degree that even when it broke out we never thought his love for Elena was sublimated bloodlust: he was shown as desiring to attack other people, relative strangers to him, and not her, whom he saw as beloved rather than food. When Stefan was at his most unstable and Elena went to him, comforting him, and he put his face in the curve of her neck, we were electrified with doubt about Stefan and fear for Elena. We thought we were seeing the reckless, almost suicidal trust Bella has for Edward. Elena: There, there, sweetheart! You mistook a blonde full of delicious blood for a donut full of delicious jelly. It could happen to anyone.

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Stefan: Oh Elena, what would I do without you? I must nuzzle your delicate neck in love and angst. Audience: Neck. Blood-crazed vampire. Blood-crazed vampire, neck! Does this not strike you as a bad combination? Elena: Please do. There, there. Everything’s going to be okay once I STAB YOU WITH THIS VERVAIN DART AND LOCK YOU IN THE BASEMENT TO DETOX. Audience : Elena Gilbert, I think I love you. Elena: Damon, get his legs.

It was a classic Vampire Diaries move, showing us the exact opposite of what we expected to see. More than that, it showed that Elena’s wit and nerve mean she can handle herself, that she’s not wrong to trust herself, and that she’s not wrong to trust Stefan. We see exactly why Elena might put her heart in Stefan’s hands, and we feel sympathy for and complicity with her decision. But then we, like Elena, have to deal with the fact that once you open the door for one monster, others might slide in. Others like bad vampire “boyfriend” Damon. We see Damon watching a sleeping Elena, and we are both moved and disturbed by this romantic gesture à la Twilight’s Edward Cullen—because this isn’t Elena’s boyfriend. She would undoubtedly not want him in her room, beholding her unconscious, touching her hair as she sleeps: the scene was as creepy as it was revealing of Damon’s softer side. The Vampire Diaries never shies away from the unsettling aspects of vampirism. It steers a middle course between Buffy

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the Vampire Slayer’s stance of “vampires have no souls, that’s a demon with the memory of the person you knew” and Twilight’s of “that’s the same person, but my, does he have a mad jones for some B Negative.” In The Vampire Diaries we learn, quite a way into the game, that a vampire can choose to suppress certain human emotions. This makes a lot of sense, in that someone who used to be human and suddenly finds him- or herself having to prey on humans to survive would really need to be able to do that! It’s also very scary, in that a vampire in The Vampire Diaries is still the person you loved when they were human, but now they have not only a hunger for blood but the ability to transform into a sociopath at will and so feel no remorse about taking it. Vampires being able to turn human emotions off and on also makes a lot of sense looking back at the actions of vampires we have seen, and shows us how clever the storytelling is. Damon’s constant drinking once he learned that his one true love Katherine never needed him to rescue her and never loved him at all made perfect sense the first time around— who wouldn’t drink having received that sort of news?—but can suddenly be seen in a new light when we observe Stefan drinking to control his bloodlust, remember Lexi saying that alcohol does that, and realize that Damon’s kill count has dropped dramatically. Now we see that Damon was not dealing with loss by drinking to excess, but dealing with loss through cautiously reaching out to other people, Stefan and Elena and even Alaric, who may offer Damon affection as real as

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Katherine’s was false. The show trusts its viewers to notice small details. Until the finale Damon could not admit that he had chosen to experience human emotion again, and it was only then that all the small hints like Damon’s drinking came together to show that Damon really was making an effort to rehabilitate himself. He had to turn on his feelings because he wanted to be loved, and to be loved, you have to love. Also, you have to stop being a psycho killer. Damon as the bad vampire boyfriend is not the only example of the way The Vampire Diaries refuses to flinch from how dangerous vampires can be, and thus how much danger a human mixed up with them might find herself in. Vampires are shown as having an approach to things that truly is inhuman—even the good vampires. Damon “There Was Nothing on TV So I Killed Someone” Salvatore goes without saying, but even if good guy Stefan talks a good game, he obviously does not prioritize human life the same way a human would. Other Character: That Damon, he is an evil piece of work. He’s like the president of Eviltonia. Stefan: I know, you are so right, it makes me really upset. Other Character: He should be put down like a rabid dog. Stefan: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. Other Character: Okay then! I’ve got a stake, let’s— Stefan: Don’t you dare hurt my brother! Other Character: Whaaaaaat? But you said—

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Stefan: Theoretically, Damon should be put down like a rabid dog. I thought we were just having a philosophical discussion! Put that stake away before someone gets hurt. Other Character: Like Damon’s innocent vic— Stefan: I MEAN SOMEONE IMPORTANT.

And why should he? Stefan’s not human, and he can’t see things the way a human can. At his most furious with Damon, he drugged him and locked him up in a cellar full of vervain and said he planned to put him in the family tomb and after fifty years, they’d reevaluate. This is not just an example of how stone-cold and also stone-cold-crazy the littlest Salvatore can be; it’s an example of how differently Stefan views the world. In fifty years or so, Elena will be dead. Humans are temporary, and vampires are eternal. In his plan, he could have Elena for her lifetime, and then get his brother back again. Since the divide between vampires and humans is made so clear and so unsettling, that does bring us to another element of the vampire and vampire’s girlfriend relationship: there is a huge power imbalance. Elena is very brave, at one point fighting off a vampire with pencils in a move reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—not the show, but the cheesy nineties movie in which Kristy Swanson stakes a vampire with a ruler. Elena is as brave as Buffy, but she doesn’t have superpowers. Despite her cleverness and courage, at a physical level she has no way of fighting vampires on equal ground. Elena is very, very vulnerable, as are the majority of the humans—mostly women—in The Vampire Diaries, and the

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show examines what the relationship between a vampire and a vulnerable human really means. When we see Damon compelling Caroline, we certainly don’t think, “Excellent work, Mr. Salvatore, please carry on,” but we are not exactly shocked, either. Dracula swoops on Lucy Westenra just like this. Dark handsome vampire bewitches and bewilders a screaming blonde . . . well, it’s a classic, isn’t it? Until the show does what it does best: takes a familiar picture, and turns it on its head. In a flashback, we see Katherine controlling a human Stefan, and then we are shocked. Stefan Salvatore, our hero, is someone we’re used to seeing as a strong and capable vampire, a character with agency and a personality we know well. We see Katherine take all of that away. Stefan still remembers being compelled by Katherine. A century and more later he told Damon that it took him years to work out exactly what Katherine did to him. We see very clearly that Stefan was violated, that something terrible was done to him without his consent by someone who was having sex with him, and that it has affected his whole life. It’s only then that we realize exactly how much what Damon did to Caroline might affect her. We have yet to see how, but I have every confidence it will. That’s not the only way the show underscores human vulnerability. Not only did Stefan give Elena a vervain necklace, a shield against his own kind, but Damon put the necklace back on Elena when she took it off. It was a tacit admission that compelling someone is deeply wrong:

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that it is something a vampire will not do to someone they love. Damon and Stefan showed their love for Elena by trying to make her less vulnerable—which highlighted how vulnerable she, or any other human, is in the presence of a vampire. We don’t just see Stefan compelled by Katherine and Caroline compelled by Damon. We also see Katherine’s pupil Isobel, who compelled a man not to be gay so she could use him as a sex toy and blood bank, and compelled another man to kill himself. We see Jeremy, whose memories Damon wiped away, feeling wronged and confronting Damon and Elena about it. Neither Damon nor Elena can entirely justify their behavior, even though both of them meant it for the best. We keep being shown that vampires ruin your life and take away your will: I do think that Damon will have to pay for what he did to Caroline. So I am super impressed by how thoughtful The Vampire Diaries is in its treatment of vampires and their relation to humans: positioning both men and women as vampires’ victims, and never waving either’s victimhood away. We viewers love Damon, who has the best lines and the best bone structure on the show, but we’re never allowed to ignore how very harmful he is. However, the question of who is harmed and who has the power on this show is a little problematic. Women don’t fare very well on The Vampire Diaries. We have seen both Caroline and Vicki compelled and fed upon, and Elena only protected by the gift of vampire boyfriendly love. And women who can hold their own—at least the nonevil ones—tend

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not to stick around. Bonnie is a powerful witch, but the show isn’t called The Witch Diaries. It would be nice to see a sympathetic vampire woman who doesn’t die. How, as a girl, do you survive appearing on The Vampire Diaries? I hope you guys can hang on a minute: I’m off to become a vampire and then—this is the most important part—join Team Evil. It’ll be great; I’ll get to wear revealing clothing and make out with Damon. Best of all, I might live. The first important vampire girl on the show was Vicki, Jeremy and Tyler’s sometime bad-girl girlfriend, who was turned into a vampire by Damon on a whim. She’d barely become a vampire before Stefan had to kill her because her bloodlust was out of control and she was going for Elena. Kevin Williamson said in an interview with TV Guide about this abrupt end to Vicki and Jeremy’s romance, “A love story between a vampire and a guy? We’re watching that on True Blood [with Jessica and Hoyt].” Good point, Mr. Williamson, we can’t have a minor plotline that involved a vampire girl and a human guy. Man, dodged that stake. Imagine what would be even worse: if both The Vampire Diaries and True Blood had major plotlines about a human girl who attracts two very different vampire guys! Wouldn’t that be terrib— uh. Look, a flying vampire! Gotta go. As you can see, I was as unconvinced that Vicki needed killing as I was excited by the idea of seeing a vampire girl on the show, but part of the charm of The Vampire Diaries is that it has a very fast-moving plot, and people die early and often. Just before Vicki’s death the last Salvatore descendant, Zach,

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also died, and at Damon’s hands. “This is just the kind of crazy ride The Vampire Diaries is!” I told myself. Vicki’s death was, however, followed by the death of Lexi, an older, experienced vampire lady who was Stefan’s best friend. I winced then, but worse was to follow. Pearl and Anna, the mother-daughter vampire pair, were definitely my favorite vampire ladies ever on the show. Pearl was old, wise, and never looked for trouble or put up with any nonsense, and Anna was smart, sometimes deceptive. No matter what men they loved, their first loyalty was always to each other. I particularly enjoyed that Anna and Jeremy’s romance was the one that actually echoed the relationship in Twilight more than any other relationship on the show, with Anna as Edward, much older and drawn to vulnerability and innocence, and Jeremy as fascinated and reckless as Bella. Jeremy is the one who wants to be a vampire, while Elena says she doesn’t; Jeremy is the one who immediately invited the vampire in and tempted her with his blood, while Elena’s first reaction on learning the truth about Stefan was to tell him she couldn’t be with him. The Vampire Diaries took a classic character, the damsel with a near death wish, and made her a boy, and we see how different Elena is by comparison. Stefan, much younger and weaker, caught a stake that was shot at him. Pearl was killed by one. Anna was dragged off to a house to die, with Jeremy putting forth an amazingly poor effort at protecting her—he yelled at the men dragging her off, and that was all. Damon was in the same house, but naturally he lived.

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“Yes, Ms. Rees Brennan,” you may be saying at this point. “The main characters of a show are unlikely to get killed off. Are you . . . new to television?” I waited until the season one finale to write a large portion of this essay because I knew that depending on whether Anna survived or not, the essay would have a very different tone. Anna did not survive. On one hand, this was not exactly a surprise. The Vampire Diaries is notorious for killing off its characters—the only ones we can be sure are safe are Stefan, Damon, and Elena—and I do find the uncertainty and excitement of this appealing. But I also feel the show is the poorer for losing the last lady vampire we have seen so far who is not aligned on the side of evil. We are left with Katherine and Isobel, both of whom are very interesting and well-rounded characters who obviously have complex inner lives and softer sides—Isobel cares about Alaric and regrets becoming a vampire, and Katherine told Stefan she loved him and may have meant it. They are nevertheless positioned as the antagonists, and they both treat humans significantly worse than any of the sympathetic vampire characters do. They are both entirely removed from humanity. Apparently Isobel still loves Alaric, but there is no suggestion they can be together: apparently it’s okay for a human girl to have a vampire boyfriend, but not for a vampire girl to keep a human boy. If a vampire girl tries for a human boy—see Jeremy “Catnip for the Undead Lady” Gilbert—she will die for it. “But a lot of people die in The Vampire Diaries!” you might say at this point. “You are simply quibbling!” In any show about vampires, there is the question of dying and coming

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back. On this show, there is a whole other method. Elena’s uncle Johnathan Gilbert and Alaric Saltzman, the vampireslaying history teacher, were both killed, and both came back to life because they had magic rings. The point of these magic rings is to protect against death, a little bit the way sunscreen protects against sunburn. Please pass the Factor Immortality. Only nobody is going to be passing the Factor Immortality to me: the two characters who are not vampires but came back from the dead are both men. After seeing a lot of vampire ladies killed and knowing the two vampire brothers will survive, seeing two more dudes get to survive death is a little much. This is part of the reason I was so pleased to see John Gilbert appear to meet a sticky end in his own kitchen in the finale! Speaking of death and The Vampire Diaries finale, in it Caroline, Matt, and Tyler were involved in a car accident. Caroline was seriously injured and spent the summer in surgery, with no promises she would be all right come season two. The guys in the car were okay, because the guys on this show are more likely to live, more likely to be supernatural (or wear life-saving supernatural objects), and more likely to, while being supernatural, still be on the side of light: see our List of Surviving Sympathetic Supernatural Characters. Bonnie with her magic, great! Two vampire brothers. One vampire slayer with a magic immortality ring. One possible pending vampire. One werewolf. . . . Okay, I admit Tyler has not yet been confirmed on the show as a werewolf. But given the frequent scenes like this:

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Tyler: I just don’t know why I keep acting out in violent or sexy ways! It’s so animalistic! I’m so out of control! What could be going on? Camera: DRAMATIC LINGERING SHOT OF FULL MOON

Well, I guess Tyler could be a werechipmunk, but I’d lay you pretty good odds. This is not just a problem for supernatural girls anymore. If Caroline dies as a result of her internal injuries—I do not think she will but there is always a chance with the tricksy, tricksy Vampire Diaries—that will leave us with Elena and Bonnie: She Who Is Beloved by Vampires and her token best friend forever who never ever gets any romance at all (the one time Bonnie scored a date all season, it was with an evil vampire who was only intent on her magical spell-casting ability, not her magical making-out skills). Both Elena and Bonnie are considerably more complex and interesting than those descriptors imply, but it would be a very familiar story to us: the story of Just the One Girl All the Boys Like, the girl surrounded by boys. I am not exaggerating. Watch me do mathematics, without the aid of a safety net. The women of The Vampire Diaries are starting to look truly scarce in comparison to the men: we have Stefan, Damon, Jeremy, Tyler, Matt, and Alaric as main characters. If Caroline dies, the girls are outnumbered three to one. There are excellent minor characters, like Caroline’s mother, Sheriff Forbes, and Elena’s guardian, Jenna, but they

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simply do not get the same screen time, number of lines, or involvement in major plot points. We’re given less opportunity to care about them and be interested by them: even Bonnie, arguably the secondmost important female character, disappeared for four episodes of the first season. If Damon disappeared for four episodes, the viewers would be hysterical. None more than me, I hasten to add: I would be swooning on the sofa with my smelling salts, in deep Damon withdrawal. But this doesn’t mean I want to go without Bonnie for that long either! Part of what made me love this show was how different it is from other shows, and from what I was expecting the show to be at first. It’s different and it’s daring, and part of what made it so for me was seeing characters like Pearl and Anna, and seeing Elena’s bond with Bonnie and Caroline, and how important it was to her. The first time I loved Elena was when she went on the warpath to defend Caroline from Damon. Vicki and Anna should not just be fodder for Jeremy’s angst. We should not love Elena just because Stefan and Damon do. I think The Vampire Diaries is an awesome show. I hope they will continue with their risky storytelling and their truly scary yet often truly sympathetic vampires. I do see a worrying trend developing, but I also see how much the show has done right, so despite my cries of sadness about Anna and my cries of “Save Caroline!” I remain a huge fan and will be waiting with breath that could not be more bated for season two—where the current deficiency of girls may be

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repaired by the arrival of Meredith, a friend of Elena’s from the books who has not yet appeared on the show. The Vampire Diaries has done so well thus far that things can only get better. I think that we will continue to see why a vampire could not help but love a woman like Elena Gilbert, and how a woman like Elena could cope with loving a vampire. I am certain there are more fascinating, frustrating interactions between humans and vampires in Mystic Falls to come.

S a r a h R ee s B r e n n a n was born and raised in Ireland by the sea. After briefly living in New York and London, she has returned to Ireland to write and use as a base for her future adventures. She is the author of the Demon’s Lexicon trilogy, a series about attractive, troubled brothers being chased through England by demons and magicians. The first book in the series, The Demon’s Lexicon, received three starred reviews, was an ALA Top Ten Best Books of 2009, and was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal. She wrote a short story about a vampire in a boy band in the vampire anthology The Eternal Kiss. Given her affinity for brothers and vampires, The Vampire Diaries was clearly always going to be a big hit with her.

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Bonnie Bennett: A New Kind of Best Friend • Bree Despain •

Bonnie Bennett is, without a doubt, a favorite character amongst fans of The Vampire Diaries. Loyal, fun, and loveable, she is the perfect example of what a best friend should be. But Bonnie evolves through the first season into something more than a simple supporting character. Bree Despain charts Bonnie’s progress from carefree teenager to a young woman bearing the responsibilities of powers that she’s only just beginning to understand.

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s an author of teen fiction, there are many things I absolutely love about my job: meeting new people, spending all day creating fictional boys for my readers to crush on, and developing whole new mythologies inside my head. But I have to say that one of the absolute best parts of my job is that watching shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, and Friday Night Lights is actually considered work. After a long day of writing and mommyhood there’s nothing better than cuddling up with my hubby and a bowl of popcorn and firing up the TiVo. Some may call this vegging. I call it research. You see, as I’m watching, I’m also taking mental notes on the choices the writers and directors have made concerning plot, dialogue, pacing, and the progression of the characters I’ve grown to love (or love to hate) and how they relate to each other. The latest edition to my TiVo lineup of shows to dissect is The Vampire Diaries. And boy, does this show never disappoint me—not as a fan who watches it for pleasure, nor as a writer who analyzes the show for research. While there are so many things to love about The Vampire Diaries (Damon . . . no, Stefan . . . no, Damon) I have to say that, as an analytical watcher, one of the aspects of the show that fascinates me most is how the writers have subverted our expectations of

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the typical “best friend” roles present in most television shows through the development of Bonnie Bennett’s character.

Fictional Best Friends: Frenemies vs. Sidekicks Let’s face it, I watch a lot of TV. And there are certain things I’ve come to expect from shows that have a clearly defined main character. Basically, in these kinds of shows (or books for that matter) there are two kinds of typical best friends: the Frenemy and the Sidekick. The Frenemy is usually a bit of a backstabber, very competitive with the main character and quick to get jealous, but ultimately she will probably still be there to help out if the main character finds herself in a serious pinch. (Even though I’d call Gossip Girl an ensemble show—as there’s not really one well-defined main character—I’d say Blair Waldorf and Serena Vanderwoodson’s relationship falls into the Frenemy category.) Often the main character and the Frenemy are friends out of habit. Usually, they’ve been friends ever since they were little kids, and even though they’ve grown up into incompatible people, they’ve always been friends so they remain so. Or perhaps the main character is new to town and the Frenemy is the first person to befriend our lonely heroine before our heroine knows better. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Cordelia Chase and Buffy Summers are a good example—although Cordelia and Buffy don’t really progress past the “enemy” part of Frenemy until season two.)

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The second kind of typical best friend character is the Sidekick: the ever-loyal, totally helpful, always there for moral support, and never-wavering in her faith in our heroine’s abilities (except for an occasional bump or minor conflict) kind of best friend. Often the Sidekick and the heroine have grown up together, but unlike with the Frenemy, the Sidekick and the main character have grown closer and more sentimental about their relationship rather than just remaining friends out of habit. (Think Rory Gilmore and Lane Kim in early seasons of Gilmore Girls.) Other times the main character “wins” the loyal devotion of a new best friend by standing up for, or physically protecting, the Sidekick character—much like how Buffy, even though she was the new kid at school, stood up for and befriended Willow Rosenberg, whom Cordelia and her cronies considered to be a loser. Or how Veronica Mars helped new student Wallace deal with a local gang of bullies, winning him as a loyal best friend despite the fact that she was the designated loser outcast at her school. Although the Frenemy and the Sidekick appear to be completely different, these character types usually have one thing in common: almost their entire existence in the show is dependent on their support of (or conflict with) the main character. They exist because the main character exists. Their characters are often interesting/funny/quirky/maddening (etc.) but ultimately they lack the development or depth to be more than a supporting character to the heroine. If you stripped away the main character in the show, the best friend would cease to really have any purpose in the story and would fade away into the background . . . or the show itself would fall apart.

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Up Next on the CW: Bonnie the Teenage Witch This is where the writers of The Vampire Diaries have made their first break with the traditional or typical best friend roles—their best friend character doesn’t fit into the role of a typical “supporting” character at all. Yes, clueless Caroline Forbes falls into the Frenemy role with her competitive desire to win Miss Mystic Falls out from under her favored friend, Elena Gilbert, or her jealousy over Matt Donovan’s pining after Elena—but we aren’t here to discuss Caroline. No, the best friend character that has me fascinated, and my writer brain buzzing, is Bonnie Bennett. Okay, I know what you’re thinking right now: but Bonnie is a supportive/Sidekick character! Or at least she started out that way. Bonnie is loyal and kind to Elena, she uses her powers to protect Elena, and she’s an awesome friend who tried her hardest to get Elena back into the real world after her parents’ death. However, the thing about Bonnie is that she’s a Sidekick character who isn’t just a sidekick. Waiting under the surface, Bonnie has enough burgeoning psychic powers and a bucket-load of issues that could fill her very own TV series without it being contingent on Elena and Stefan Salvatore’s drama or Damon Salvatore’s smoldering “eye thing” (although I think I’ll keep Damon’s “eye thing,” thank you very much). Don’t get me wrong, I love Elena, but if you cut her out of the story and we were left with Bonnie to carry the weight as the heroine of the show, she could totally do it. Bonnie is as interesting a character as Elena (if not more so) and the

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series would probably be just as compelling, fraught with drama, and dare I say sexy, as it is now. Can’t you just picture a show about a beautiful teen girl who discovers that she’s a witch with incredible powers when two hot guy vampires return to town, bringing all sorts of danger with them—that only she has the power to stop? I think I just swooned a bit. Speaking of swooning, I can’t be the only one who thinks Bonnie could fill in nicely as Stefan’s love interest in the show. There’s definitely a crackling of chemistry between them that could turn into quite the electric charge if the writers decided to explore that avenue. Again, I’m not dissing Elena, but if she were out of the picture, there’s plenty of tension to be explored between Bonnie and Stefan. I mean, Bonnie was the one who was interested in “the new guy” when Stefan enrolled in Mystic Falls High in the first place. Bonnie was the one chanting, “Please be hot, please be hot,” and then practically squealing with delight when she discovered that Stefan was indeed hot (“Pilot,” 1-1). Elena, on the other hand, barely even seemed to care. And there was definitely a hint of sexual tension between the two at other times—like when Stefan saved a bikiniclad Bonnie from burning up in one of her pyrokinetic trances, or the way she smiled at him when he told her about how her Salem Witch ancestors were “heroic examples of individualism and non-conformity” (“Friday Night Bites,” 1-3). And don’t forget how Stefan used his own blood to save Bonnie’s life after Damon tried to kill her for destroying the crystal (even if Emily Bennett was technically the one

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who did it). Can’t you just picture a sizzling affair between a brooding vamp and a strong beautiful witch who’s sworn to use her magical abilities to protect her town from the epic threat of vampires—never mind the fact that she’s in love with one? And on that note, what about a Bonnie-Stefan-Damon triangle? There’s a lot of passion behind Bonnie and Damon’s disdain for each other, and we all know how thin the line between love and hate can be when it comes to great fictional writing. What if Damon started to pine for our powerful heroine à la Spike and Buffy? I know I’d be one happy viewer. But I digress. The point is, with Bonnie’s growing powers, angst about said powers, headstrong nature, fierce determination to do what’s right, and leading-lady-esque romantic possibilities, she’s got enough depth and potential that she definitely doesn’t fit into the role of just a supporting Sidekick character. And as her character continues to develop, as was hinted at in the last two episodes of season one, Bonnie is evolving into one of the major players—and a force to be reckoned with—in Mystic Falls. (More on this in a bit . . .)

How Come It's Always about a Guy? Another popular “best friend” trope in teen fiction/television that the writers of The Vampire Diaries have turned on its head with Bonnie and Elena’s friendship is the idea that a guy is usually the one who causes conflict in female

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friendships. In both Frenemy and Sidekick friendships between girls, a guy usually causes a major point of conflict in the relationship. The point of conflict comes either because the best friend is jealous that the guy is interested in the main character—which either leads to competition or hurt feelings, depending on the nature of the friendship—or from the fact that the Sidekick best friend feels threatened by the main character spending too much time with, or relying upon, the guy instead of her. However, the “guy conflict” between Bonnie and Elena isn’t founded in jealousy. Yes, I did just go on and on about how there’s a bit of sexual tension between Bonnie and Stefan, and how Bonnie had eyes on him before Elena—but the point of tension between Elena and Bonnie concerning Stefan has nothing to do with petty feelings, and everything to do with Bonnie’s moral objection to what Stefan is: a vampire. When Bonnie realized that Stefan and Elena had interest in one another, she dropped any idea of going after the guy herself and jumped fully into wingman—or wingwoman, as the case may be—mode. She facilitated getting the two lovebirds together. It wasn’t until Bonnie started to get psychic feelings about Stefan’s past that her acceptance of him started to waver. When she found out what Stefan really is—and then when his brother Damon’s insistence on opening a tomb full of bloodthirsty vampires inadvertently caused the death of her grandmother—Bonnie knew that she could no longer just go along with whatever Elena wanted. Bonnie is a fiercely loyal friend, but her loyalty will only stretch so far when it conflicts with her ideas of right and wrong.

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Damon and the other vampires posed a serious danger to Bonnie’s friends and family. And since Bonnie is one of the few people in Mystic Falls with the power to take them on, she couldn’t just stand by and let them overrun her town— no matter how many fuzzy feelings her best friend, Elena, may have toward certain members of their species . . . leading Bonnie to ultimately betray the best friend she’s been so loyal to all her life.

Betrayer or Hero? I don’t know about you, but I was completely shocked when Bonnie revealed that she lied to Elena about removing the spell from Johnathan Gilbert’s device—but honestly, I should have seen it coming. Based on Bonnie’s belief system, her strength as an independent character, and her desire for everyone she loves to, as Katerina Graham explained in an interview with MTV’s Hollywood Crush, “be okay, to be safe . . . [and for nothing] bad to happen to her friends and family,” I should have known that Bonnie wouldn’t have disabled the only device she knew of that could possibly help destroy vampires—even if her best friend asked her to. Because Bonnie isn’t your typical Sidekick character who will do anything for the main character with unwavering faith, she couldn’t go against what she knew to be right. But what really shocked me was that Bonnie didn’t just refuse to remove the spell. No, the surprising part of this twist was that Bonnie was willing to lie to her best friend, Elena, and

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the Salvatore brothers—to go through the motions of removing the spell, so Damon would be willing to hand the supposedly inert device over to Uncle John—in order to do what in her mind was the right thing. Watching this development in Bonnie’s character sent all sorts of questions through my writer brain. Was this lie the beginning of a downward spiral for Bonnie? Was this the first clue that the evolution of her character may take her to much darker places, and may make her willing to do much worse things, in the name of doing what she believes to be right? What’s interesting to note with the result of this step in Bonnie’s evolution is that once again the writers of The Vampire Diaries were subverting the typical best friend tropes, this time twisting the typical result of the “best friend betrayal.” I kept expecting Bonnie’s lie to blow up in her face—and so did Bonnie, considering how she told Caroline that she knew Elena would never ever forgive her for what she’d done—but ultimately Bonnie’s decision to lie about breaking the hex actually resulted in the town being saved from the tomb vampires. Uncle John was able to use the active device to incapacitate and destroy the mob of vengeful vampires before they massacred the Founding Families at the town’s Founders Day fireworks celebration. In Bonnie’s mind, and I’m sure in the minds of any inhabitants of Mystic Falls who actually knew the truth, she really did do the right thing. Although her decision put someone her best friend cared about (Damon) in danger (trapped in a fiery basement), with Bonnie’s eventual help, that person was rescued in time. The narrative

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actually validated Bonnie’s choice, rather than punishing her (as would be typical in many shows) for her betrayal.

A Force to Be Reckoned With Even though Bonnie had a flash of returned loyalty to Elena and used her powers to subdue the fire long enough for Stefan to save Damon, she still wasn’t ready to back down and be forced into the role of a supporting character. Not one bit. In fact, Bonnie used this incident as an example of how strong her powers had become in order to illustrate to Stefan that she is powerful enough to enforce her own agenda in Mystic Falls. She told Stefan that she may have helped save Damon that time, but if in the future he so much as “sheds one drop of innocent blood” she’ll take him down—and go through Stefan if she needs to (“Founder’s Day,” 1-22). Bonnie knows who she is now and what she’s capable of, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to protect her friends and her town— whether her friends would agree with her tactics for protecting them or not. One might think that Bonnie has passed into Frenemy territory with her betrayal and lies to Elena. However, what Bonnie did was well beyond backstabbing and pettiness and her actions were also far more altruistic than any Frenemy I’ve ever seen on TV. No, Bonnie’s character has evolved well beyond Frenemies, Sidekicks, and even “best friends” at this point. Bonnie is growing more powerful as a character, and as a witch, and it seems as though she wants to use that

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power as a balancing and protective force to keep the supernatural at bay in Mystic Falls. She still sees Damon and other vampires as a threat, and she wants to keep her friends and family safe. But I worry about what Bonnie may be willing to do in the future in order to follow her conscience. We’ve already seen that Bonnie is willing to lie and deceive her friends. And, as explained by her grandmother, many things can fuel a witch’s power—and anger and worry are two of them (“Fool Me Once,” 1-13). As Bonnie’s anxiety and fear of the vampire threat continue to grow, so may her powers. Will she become too powerful for her own good? And if Bonnie continues to pull away from her balancing loyalty to Elena, she may not be willing, or able, to stop herself from losing control of her powers before it’s too late. My writer mind (and my fangirl heart) has many more questions about Bonnie’s character and her future. I wonder if Bonnie will be able to see shades of gray concerning the Salvatore brothers, or if she will become more entrenched in the black-and-white idea that all vampires are evil and need to be destroyed. And what about forgiveness? Bonnie was once able to forgive all the bad things that happened to her as a result of the Salvatore brothers’ existence—like being attacked, kidnapped, and almost killed—because of Elena’s relationship with Stefan, but at the end of the first season it seems like she may be evolving beyond the ability to forgive. Perhaps Bonnie will become too prideful of her powers and start to see herself as above the vampire problems that drag witches down. Perhaps she’ll come to believe that she must

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annihilate all of them, including Damon and Stefan, and possibly Elena if she gets in the way, in order to do the right thing. Will Bonnie become the force that saves Mystic Falls from its supernatural woes, or will the writers of The Vampire Diaries take their subversion of the typical best friend character to further heights by causing our “best friend” character to become an even greater threat to the town and people she loves than what she thinks she’s trying to protect them from? I, for one, can’t wait to watch and find out. And then take copious notes . . .

B r e e D esp a i n is the author of The Dark Divine and the upcoming sequel, The Lost Saint. Bree rediscovered her childhood love for creating stories when she took a semester off college to write and direct plays for at-risk inner-city teens from Philadelphia and New York. She currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband, two young sons, and her beloved TiVo. You can visit her online at www.breedespain.com.

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The War between the States • Claudia Gray •

Is one of the series’ biggest changes from book to screen—the Salvatore brothers’ background—both its strongest asset and its Achilles’ heel? Claudia Gray presents the case for necessary and inspired changes and tells us why the past is key to realizing the series’ full potential in the present.

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he online protests began around the time the makers of The Vampire Diaries cast Nina Dobrev as Elena Gilbert. Were fans of the book series worried that Dobrev couldn’t carry the central role? Nope. Were they advocating for another fan-favorite candidate? No again. There was no way Dobrev could play Elena—because Dobrev is a brunette, and in the original L.J. Smith books, Elena is a blonde. It seems like a pretty small thing to get upset about, but when it comes to adapting a beloved book into film or television, fans understandably dread the inevitable changes. We’ve all been burned before by books that got “dumbed down” or turned into something unrecognizable from the story we originally loved. Even alterations as minor as a character’s hair color set off warning bells, making those of us who loved the books wonder just what else was about to get changed. But as The Vampire Diaries shows, those changes can definitely be for the best. What works dramatically in print isn’t necessarily what works dramatically on television, and the creators of the TV show seem to have figured out precisely what they needed to alter in order to bring Elena and the Salvatore brothers to the small screen. The first season of the series is dynamic on almost every level, in large part because of the changes the creators made to accommodate the new storytelling format. Let’s just take one example to start with: Jeremy Gilbert. 36

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Elena’s younger brother didn’t exist in the original novels; instead, her only sibling was Margaret, a very young girl hardly out of toddlerhood. Margaret served her purposes in the novels, giving Elena someone to care about in the wake of their parents’ death and to protect from danger. However, Margaret was not a deeply engaging character in her own right—it’s hard to be, when you’re only four years old—and she could never take a very active role in any vampire adventures. In the TV show, however, we have Jeremy. He’s younger than Elena—but not by much, so he’s in high school with her, a friend to her friends. More than that, he’s somebody who comes to share her conflict between the ordinary and supernatural worlds. He began the first season with a mad crush on Vicki and a drug habit born of grief for his parents; he ended it with a death wish that might just be fulfilled. His complicated journey drew in Elena, Stefan, and Damon, so that we learned more about their characters based on how they dealt with him. And he also emerged as a major character in his own right. Love him or hate him, Jeremy’s an integral part of the show. If the TV creators had felt bound to remain consistent with the books—if we’d seen Margaret on-screen instead of Jeremy—we wouldn’t have had the ill-fated affair with Vicki, the moral quandary of erasing Jeremy’s memory, or the entire Anna story line. Instead, we would have seen Elena . . . doing more babysitting. Not exciting. Or, as long as we’re discussing the differences in Elena, why don’t we talk about the changes that are so much more

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important than the color of her hair? Blonde Elena from the books is the “queen bee” in her high school, vivacious, bold, and with a cutting wit. She made a brilliant central character in the books, and through L.J. Smith’s prose, we were able to see the vulnerability and yearning beneath her glamour. However, on television—where it takes longer to reveal characters’ inner depths—the books’ Elena might have come across as shallow and turned off potential viewers before they got a chance to really know her. So the television show’s Elena is darker in more than hair color. This Elena’s grief and alienation seem more immediate, and while she certainly seems to be well liked at her school, she was obviously never the queen bee type. A television viewer discovering the series for the first time sees Elena’s softer side right away. And yet, at the core, she is still Elena—passionate, loving, and possessed of a will of iron. She’s a likeable and compelling central character for the drama, not despite the changes from the books, but because of them. So, obviously, change can be for the better. The television show’s revisions from the Vampire Diaries novels have for the most part been very intelligent and ideally designed for the different dramatic needs of a TV series. This whole essay could be nothing but a list of those changes, from the picayune (Tyler must be very glad his last name is no longer “Smallwood”) to the potent (the differences in Katherine’s history and motives). But the single best proof of the need for change is also probably the single biggest alteration between books and series: the new background for the Salvatore brothers.

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Even if you haven’t read the Vampire Diaries novels, you might guess based on the names alone that two guys named Stefan and Damon Salvatore weren’t originally supposed to be from Old-South Virginia. They were originally noblemen in Renaissance Italy. The television show made them hundreds of years younger so that the Salvatore brothers could share in the history of the town where the drama is set (once Fell’s Church, now Mystic Falls). And I’d argue that this change, more than any other single factor—yes, even more than the pure hotness of Ian Somerhalder—is the numberone reason that The Vampire Diaries has become such a sensational TV show. First of all, the darkest events of the Salvatore brothers’ pasts are now part of the history of the town itself. Katherine’s faked death isn’t something that happened in a land far away—it was the central event of the Battle of Willow Creek, and she was only one of many vampires trapped in a tomb just outside of town. As soon as we learned that, we learned many things that drove the story line forward for a large part of the year: Katherine could come back. Damon would do anything he had to do to get Katherine back. But getting Katherine back meant freeing more than a dozen vampires who had been starved of blood for nearly 150 years—and who would be out for revenge. Can we even imagine the first season playing out any other way, now? By making those events so immediate—at the center of Mystic Falls, both literally and mythologically—

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the show made them more threatening and more real. The viewers aren’t just wondering what happened way back when; we’re dying to find out what happens next. (Best of all: our most significant clues about what happens next are hidden in the characters’ past.) And of course, the Battle of Willow Creek doesn’t just affect Elena, Damon, and Stefan. That long-ago conflict and discovery means there’s also a long tradition of vampire hunting in town. The adult characters in the TV show aren’t merely clueless parents out of the loop—they’re out to kill vampires, and they know how to do it. The Founders Council is one of my favorite elements of The Vampire Diaries TV show, even though it’s a foil to the vampires we love so much. Even when they’re at their most bloodthirsty, the members of the Founders Council never seem to be merely cruel or vicious. They’re genuinely trying to protect their town and their children. Besides, the humor that’s come out of the Founders Council—particularly Damon’s stealthy infiltration of the group—has been priceless. I wouldn’t trade a single scene with the beleaguered Sheriff Forbes, especially the ones where she talked vampire-hunting tactics with Damon, who seems to respect her a little bit . . . at least as much as he respects anyone.1 My personal dream for season two of The Vampire Diaries? Now that Mayor Lockwood has been “outed” as supernatural and then murdered, there’s a vacancy in city government. Wouldn’t a fine, upstanding member of the community—someone from one of Mystic Falls’ oldest families, someone who understands the real dangers to the town—be the perfect candidate to take over? Vote for Mayor Damon Salvatore in 2010! 1

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Finally, having Stefan and Damon be natives of Mystic Falls means that living there—and falling in love with Elena there—has more resonance for them, and so also for us. This came out very powerfully in the first-season finale, “Founder’s Day” (1-22). We saw Stefan and Damon amid people costumed in the kind of clothing they wore during their lives. It was a game when teenage boys lifted vintage rifles and pretended to fire at each other, but the viewers could see that the Salvatores remember that the war was no game. Most significantly, just after Damon and Stefan had agreed between themselves that they could not confuse Elena with Katherine, they saw Elena—dressed in the same kind of elaborate hoop-skirted gown Katherine used to wear.2 Past and present collided, and we saw that neither brother could ever be totally sure of his feelings where Katherine was concerned. The silence that fell between them reminded us that, as Faulkner said, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past. Especially in Mystic Falls. But all those Civil War costumes reminded me that—as smart and innovative as The Vampire Diaries has been in making changes from book to TV—the writers of the television show haven’t yet followed through with all those changes. Although they made a smart choice with this new background (what’s a more perfect parallel for a story that pits brother against brother?), The Vampire Diaries hasn’t fully engaged with that background so far. There are some How wonderful was it when this episode mirrored Elena’s first appearance in Katherine’s clothes with Katherine’s first appearance in Elena’s clothes?

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issues they haven’t addressed—big issues—that not only deserve to be looked at in their own right, but also could make for even more fabulous stories to tell. First, let’s talk about those flashbacks to 1864. The Salvatore brothers and their father lived in a palatial mansion. Everyone in town was shown wearing beautiful clothing, shopping happily at a quaint little store, and chatting in the street over various pleasantries. Except by 1864, it wasn’t that much fun to live in the South. The Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history, had been raging for three years. Quaint little shops in small towns were usually closed, because supply lines had been cut off, transport was impossible, and goods were therefore hard to come by. Because of blockades, new fabric couldn’t be brought in, and even the cotton grown in the Confederacy couldn’t be sent to mills in the North or Europe to be woven into cloth. So Katherine wouldn’t have had many pretty new ball gowns. The economic devastation across the entire South at that time is almost impossible to exaggerate. Depending on where exactly Mystic Falls is supposed to be, there’s a decent chance the town’s residents in 1864 wouldn’t even have had enough to eat. (Well, the town’s human residents.) Wouldn’t it be even more interesting to see flashbacks to Mystic Falls at that time and see how dramatically things were changing? To see Stefan and Damon dealing with a world that was coming apart at the seams? It wouldn’t be difficult for the TV show’s creators to introduce that; the more glamorous flashbacks we’ve seen have mostly been set before the Battle of Willow Creek itself.

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So if we revisit the Salvatore brothers’ first years as vampires, perhaps we’ll get to see less of the glitter and more of the grit. Or at least we might get a few more examples of Civil War-era characters seeming to remember that the war is actually happening. This new Civil War background brings up another issue that the TV show has mostly ignored so far: race. Going back to the Confederacy and pretending that it was a place where race didn’t matter isn’t just fantasy—it’s farce. Whenever Damon or Stefan talk about Emily—a powerful witch, and Bonnie’s ancestress—they describe her as “Katherine’s maid.” In that time and in that place, it is very likely that Emily would have been Katherine’s slave. Now, we can ask: would anybody be able to keep a witch as strong as Emily as a slave? Maybe not. And if that’s the case, what a great story to tell—the story of how Katherine and Emily reached terms, chose to behave according to societal norms while secretly balancing their supernatural power. It would also be fascinating to discover what Emily thought of the racist society she lived in, and ways in which she resisted its authority. But The Vampire Diaries hasn’t told us that story yet; instead, the show seems to be pretending that it’s not an issue. In so doing, it’s missing out on dramatic possibilities, something I hope will change. The question of race applies to more than Emily, though. What did it mean for Pearl and Anna to be among the town’s leading citizens back in the 1860s? Asian-Americans weren’t enslaved in the Confederacy, but they faced prejudice. Instead of seeing Pearl flirt with a parasol, what if we saw

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how she overcame those attitudes? We’d have learned a lot more about how powerful—and persuasive—she could be.3 Guess who else would have had to cope with racial prejudice back in the 1860s? That would be . . . the Salvatore brothers. Wait, you might say. You can’t possibly compare anything they would have faced to the oppression of slavery. And you’re right; I wouldn’t. What Italians dealt with in that era, ugly as it was, doesn’t even come close. No, really, wait, you might say. Damon and Stefan are white. Are they? In that era, not everybody in America thought so. Italians were considered swarthy, volatile, violent, and dishonest because of their race. Once, the United States Senate invited an expert on ethnic groups to address a committee, and he was asked by one senator whether an Italian was a white man. The so-called expert’s classy reply? “No, sir. He is a Dago.” What year was that testimony given to the Senate? 1912 . . . in other words, fifty years after the period that the television series shows us the Salvatore family as leading citizens in a white supremacist society. Also, why is it that almost all the vampires we’ve met are in positions of power in society? Is it just because it’s more fun to show actors in sumptuous period costumes, or is it because vampires won’t let themselves remain downtrodden for long? Harper appears to have been a slave, and it would have been fascinating to explore his history, but he’s staked before we can find out much about him. It was way too early to lose a character who could have told us so much—not to mention too early to lose a guy who was that hot. Of course, it’s always too early to lose a guy that hot.

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In this particular case, though, I’m willing to give the TV show a pass on historical accuracy. It’s been long enough since Italians faced racial discrimination in the United States that most viewers would never catch the problem. Also, any attempt to portray the Salvatores as victims of prejudice in a society where slavery is still in force would come across as unbelievably crass. It’s still worth thinking about, though, just to recognize how different that era was from our own. And, on a larger scale, I’d argue that bringing in the issues of race when the history calls for it makes the storytelling richer and more dramatic. It raises the stakes. It adds complexity to the characters. And when is that ever a bad thing? I’ve already suggested a few ways in which the television series could delve into these issues to good effect. Consider the ways in which the show has already gotten it right— some of the most enjoyable scenes and story lines we’ve seen. For instance, we learned in a throwaway line—one of the very few references the 1860s-era characters have made to the fact that a war’s going on—that Damon refused to fight for the Confederacy. Stefan defended Damon’s choice as a matter of conscience, but we understood clearly that Damon’s decision wasn’t looked upon kindly by the people in town. He may even have been considered a traitor. Just think about how much we learned about the brothers from that fact alone. This was the first hint the television show gave us that, during his human life, Damon was more independent, gentler, and perhaps more principled than Stefan. Taking a stand against the Confederacy in that time and place was not an easy thing to do. Damon would

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certainly have been well on his way to being a social outcast. But he took that stand. I don’t know about you, but I want to know more! Was Damon’s refusal to fight a protest against slavery? A sign of loyalty to the Union? A pacifist stance? Or was Stefan wrong about it being a matter of conscience? Damon might have been a coward—or merely smarter about the Confederacy’s chances of victory than most of his peers. That answer would tell us even more about a fascinating character. Stefan’s position is also intriguing. He defended his brother in a way that suggested Damon’s decision was not Stefan’s own. So Stefan didn’t take a stand against the Confederacy— or did he? He was at home, not in the army, and we have yet to see him in uniform or hear him make any references to combat. The reason for this may be as simple as his youth, since Stefan died in his teens, but by the later years of the Civil War, boys as young as fourteen were commonly going into combat. That’s another mystery I’d love to see unraveled. Even on its own, Stefan’s defense of Damon tells us a lot about him and about their relationship. Their father disapproved of Damon’s decision not to fight for the Confederacy, but Stefan stood up to his father and showed respect for Damon’s choice. Even in the face of public condemnation, Stefan remained loyal to his brother. Here we see the origins of Stefan’s commitment to Damon, and the first of many proofs that—no matter how often they might be in conflict— Stefan will never abandon him. Another way the show got it right? Bringing in the history of Bonnie’s family. In the L.J. Smith books, Bonnie’s last

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name is McCullough, and she is a pale-skinned redhead; in the television show, Bonnie Bennett is African-American and a direct descendant of Emily. This means that Bonnie’s witchcraft, interesting as it is in its own right, is now tied into the history of the Salvatore brothers, Katherine, and Mystic Falls itself. Emily was the one who imprisoned the vampires in the tomb; Bonnie’s beloved grandmother Sheila was the one who set them free a century and a half later, though the spell ultimately killed her. This means Bonnie doesn’t care about the vampires’ role in Mystic Falls just because her best friend is dating one. She’s as much a part of this story as Elena, Stefan, or Damon, with just as much power to influence what lies ahead. All that potential really began paying off in the final few episodes of the first season, when Bonnie returned to town after grieving for Grams.4 Bonnie still loved Elena dearly as her best friend, but she couldn’t bring herself to associate with Stefan and Damon because of their inadvertent role in her grandmother’s death. Then, when Elena and the Salvatores went to Bonnie and asked for her help in de-spelling the magical device that would reveal and incapacitate every supernatural creature in town, Bonnie only pretended to do it. This was the single event that drove every element of the first-season finale: Damon’s near-death in the fire, Stefan’s decision to rescue Is it just me, or does Mystic Falls High School have the most lenient attendance requirements of any school ever? Nobody seems overly concerned when Bonnie and Stefan skip entire months of class at a go. Why wasn’t my high school more like this?

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him, Anna’s murder, Tyler’s manifestation of supernatural powers, and Caroline’s injury in the car accident. It all came back to Bonnie—and because of her lineage, these events are also woven into Mystic Falls’ history, back to the day when a witch as powerful as Emily had to at least pretend to be a maid. We were reminded that these strong AfricanAmerican women have power even the vampires can’t match, and instead of merely following orders, they use that power as they see fit. As the show goes forward, I want to see history come back to haunt us even more strongly. I want Katherine to try to make the same deals with Bonnie that she did with Emily. I want to find out just what Stefan did and didn’t do in the Civil War. I want to see flashbacks of a newly vamped Damon trying to make his way through battle-scarred Virginia. I want to find out just what else the Founders Council knows, and how that’s affected Mystic Falls. In other words, I want the show’s writers to dive into the new history of this town with even more depth and resonance than they already have. The Vampire Diaries can only get juicier if it will sink its fangs more deeply into the past. Will that require the show to change somewhat? Yes. But that’s no reason to worry. As the television show has already proved with its careful amendments to the book canon, change can be good.

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C l a ud ia G r ay is the Chicago-based author of the New York Times bestselling Evernight series. She’s been a fan of vampires ever since she was a little girl scared out of her wits by black-and-white Dracula movies. You can learn more about her work at www. claudiagray.com.

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Ladies of the Night, Unite! Damon Versus the Feminist Vampire Movement • Jon Skovron •

As long as there have been vampire tales in popular fiction, there have been vampire women. For the most part their roles have reflected the times in which the stories were written, with very few women taking center stage as powerful characters. Jon Skovron analyzes the evolution of the female vampire as women’s roles have changed in modern times and how The Vampire Diaries manages to turn the vampire conventions of old on their head to produce some pretty kick-ass female vampires.

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T

he Vampire Diaries is a perfect example of an age-old battle between opposites. Not Good and Evil, of course. Neither the book nor the show is so didactic as to portray any character as purely Good or purely Evil. No, I’m talking about that other age-old conflict: Boy Vampires vs. Girl Vampires. The conflict began a long time ago, in a place kind of far away . . . The year was 1816. Many called it the “Year without a Summer” because of a series of strange weather events in northern Europe that extended the rains of spring straight into fall. The earnest young English physician John William Polidori found himself in a Gothic villa near Geneva with his good friend and frequent traveling companion, the poet Lord Byron, and guests Claire Clairmont, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Since they were forced to stay indoors by the freakish weather, they spent a lot of time getting high on laudanum and reading aloud ghost stories to each other. Byron then proposed they each write their own tale of horror. Out of that weekend came two things: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a book I hold very dear to my heart) and the first known use of vampire folklore in literature, Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” Yes, dear reader, that would be eighty-one years before that Bram Stoker guy wrote that book called Dracula. Now, we’re going to leave aside speculation on the nature of the relationship between Polidori and his “good friend,”

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Lord Byron. One thing we can say with a fair amount of confidence is that the vampire in Polidori’s tale was a thinly veiled depiction of Byron himself: mesmerizing, scheming, deceitful, womanizing, eccentric, and, in his own strange way, utterly charming. Remind you of anyone you know? Perhaps Damon Salvatore? In this first literary vampire tale, written long before Ian Somerhalder smirked his way onto the camera, a young, wealthy Englishman named Aubrey befriends Lord Ruthven, a popular if somewhat aloof member of London society who invites Aubrey to go abroad with him. The two travel to Italy, where Aubrey discovers that Ruthven enjoys making others miserable and robbing innocent young women of their virginity (perv!). Aubrey decides to leave Ruthven’s company, pausing just long enough to prevent one girl from being dishonored (what a guy!), and finds some peace in Greece, where he falls in love with a local peasant girl. It’s there that he first hears of creatures called “vampyres,” and they remind him of Ruthven in a way he cannot quite put his finger on (creepy!). Soon after, the peasant girl is killed by a vampyre and Aubrey is nearly driven mad with grief. When he recovers, he finds that Ruthven has been caring for him during his time of mourning. He feels he owes a debt to him, so he agrees to travel with him again. Soon after, they are ambushed by robbers and Ruthven is mortally wounded. On his deathbed, he makes Aubrey swear that he will not talk about him or his death for a year and a day. Somewhat confused, Aubrey agrees (sucker!). Once back in London, he discovers, to his horror, that Ruthven is still alive, posing as

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the Earl of Marsden, and wooing Aubrey’s pure, virginal sister. Forced to keep silent, unable to save his sister, Aubrey has a nervous breakdown. By the time he (finally!) resolves to break his oath and tell them all the truth about Marsden/ Ruthven, they all think he’s totally insane and discard his claims as delusional. On the day before the oath ends, his sister marries Ruthven. The next day, Aubrey is able to calmly and clearly tell them everything, and this time they believe him (why now?). But then he dies. His friends and caretakers try to save his sister, but they’re too late. The last line reads, “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!” One of the things most striking to a modern reader about “The Vampyre” is its blatant objectification of women. The two female characters, Aubrey’s Greek girlfriend and his sister, are utterly helpless and little more than scenery and tools for Ruthven to drive poor Aubrey mad. Neither of them have a single line of dialogue or character development. Well, unless you consider dying to be character development. In an introduction to “The Vampyre,” Polidori describes the author Madame de Stael as “perhaps the first of her sex, who has really proved its often claimed equality with the nobler Man.” So I think it’s pretty clear how he views women in general. After Polidori’s book, but still twenty-five years before Dracula, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu wrote the first story about a female vampire, Carmilla: A Vampyre. The title character is said to be based on the historical figure of Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of virgin

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servant girls to keep her youthful appearance. In the story, Carmilla is a two-hundred-year-old upper-class teenage girl who preys on other upper-class teenage girls by first becoming their BFF, then killing them at a sleepover. The lesbian undertones are pretty hard to miss and it’s difficult to know if the author was exceptionally liberal and open-minded, or if he simply couldn’t conceive of a man being the victim of a woman, even if she was a vampire. Either way, it didn’t go over too well with the generally stuffy English middle class. In fact, neither Carmilla nor “The Vamprye” made an enormous impact on English culture. In addition to the shortcomings in writing, both were short stories with minimal plots at a time when dense Gothic novels were becoming all the rage. And frankly, a pale, less humorous Lord Byron and a waifish, snooty lesbian just aren’t that scary. The people wanted real horror. Ultimately it was Bram Stoker’s Dracula that landed like a thunderclap on the European psyche and established the popular concept of the vampire. It was big. It was epic. It was, at the time, really, really scary. Back in the 1800s, England was simultaneously fascinated by and frightened of foreigners. Scary stories have a long, time-honored tradition of preying upon our fear of “The Other,” a culture or person we don’t understand. At around the time of Dracula’s popularity, steamships and trains made mainland Europe and beyond far more accessible to the English middle class than in times past. This made for some splendid holidays abroad (or not, as in Aubrey’s case), but it also made the British Isles much more vulnerable to everything from new diseases to foreign

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business competition. The figure of Dracula, with his dour looks, broken English, and hairy palms (ick!) descending upon pristine, virginal England with all his exotic, wicked eastern European ways, was both enthralling and terrifying. So it was Stoker who set the precedent in vampire literature. And unfortunately, even though Dracula was published almost a century after Polidori’s book, it progressed little in its depiction of females. Mina Murray (later Mina Harker) has the potential to be a real character with something vaguely akin to motives, at least until the dirty foreign vampire corrupts her, but Lucy Westenra is never anything more than a plot device. And while Dracula had succeeded in making the male vampire a true figure of horror, female vampires were a different story. Dracula’s female vamps are sad, wretched, hissing scavengers, always subservient to the lone alpha-male vampire master. After Dracula, there was a bit of a lull in the development of vampire mythology until the early twentieth century, when the first vampire movies appeared: Nosferatu (a supremely creepy silent German Expressionist film that was essentially Dracula with all the names and some of the plot changed) and Dracula. For all its faults, the original Dracula movie with Bela Lugosi is an elegant piece of work that is still somehow unnerving even for many modern viewers, although these viewers will also find that the early twentieth century was no more progressive in its portrayal of women than the nineteenth. That could have been rectified a few years later with the Hollywood invention of Dracula’s Daughter, which follows

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Countess Marya Zaleska and her attempts to cure herself of the vampirism she inherited from her father. But Dracula’s Daughter is a cheap knockoff that makes little sense and frequently borders on slapstick. Throughout the movie, there is the sense that “the fairer sex” simply can’t handle being that evil. Of course, that wasn’t really a new idea in literature. Even Lady Macbeth, that ultimate female evildoer, says, “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty!” She believes she has to abandon her gender in order to truly be bad. Over the next forty years or so, vampire movies came and went, usually recycling the same old Dracula-type imagery and themes, and lots of hissing, cringing, submissive vampire women. In the late sixties, there were a few noble attempts. Some might say that the first real success was The Vampire Lovers, loosely based off Le Fanu’s Carmilla and released in 1970. While a movie about wealthy lesbian vampires was a modest hit in France, the American public wasn’t quite ready for it yet. But soon after, in 1973, one year after the Equal Rights Amendment was passed in Congress, a novel called Interview with the Vampire was written by a woman named Anne Rice. Published in 1976, it introduced the vicious yet tragic Claudia, a female vampire trapped in the body of a little girl. This unlikely character was just the beginning, though, of a whole new era of female vampires: Miriam in The Hunger, Mae in Near Dark, Marie in Innocent Blood, and of course the countess in that timeless classic Once Bitten (come on, you

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know you love it). These were women who could be strong, feminine, and damn evil all at once. But the female vampire archetype didn’t just stop once it reached Dracula-level evil. It continued to evolve until we finally had strong, female, vampire heroes. I’m thinking, of course, of such characters as Selene, the gun-toting, leatherclad, ass-kicking, werewolf-loving vampire played by Kate Beckinsale in the movie Underworld. Now that, dear reader, is liberation. The evolution of the vampire archetype was not limited to females, though. In the book that birthed the first truly fierce modern female vampire, Anne Rice also introduced the male tragic hero vampire. Louis was a guy who didn’t really want to be a vampire, felt pretty bad about it, and tried everything he could to avoid doing vampire-like things. You know, like killing and stuff. And since poor whiny Louis and his hopeless crush on Claudia in Interview with the Vampire, we have seen a slew of tragic, conflicted, impotent, or repressed male vampires: Edward from The Vampire Tapestry, Jack from The Vampire Files, John from The Hunger, Caleb from Near Dark, Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dracula from Coppola’s reinvented Dracula, Edward from Twilight, and of course Stefan Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries. Poor, pathetic Stefan Salvatore. He just wants to be a real boy! One-hundred-and-fifty years of arrested development can really mess you up. There are times when one sides with his brother, Damon, and wonders why Stefan can’t just get over himself already and dibble a little from the blood bank without turning into a psycho about it. At least it’s better

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than making out with your best friend’s mom, then beating him up (leave that to the werewolves). But Stefan is so trapped by his own self-loathing, he can’t seem to accept that being a vampire doesn’t make him intrinsically good or evil. Even though he is a modern vampire, he’s stuck thinking of them in the old Dracula model. But just as Stefan’s forebear Louis had Lestat to goad him out of his tragic paralysis, so Stefan has his brother, Damon. I cannot think of a single vampire in all of the books and movies I have consumed (and trust me, that is a great many) who is more in keeping with the original model of Lord Ruthven, aka. Lord Byron. It pains me to admit, but not even my favorite vampire, Lestat, matches Damon in that celebration of self-absorbed, self-mocking, arrogant, charming, cruel, noble romanticism. It is his humor that sets him apart, a humor that is so self-serving yet so utterly beguiling that we cannot help but smile in spite of ourselves. Back in Lord Byron’s day, at a time when poets were like rock stars, Byron was the quintessential English heartthrob. People loved him. They hated him. They loved to hate him. So it seems to be with Damon. But there is one important difference between the two: Lord Ruthven never had to contend with a female of his own species. Which is why Damon is having such a tough time being a truly scary alpha vampire in Mystic Falls. Byronic heroes don’t really cut it these days because chicks don’t put up with that kind of crap anymore. Damon, by hearkening back to the original vampire model, doesn’t fare any better with the ladies than Dracula would, were he to turn up in Mystic Falls today. It almost seems purposeful the

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way the writers break down Damon’s machismo slowly, bit by bit, using a long list of female vampires. The first is Vicki, a mortal girl whom Damon decided to turn on a whim. But unlike Dracula, Damon wasn’t interested in having a harem of docile female vampires to fawn over him. If anything, he seemed to find Vicki’s dependence on him tiresome. The only amusement he got from her was by using her as a means to upset Stefan—as a tool, just as Lord Ruthven does with Aubrey’s girlfriend and sister. Whenever Stefan began to get Vicki under control, Damon said or did just the right thing to send her spiraling back out again. Finally, Damon goaded her into leaving the house, and soon afterward she attacked Elena’s brother, Jeremy, forcing Stefan to put her down. It was only then, when Elena was guilt-stricken over Jeremy’s shock and horror, that Damon showed any remorse. His gesture to erase Jeremy’s memory was a generosity that we hadn’t seen in him previously. It was, in its own strange way, somewhat gallant. But more than that, it was what we tend to think of as “human”— and while Damon was still at that point the villain of the series, with that one gesture we began to see the possibility that he could be more. Then there was Stefan’s old vampire gal-pal, Lexi. Even in her short time on screen (sigh . . . ), she made it quite apparent that a direct confrontation between her and Damon would not end well for him. It was a jarring moment because it was the first time in the show where we understood that Damon was perhaps not the most fearsome thing out there. In order to neutralize her, he had to resort to posing as a

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human and staking her. (You want to talk about dick moves, Damon? What about that one?) Pearl, played with chilling understatement by Kelly Hu, was another big roadblock for Damon. The moment when she nearly gouged out his eyes with her thumbs pretty much summed it up: while Lexi showed us that Damon wasn’t the most powerful vampire in existence, it was Pearl who showed us that he wasn’t the most ruthless, either. But while Lexi and Pearl were impressive, it was Katherine who really exposed Damon’s weakness. Katherine turned, then abandoned Damon. He thought she was taken from him and his every action was bent toward recovering her from the tomb he thought she was imprisoned in. After much difficulty and sacrifice, he learned that she was never even in the tomb. That she could have contacted him at any point in the one hundred and fifty years since they were separated. And she did not. It was a blow more terrible than anything Bonnie, Lexi, Pearl, or an entire legion of female vampires could have delivered. Suddenly, we could empathize with Damon, and he didn’t seem so “bad” after all. At least, no more so than Stefan, with his addictive personality, is “good.” What brings us over to Damon’s side, at least for short periods, is his seemingly endless capacity for unrequited love. Because when he did discover that Katherine was no longer interested in him, his attention began to turn toward her fragile, human look-alike descendant, Elena, who is in love with his brother. There are several reasons why this was a really bad idea. But ultimately, for someone trying to be the

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alpha-male vampire of a town suddenly crawling with them, the biggest problem is the vulnerability it brings. It doesn’t matter how strong or invulnerable you are, if the person you love is fragile, that makes you fragile, as well. That vulnerability was quickly exploited by Elena’s birth parents, Isobel the vampiric ice queen, and her toady, the human Johnathan Gilbert. Unlike Lady Macbeth, Isobel has no difficulty reconciling her femininity with her cruelty. She is refreshingly frank in her brutality, threatening her own daughter’s life to get what she wanted from Damon. Even though she eventually showed us her weakness, and it was (surprise, surprise) her love for the human Alaric, she never really let it distract her or get in her way. Not coincidentally, I think, she was the only vampire who successfully escaped Mystic Falls unscathed. If there is a truly unlikeable character in The Vampire Diaries, it isn’t a vampire. It is Isobel’s onetime lover and Elena’s father, John Gilbert, the most loathsome and weaselly vampire hunter that has ever existed. In his attempts to eradicate vampires from Mystic Falls, he was smarmy, backstabbing, pitiless, and utterly spineless. With a human like him around, who needs vampires? Okay. So I admit it. The main reason I hated John Gilbert was because he killed my favorite character, Anna. Poor lost, loyal Anna. A goth geek boy’s dream: cute without being intimidating, smart without being pretentious, and blunt so you don’t have to worry that you’re not picking up on “girl signals.” She knew that Jeremy was trouble, a selfish little twerp who can’t see past his own pain. And even if she hadn’t

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known, her mother made it abundantly clear that, be their name John, Jeremy, or Johnathan (her own long-lost human love), the Gilberts were bad news for vampire ladies. But just like her mother, Anna fell victim to the love of a human— and it was her undoing. Had she left Mystic Falls when her mother first urged it, perhaps they both would have survived. Had she not gone back to warn Jeremy that other vampires were planning to attack the night of the Founder’s Day celebration, she might still be alive. But of course, she didn’t. And really, if Anna had ignored her love for Jeremy, she would have remained the harsh, sneaky little scamp we first thought she was. Oh yes! Don’t forget that when we first met her, she was turning people into vampires because they were “useful,” kidnapping Elena and Bonnie to use as leverage against the Salvatore brothers, and being generally indifferent to the suffering of humans. Anna, like Damon, was humanized largely through love; it was Damon’s love for Elena and Anna’s love for Jeremy that changed the show’s genre from traditional Gothic horror to modern tragic romance. In the final episode of the first season, it seemed there was a moment when the power could have shifted in favor of the boys or the girls. Both Damon and Anna laid helpless in a burning basement, staring at each other in a “We are so screwed” sort of way. But then John Gilbert came in and staked Anna before there was even the possibility that she could be rescued. And as an ardent member of Team Anna, my question was—why? Damon gets to keep on pining for his tragic human love, why couldn’t she?

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There are two reasons that make sense to me from a storyteller’s perspective, one based on character, the other more abstract. From a character perspective, Anna wouldn’t have sat around pining for Jeremy for long. The only reason she got as attached to him as she did was because that wanker John Gilbert killed her mother. But soon, she would have moved on with her life, just as she said she would before her mother’s death. And it’s just more interesting to have someone murdered tragically as a consequence of trying to save someone they love than just have them fade out of the story. The other reason is because she had to make room for the queen. You know who I’m talking about. Katherine. When you talk about a character for an entire season and only show her in flashbacks, you are purposefully building that character up to the point of near-mythic levels. Just as Anne Rice popularized the strong female vampire and the self-loathing male vampire, she also brought to popular culture Akasha, Queen of the Damned. An alpha-female vampire reminiscent of Kali from Hindu mythology. Creator, Lover, Destroyer. For the Salvatore brothers, at least, Katherine is all these things. Just as Stoker didn’t include other male vampires that might pull focus from Dracula, the writers cleared the decks of all the female vampires before bringing Katherine onscreen. When she finally made her appearance, it was with a strike of surgical precision aimed at the two strongest male characters. Within minutes, she seduced Damon and brutally murdered John Gilbert, immediately establishing her dominance.

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Forget Caroline and Founder’s Day—the real Queen of Mystic Falls has returned and she hasn’t got the time or the patience for human emotions like love. Tragic romance must take a backseat to horror once again. At least for a little while. It is, after all, a story about vampires.

J o n S ko v r o n lives with his two sons outside Washington, D.C. His first novel, Struts & Frets, is about music. It was recently published by Abrams Amulet. His second novel, Misfit, is about demons and other monsters. It comes out in the fall of 2011. If you like music and/or monsters, visit him at jonskovron.com.

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In Which Our Intrepid Heroines Discuss the Merits of the Bad Boy Versus the Reformed Bad Boy with the Help of a Couple of Dead Women Who Know About Such Things. • Alyxandra Harvey •

The Stefan vs. Damon argument is as old as the Vampire Diaries book series itself. With the advent of the TV series, the debate has reached an entirely new level. Every Thursday night, lines are drawn, “Team” loyalties formed or reinforced, and this same argument found all over Twitter, Facebook, and fan communities. Here, Alyx Harvey serves up a lesson in what defines a heroic figure and explains why the Salvatore brothers both fit the bill—with a fun twist.

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ight trembled on bat wings over the treetops. “Well, that’s just awful.” Lizzie scratched it out so ferociously the paper pockmarked. The candle next to her elbow rattled. “It’s about vampires, of course it’s got bats and night.” She was still sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table and scowling at the offending description when Cat burst into Lizzie’s parents’ sunroom. “I know! I know! I’m late,” she said, sounding out of breath, as always. “I got this text from Edw—oooh, hey, is that Vampire Diaries?” She plopped onto a chair facing the television, entranced. “Damon totally takes his shirt off in this episode.” “You’re late,” Lizzie said. “Shh. Damon.” “Please, Stefan’s cuter.” Cat looked away for barely a second, one eyebrow raised in patent disbelief. “Is not.” Lizzie pointed to the screen. “Look at that half smile. Those eyes. You can just tell he’s deep. And he’d totally remember your birthday.” She sighed a little, then shook her head. “Okay, we have to focus.” Cat snorted. “Dude. Shirtless. I’m focused.” Lizzie grinned. “Not on cute guys, on our homework. Due in exactly nine hours, remember?” She waved her hand. “Cute guys always win out.” “Don’t make me turn it off.” Lizzie reached for the remote. 68

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Cat froze. “Put that down. When did you get so mean?” Lizzie compromised and hit the mute button. “Okay, so the assignment is to connect a contemporary story to something we’ve read in class this year.” “Yeah, but connect how?” “Parallels, themes, the usual.” She nodded to a pile of books on the table. “I got some stuff out of the library last week.” “Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Poetry of the Romantics, Themes in English Literature.” She leaned her chin on her hand morosely. “God, I’m bored already.” “We don’t have time to be bored. Look, I did piles of research but I’m not doing the whole essay by myself. Group project, remember?” “Are hot guys a theme?” Cat wondered. She paused, brightening. “Hey, The Vampire Diaries is a contemporary story.” “That’s true.” “So we could watch all the episodes again and technically we’d be doing homework.” Lizzie sat up. “I’ve always wanted to write a paper about how Team Stefan is Team Darcy.” “You want to write essays? You’re so weird.” Lizzie ignored her. “I could claim Stefan as the descendant of the literary tradition of the Romantic hero, via Mr. Darcy.” “I don’t even know what you just said,” Cat grumbled. “Stop showing off.” She slumped. “I don’t want to talk about Stefan all night.” She shuffled through her notes and the piles of books. Wuthering Heights fell off the table and bounced off her toe. “Ouch!” She glared at the offending paperback,

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then picked it up, looking thoughtful. “We could prove Damon is a Gothic hero, via Heathcliff, instead. Then I could write about how hot Damon is.” She flipped through the pages. “I mean he’d be just as yummy prowling the moors as he is in a black leather jacket. And both of them have a thing for Katherines.” She narrowed her eyes accusingly at Lizzie’s binder. “Are you doodling vervain?” “Yeah, so?” “Yeah so, that’s the plant that trapped Damon!” “Well, it’s not like it gives Stefan the warm and fuzzies either.” “Excuse me, but Stefan locked Damon in a room full of this stuff. That’s it. Team Heathcliff is so going to kick your ass. Team Darcy’s going down.” “I think Jane Austen would disagree.” “Wanna bet?” “What do you mean?” Lizzie asked. “I mean, we go to the source. It’s midnight, after all. All the best witchcraft happens at midnight. So I say we summon Jane Austen and Emily Brontë and let them decide: Romantic hero or Gothic hero.” “Okay. But when I win, you have to admit Stefan’s just as cute as Damon.” Cat winced. “Fine.” “I’m going to want that in writing.” “Just turn off the lights,” Cat grumbled. “And pause the TV on that scene with shirtless Damon. I need some inspiration.” They sat in the mostly dark room and stared at each other. “Now what?” Lizzie asked.

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“I don’t know,” Cat admitted. “We need a candle. There’s always candles with this stuff. And a grimoire. And we should hold hands. Bonnie and her grandmother held hands when they opened the tomb, remember?” “Yeah and Bonnie’s grandmother died after the spell,” Lizzie pointed out. “If you kill us, I’m going to be so pissed at you.” She pulled a box of matches out of the bottom drawer of the cabinet and lit the candle on the coffee table. When the wick flared, she placed it on the ground between them. They held hands and stared at the candle so hard Lizzie’s eyes teared. Nothing else happened. She placed her copies of Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice on either side of the candle. “Bonnie’s grandmother said lots of things fuel a witch’s power, like worry or anger. So maybe if we concentrate on the books and think really hard about getting an A we can use that to fuel the spell.” “I’d rather use lust.” Cat flicked a glance at the television screen. “Concentrate.” They stared at the candle again. “Shouldn’t we chant?” Cat asked. Lizzie nodded. “Jane Austen, Jane Austen, Jane Austen.” Cat joined in. “Emily Brontë. I feel like an idiot. Emily Brontë, Emily Brontë.” The door from the back garden creaked open. Two women joined Lizzie and Cat. One of them wore a black dress with white petticoats dragging dead leaves. The candle flickered.

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Cat gaped. “Is that . . . Emily Brontë?” Emily Brontë’s companion was wearing a flower-trimmed bonnet. There were ink stains on her fingers. “And Jane Austen,” Lizzie choked. “Either the spell worked or we’re having a joint English Lit hallucination.” “Can I count that as homework?” Cat fixed her hair. “If Damon shows up I’m going to freak right out. Now that’s a hallucination worth having.” She reached for her phone. “And I’m so taking a picture of him.” She leaned over with such enthusiasm to see if he might be following the dead women up the path that she nearly fell over. “Excuse me,” Emily Brontë said. “We are not entirely certain why we are here.” “You’re here to get me an A for my English Lit paper,” Cat said. “Could you come to school with me tomorrow?” “It’s not show-and-tell,” Lizzie said before smiling at the dead women. “We summoned you,” she explained. “We are aware,” Miss Jane replied. “Oh. Right. Okay.” Lizzie sounded flustered. “We want to connect your heroes to our heroes from The Vampire Diaries. Mr. Darcy to Stefan or Heathcliff to Damon. But we can’t decide which one fits better.” Miss Brontë frowned. “Heathcliff isn’t a vampire.” “Neither is Mr. Darcy,” Miss Jane added. Lizzie looked apologetic. “There have been a lot of books written about Mr. Darcy since Pride and Prejudice,” she said. “Some of them with vampires.” “And even Nelly in Wuthering Heights wondered if Heathcliff was a vampire.” Cat smirked at Lizzie. “Ha, see, I did

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read the class books.” She turned back to Emily Brontë and Jane Austen perched on the couch next to each other. Cat suddenly felt as if she were trapped in the scariest literary pop quiz ever. “So can you help us decide if Stefan is more like Mr. Darcy or Damon is more like Heathcliff? You know, hero versus hero. Like literary wrestling, but without the spandex.” “Heathcliff is also certainly not a hero,” Miss Brontë said. “He’s selfish and violent.” “Just like Damon.” Cat smiled as if the adjectives had been complimentary. “See? Totally Gothic hero material. Or Byronic hero. Oooh. Do you think I can get extra credit for bringing Byron into it?” Lizzie just shrugged. “Okay, look, the Gothic hero or Byronic hero, or antihero, whatever you want to call him, is the rebel. He’s the one who won’t just go along with the status quo if he doesn’t think the status quo is worth it. That’s why Heathcliff is the quintessential Gothic hero. He runs away to make a name for himself and he refuses to bow and scrape to the wealthy neighbors, or even to Catherine’s brother. Damon’s got that totally hot rebel thing going, too.” “Damon’s just rebelling because he’s bored. The Romantic hero is a rebel with a cause,” Lizzie said. “They want to make things better, like Stefan. So not the same thing.” “Damon abandoned the Confederacy in the flashbacks, remember?” Cat said, knowing the flashbacks were Lizzie’s favorite parts. “That was a conscience thing.” Lizzie wrinkled her nose because she didn’t have an argument. Cat looked smug. “But that was in the 1860s,” Lizzie finally said. “What about now? When he’s just a big baby?”

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“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that. Anyway, Damon clearly fits into Gothic literature—the whole series does.” She flipped through one of Lizzie’s books, looking for the highlighted parts. “See, right here. It says Gothic literature was a rebellion against the strict codes of society.” “It’s also about decay and mystery. And the sublime,” Lizzie said. “So you have to prove it all if you want to win this thing.” “The sublime?” “The experience of the world through personal or physical sensation,” Miss Brontë explained. Cat looked interested. Very interested. “That sounds like fun.” Lizzie nudged her. “Focus or we’re going to fail English.” “No, we won’t. I can totally link Vampire Diaries to Gothic Lit. Is there a checklist? You know, typical Gothic stuff. Not corsets and black eyeliner, though. I mean the really old stuff.” She winced at Miss Brontë’s dry look. “Not that you’re old or anything. I mean, for someone who’s been dead for like two hundred years, you look really good. Um, I’ll shut up now. The Gothic traits?” she prodded while Lizzie snickered beside her. “Ruined buildings and castles,” Lizzie said, glancing at Miss Brontë for confirmation. “And graveyards and mists and crows.” “Damon has the mist thing down and crows that follow him. Plus he hangs around the cemetery when Elena is there.” “And the idea of finding yourself and your place in the world through harrowing, fearful adventures,” Lizzie continued.

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“Damon finds his place. It’s with Katherine, then with Elena.” “And vampires, of course,” Lizzie added grudgingly. “Done and done.” Cat rubbed her hands together gleefully. “Stop that, you look like Lady Macbeth,” Lizzie told her. “Shut up,” she said but she dropped her hands back to her side. “Any curses and spells and stuff?” “Yeah,” Lizzie admitted reluctantly. “Family curses and madness, witchcraft. All of that.” “Sweet. So the whole Katherine/vampire/bury-them-underthe-church/family-curse thing is classic. And the witch angle with Bonnie.” “What of vengeance?” Miss Brontë inquired. “It is also required.” “Damon says it himself: ‘I am vengeful.’” Cat rubbed her hands together again and nearly cackled at Lizzie. “I’m so on a roll. I’ve totally just proved how much cooler the Gothic hero is than the Romantic hero.” “Hah! All you’ve proved is The Vampire Diaries has some stuff in common with Gothic literature, which, duh. That doesn’t make the Gothic hero cooler. Your hero is based on a guy who’s mean to puppies.” Lizzie grimaced. “I mean, gross. Heathcliff hung one off the back of a chair!” “Yeah, you did kind of take his bad-boy thing too far,” Cat agreed, glancing at Miss Brontë, who just shrugged. “I mean, I’m sure Damon would never hurt a puppy.” Lizzie stared at her. “He killed Lexi!” Cat winced. “Yeah. But she wasn’t a puppy.”

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“And the couple in the very first scene of the pilot!” “Um, dramatic tension?” “And what about Vicki? Plus he basically tortures Caroline. And he snapped that woman’s neck at Pearl’s house!” “To save your precious Stefan! Brotherly love should count for something. Plus, he can’t help it,” Cat insisted. “It’s not his fault. Anyway, you just don’t get it.” She shook her head sadly. “What is the appeal?” Miss Jane inquired politely. “My bad boys, such as Wickham, seem good but are proven otherwise. And Mr. Darcy seemed bad, I suppose, but was proven to be good. Heathcliff and Damon seem very much like the ne’erdo-wells they are.” “The appeal? Oh, that’s easy.” Cat smirked at Lizzie and tried to sound like a professor. “Like all successful predators, the bad boy has a killer smile.” “His smile?” Lizzie repeated, unconvinced. “Seriously? That’s your best argument as to how Damon and Heathcliff are alike? I have this whole bit about how Stefan pursues redemption, just like Mr. Darcy does all this stuff to save Elizabeth Bennet’s family without her knowing it, just for her. And that’s so much hotter than a smile. Bad boys never do anything just for the girl. It’s always for themselves first.” Cat sighed. “But Stefan mopes.” “He doesn’t mope! He’s deep. And the journal writing in an old leather bound book? Classic Romantic hero and classic yum. And hello, would you be cheerful all the time if you were 162 years old and back in high school?”

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“Good point. But haven’t you noticed? The good guys mope. It’s like they don’t have the right facial muscles to crack a smile. But the bad boys,” she nearly purred, “now they smile.” “Cite your sources, if you would?” Miss Jane inquired, sounding intrigued. “Angel versus Angelus or Angel versus Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Edward Cullen, of course, the mopiest. And then Stefan versus Damon. It’s classic.” “We haven’t been introduced,” Miss Jane replied. “It’s like how Wickham smiles,” Lizzie explained to Miss Jane. “And Mr. Darcy doesn’t. But being serious is just part of being a Romantic hero. And all that thinking is very tiring, you know.” She turned to Cat. “You should try it.” “Ha!” Cat said. “Never mind that, I’m totally onto something. The bad boy smile is just as powerful a weapon as fangs and as disarming as vervain. It shows you what you want to see, though not necessarily what’s there. It makes you think that you’re the only one who can heal him and that you might have a lot of fun in the process. It promises you things. Naughty things, mostly.” “Never mind the flash of fangs,” Miss Brontë agreed. “It’s the flash of that smile you really have to be on your guard for.” “Exactly! See, Emily gets it. That smile is shorthand for instant gratification, which is, after all, the bread and butter of the bad boy. I could totally get us an A with that!” “But Heathcliff broods,” Lizzie said. “And Damon doesn’t, by your own theory.” “Because Damon’s way more fun than that.” “That’s your argument?”

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Cat nodded smugly. “He’s doing the sublime thing you mentioned. It still fits.” “But you agree Heathcliff is a big jerk.” “Yeah, sometimes. So?” “So, Mr. Darcy and Stefan are better. We should write about them.” “I’m sorry, what part of Damon is hot has you confused?” “But that’s not the point.” “That’s always the point. Look, the Gothic hero is hot. He just is.” “That is standard,” Miss Brontë agreed. “The power of seduction and obsession and all that.” Cat grinned. “Plus, how else would he get away with acting like an ass if he didn’t also have such a cute ass?” “Can we talk about Mr. Darcy now, please?” Lizzie asked, rolling her eyes. “That’s all you ever want to talk about.” “Well, he’s awesome.” She cleared her throat pointedly. “As is the Tradition of the Romantic Hero.” “I can actually hear you talking in capital letters,” Cat said. “Because this is important. Gothic heroes get all the flash, but Romantic heroes are so much better.” “They’re mushy,” Cat muttered. “Valentines and sappy rhyming poems? Seriously? Does that ever work?” “Not that kind of romantic,” Lizzie said. “Honestly, do you sleep through class every week? I’m talking Romantic with a capital ‘R,’ not flowers and heart-shaped chocolates. It’s about art and nature and acting on intuition, not just logic.

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Less structure, more passion, but not the destructive Gothic kind of passion. I’m talking about Shelley’s poetry, or Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans—” Cat let out a loud fake snore. “You’re worse than a teacher with this stuff.” “Hey, I listened to you prattle on about smiles and cute butts.” “As if that’s a hardship.” “I’ll take a cravat over a cute butt any day,” Lizzie insisted. “That’s because you’re weird.” Lizzie lifted her chin stubbornly. “No, it’s because Stefan is just as hot as—hotter than—Damon.” “Excuse me.” Cat narrowed her eyes. “I’m not above a catfight.” “Excuse me, but in the pilot, Bonnie says Stefan has a ‘romance novel’ stare.” “Yeah, well, Damon has a leather jacket.” “So does Stefan.” “I fear we’re getting off point,” Miss Jane interrupted drily. “Let’s agree they’re both hot.” Lizzie blinked at Cat. “Did Jane Austen just say Stefan and Damon are hot?” “You wished to prove your Stefan as a descendant of Mr. Darcy via the tradition of the Romantic hero?” Miss Jane continued, as if Lizzie hadn’t spoken. “Yes.” Lizzie forced herself to stop glaring at Cat. “The Gothic hero isn’t the only rebel. The Romantic hero isn’t part of the regular ordinary world, either. The Romantic hero doesn’t take the easy way out. He’s lonely and misunderstood,

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like the way everyone thinks Mr. Darcy is cold and unfeeling when he’s really not, he’s just shy. And okay, arrogant, but he does get better.” Lizzie glanced at the notes she’d been taking. “He regrets being hurtful. Gothic heroes never really regret being jerks, not long enough to stop doing what they’re doing, anyway. They give into every impulse.” “Yum,” Cat interrupted. “Promise?” “The Damons, the Heathcliffs, they’re just bratty little boys. The Mr. Darcys and Mr. Rochesters have a purpose. They’re heroes.” “Yeah, but they’re no fun,” Cat complained. “They’re all depressed.” “Better than the Gothic heroes. It’s like they have PMS all the time.” Cat grinned, then paused. “Wait a minute, wouldn’t Mr. Rochester be considered Gothic? I mean he prowls about moodily, locks his wife in the attic, and is generally yummy and dark like Damon.” Lizzie shook her head smugly. “Nope. He redeems himself so he’s mine. A true Romantic hero like Stefan.” “How do you figure?” Cat demanded. “He lied to Jane. A lot. And, hello, wife chained up? How is that Romantic?” “At first it’s not. But he redeems himself by taking care of her, even after Jane ran away because of her. And he tries to save her during the house fire. Anyway, locking up crazy people is just what they did back then. He could have sent her to one of those hospitals where she’d be restrained in a cell. Most people would have done that to avoid the scandal.”

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“She’s quite right,” Miss Jane interjected. “Just as, in the end, Mr. Darcy doesn’t support the accepted order of things. He marries Elizabeth despite her family scandals and her rather annoying mother.” “See?” Lizzie continued. “Mr. Rochester is as much of a rebel as Heathcliff, only he manages to create something, even through his suffering, instead of just randomly destroying things with his temper. Sound familiar?” “Hey, Damon was betrayed. He has a right to be cranky sometimes.” “Damon betrays Stefan all the time.” “They’re brothers.” Cat shrugged, as if that explained everything. “And he saved him from being tortured in Pearl’s basement, remember? Anyway, the reason Damon does all that other stuff is because he wants to free Katherine, because he loves her.” “Yeah, but he likes doing all that other stuff, all the violence and the temper tantrums. He gets off on it. Even Elena calls him a ‘self-serving psychopath.’” “He does it for love! So they can be together. That’s romantic.” “Selfish.” “Romantic!” “Selfish!” “Girls!” Miss Jane interrupted briskly. “A little decorum, if you please. I have no wish to witness fisticuffs this evening.” Cat bristled but sat back. “Anyway, when he really starts to get into Elena, he changes,” She insisted, but she wasn’t screeching anymore.

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Lizzie frowned at her notes suddenly. “Hold on, I’ve got a Northrop Frye quote here: ‘The Romantic hero is placed outside the structure of civilization and therefore represents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless, yet with a sense of power, and often leadership, that society has impoverished itself by rejecting.’” Cat frowned, too. “Wait, that kind of sounds like Damon, too.” “I know.” Lizzie shuffled through her papers a little more violently. “Okay, we have to rethink this. It’s getting muddled.” Cat groaned, leaning her chin in her hand. “This sucks. I could be watching Damon right now.” “No, wait, I got it. Look, it’s not about who’s a Romantic hero and who’s a Gothic hero because Stefan and Damon are both kinds of heroes at the same time.” “Huh?” Lizzie bounced in her seat. Cat sighed. “I’m on to something,” Lizzie promised. “It’s about the archetype of the hero: Epic, Gothic, Romantic.” “Epic? We have epic now?” “Epic heroes are like Odysseus and Hercules. They have mythical origins, usually born of a god, and their tests are more physical than mental. They definitely uphold the status quo.” “Does this have to be in the essay?” “No.” “So don’t care then.” “As I was saying,” Lizzie continued with a sniff, “it’s not about who’s the better hero, because they’re both on the same

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path of the hero archetype. They’re just in different stages of the same journey. Damon’s stuck in the amoral Gothic brooding stage and Stefan has progressed to the Romantic redeemed bad boy looking for further redemption stage.” “But what about when Stefan drinks Elena’s blood and gets all addicted?” “Huh. Crap.” She bit her lip. “Wait! Got it! He’s backtracking on his path, but he eventually moves forward again. It’s a temporary slide.” “True,” Cat agreed. “Damon even says it, Stefan goes back to being boring and straightlaced—‘successfully cured of anything interesting in his personality.’” “Watch it,” Lizzie warned. “Yeah, yeah. You’re right, though. I mean, Damon moves around on his path, too, like when he saves Elena from Isobel.” Lizzie nodded. “So the timeline goes like this: Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester, Mr. Darcy.” She beamed. “Man, I’m good.” “If you say so,” Cat said. “So you write the part about Stefan and I’ll write the part about Damon.” She was about to blow out the candle when she paused. “Wait, we still haven’t answered the most important question of all.” “What’s that?” “Who’s yummiest, Romantic Stefan or Gothic Damon?” Miss Jane looked interested. Miss Brontë just looked pale. “What do you think?” Cat asked them. “We summoned you from the dead—the least you could do is answer that one question. I mean, we’ve been doing all the work. You don’t make very good CliffsNotes, just so you know.”

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“Choose?” Miss Jane asked. “Why would Elena choose when she can have them both?” Her smile went decidedly wicked. “After all, isn’t that why you watch every week?”

Aly x a ndr a Ha r v e y is the author of the Young Adult vampire series The Drake Chronicles. She likes tattoos, cinnamon lattes, and Mr. Darcy. Visit her at www.thedrakechronicles.com.

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You're My Obsession • Vera Nazarian •

If there’s one theme that is common in vampire stories throughout the ages (aside from the unquenchable thirst for blood) it would have to be obsession. Vampires obsessing over their victims’ blood, their victims falling under their thrall and obsessing over them, the families of victims obsessing over getting revenge for the deaths of their loved ones . . . the list goes on. In this essay, Vera Nazarian looks at how obsession runs deeply throughout The Vampire Diaries and the way it shapes both the story and the characters throughout the first season.

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admit, I am obsessed with The Vampire Diaries, the sensational new teen vampire prime-time drama that’s a cross between Dawson’s Creek and Twilight, with a dash of Buffy and All My Children, and a sprinkling of Smallville. My obsession didn’t kick in right away. As with any selfrespecting object of fascination, it started out shallow, took some time to engage, but steadily grew on me until, next thing I knew, I was swimming with vampires, without a safety cage and up to my chin. At first it seemed like fluff. Ridiculously pretty boys and glamour girls (some of them undead) monologuing, having crushes; typical family drama. But by the end of its first season The Vampire Diaries had grown mysterious, dark, and deep, way past its light and superficial “perfect teens with fangs and emo” first impression, and acquired layers, history, a hectic intense tone, and emotional complexity. And that makes the series compulsively watchable not only in the gripping soap opera sense, but also as a good character drama—the best kind of obsession, the kind from which we actually come away with new knowledge about ourselves. Vampires are especially good subjects for obsession because the strangely compelling stories we tell about them all end up being about obsession. The Vampire Diaries is a prime example. Think about some of the most prominent details of the story:

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There’s Damon Salvatore, obsessed with Katherine Pierce and her modern-day doppelgänger, Elena Gilbert, and his brother, Stefan, obsessed with a combination of Elena and his own personal guilt, control, and sanity. Elena obsessed about uncovering her origins and then, after the shock of finding Isobel, Undead Mommie Dearest, deriving meaning from it all. The Mystic Falls secret Founders Council (original and present-day) is fixated 24/7 on vampires and magical antivamp gadgets, not to mention paranoid enough to put that wonderful vamp repellent vervain in everything from liquor to jewelry—seriously, as far as those guys are concerned, life’s an all-you-can-eat undead buffet, all vampires all the time. Even the minor characters, the ones we see only for an episode or two, are all obsessed. Lee’s sole purpose was destroying Damon to avenge the death of his girlfriend and Stefan’s old friend Lexi. The same goes for Frederick, one of the most bitter tomb vampires, whose only goal was revenge on everyone in town generally, and the Salvatore brothers in particular. Oh, and then there’s all the stalking. Admittedly, Edward from Twilight might teach the master class, but in the world of The Vampire Diaries a bright and eager stalker wannabe can learn a thing or two not just from experienced lurkers Stefan and Damon, but from Anna stalking Jeremy, Jeremy tailing Vicki . . . And then there’s Elena, who appears to be a prime Object of Obsession™ for both humans and vampires at Mystic Falls—frequently (for the vampires) because of her resemblance to Katherine, but more often because she is simply at

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the heart of events, the glue holding together many of the relationships. So, what is it with vampire story lines and obsession? It seems you cannot have one without the other. First, let’s attempt to understand and define obsession itself, sans vampires. According to The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, obsession is “a thought or emotion which comes strongly to mind with unwanted persistency.” In general people obsess about obtaining things—material objects, special relationships with other people, resolution to problematic situations, revenge, closure, social and personal justice. We also obsess about achieving—life goals, status, respect, fame, recognition, proficiency, inner balance—and about avoiding—danger, death, pain, discomfort, shame, humiliation, difficulty, anything that particularly frightens us or causes stress and anxiety. Most people experience at least occasional bouts of desire—to obtain, achieve, or avoid—that become extended preoccupations. Who, as a kid, never wanted a specific toy to the point of nagging our parents about it? How many of us have never experienced a serious crush on someone at school or at the office? The difference between a mere longing for something and obsession is not so much the degree of the need or its urgency, but control. As soon as we lose control over our own behavior as it relates to the object of our desire, and allow our desire to overpower and rule us, we can be described as obsessed. At that point, all figurative brakes are off and our desire takes over. Completely unregulated, it

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grows in urgency and intensity. On the other hand, as soon as we regain the ability to let go and relinquish the object of our obsession (if we ever do), our obsession fades away. For purposes of our discussion, then, let’s define obsession as a single-minded, unhealthy, overpowering preoccupation (with something or someone) over which a person has little to no control. And what about vampires? The basic layman definition of a vampire (without all the supernatural paraphernalia of blood and fangs) is that of a user of others: not just a predator, but a parasite. (We’ve all heard the term “emotional vampire” used to describe a person who seems to “feed” on [mostly negative] emotional energy generated by others—a person who gets energized by or enjoys seeing others argue, get upset, or become excited while they themselves remain calm and unaffected.) A predator feeds on others, but is a part of a natural food chain, the circle of life. A parasite, however, takes from the living without contributing anything in return. The vampire preys on others to fulfill its own needs regardless of the consequences to anyone else. Vampires are defined not solely by their hunger, or what they hunger for, but their lack of control in feeding that hunger—the lengths to which they are willing to go, and the damage they are willing to do. Obsession, taken to the furthest extreme, can be seen as an out-of-control vampiric need for its object. Vampires and obsession are natural bedfellows. Indeed, all vampire tropes ultimately portray obsession of one kind or another. Foremost is vampires’ obsession with blood.

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Blood Blood is the only true sustenance left to a vamp (assuming we are talking about your common, everyday, “normal” bloodsucker vamp and not, say, an incubus/succubus sex fiend). And what drives a vampire first and foremost is the eternal need to quench its hunger for it. The hunger is in command, and the vampire follows, like a puppet, doing anything and everything it can to take care of this need. So here we have creatures who are walking obsessives by definition. In the world of The Vampire Diaries, Stefan, seemingly the most humane vampire, is also the one who is most obsessed with blood: the substance itself and the various repercussions of its consumption. Unlike his more ruthless “evil” brother, Damon, who has no problem sipping a human, Stefan consumes only animals rather than take human blood—at least not until he was driven back to it in an emergency, with Elena offering her own blood to save his life. He is constantly fighting himself to exercise a measure of control over his relentless hunger. And trying to control the impossible—his nature—nearly paralyzes him, makes him rigid and weak, because all of his energy is channeled into the struggle. But while he is weaker and more vulnerable, he is also necessarily in a position to be more careful, more introspective. Blood is both a symptom and the cause of Stefan’s deepest obsessive discomfort. He is fixated on blood in general and the guilt that comes with its use. But it was not until the episode “Blood Brothers” (1-20), when he revealed his

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role in Damon’s transformation into a vampire, that we realized what Stefan’s true obsession is: his feeling that he is responsible for Damon’s existence and choices. Blood as metaphor—in the form of brotherly bonds—is also his deepest secret guilt.

Family Blood is also a genetic bond; it is what ties us to our ancestral pasts. And it connects vampires literally to the various people living in history—people vampires have had for lunch. (Think about it: blood is both nourishment and living history. Kind of like how remembering that special meal you had years ago on vacation helps you recall the vacation itself. When Stefan—who had abstained from humans for years, possibly decades—tasted Elena’s blood for the first time, it could be said that he was for the first time experiencing the modern age, the here and now, and simultaneously letting go of a large portion of the past in the form of Katherine. Damon, on the other hand, has had a far longer unbroken “chain” of consuming human blood, and is thus more connected to the past via an endless succession of flavor “souvenirs.”) An obsession with blood is, in a sense, another way of saying obsession with family. The Salvatore brothers are obsessed with each other: Stefan with “saving” the brother he feels responsible for turning into a monster (never mind Damon’s own responsibility), and Damon with punishing Stefan for a host of betrayals—for Stefan’s role in Damon’s

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change into a vampire, perhaps, but also for the part Stefan played in Katherine being caught and, we suspect, for receiving a share of Katherine’s attention in the first place. Stefan and Damon are also consumed with the burden of regret for “failing” Katherine (their new family), coupled with the guilt of disobeying their human father’s direct orders by fraternizing with Katherine and her “devil kind,” and in the process severing their natural familial bond. Their father cut them off as soon as he understood the full extent of their involvement with the town vampires and then violently rejected his younger son as demon spawn when Stefan, recently turned into a vampire, came to him, seeking nothing more than acceptance. With no other family left, and their new surrogate “family” in the form of Katherine gone (imprisoned in the tomb, they assumed), the brothers had only each other. The next hundred years become a painful ritual of holding each other at bay, blaming each other (and themselves), and avoidance, following each other from one place to another, until inevitably they ended up back at Mystic Falls, driven by the mysterious call of roots and family. In the present day, Stefan and Damon are deeply and profoundly bound by their common obsessions—not only with each other and Katherine, but with the town, the land, and all it represents. It seems that no matter how many times they part company or betray each other, they always find themselves in the same place, back where they began, with each other. Anna and Pearl were similarly connected. It was the bond of family that drove Anna to return to Mystic Falls, despite

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the risk to her own life, in order to rescue her mother from the tomb. Later, with Pearl gone for good, Anna attempted to find replacement family in the form of Jeremy Gilbert. The humans in Mystic Falls are also obsessed with family. Elena and her best friend, Bonnie Bennett, were each bound up in their own way in the search for understanding in the context of family. Both were looking for a sense of control over their lives and themselves, Elena by searching for her birth parents (and her connection to Katherine) and Bonnie by learning to utilize her genetic supernatural gifts. But until they found it, the urge to search, to discover themselves in their roots, is what drove them. In Mystic Falls, family matters—especially if you belong to one of the town’s Founding Families. Mystic Falls’ main holiday is Founder’s Day. At the Founder’s Ball the most prominent citizens parade themselves and their offspring, and precious historical memorabilia of the early days are brought out of storage and displayed in fine cases next to antique photographs, as proud heritage of the original families. Because family is not just about blood, of course—it’s also about history.

History and the Past Vampires and history are inseparable tropes. The past is a rich unending panorama of time and events, both personal and grandly historical, and ironically it is alive for vampires in a way it can never be for the rest of us. A vampire is a

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creature frozen in its own shell outside the normal temporal flow; what is history to us is not always so for them. And through vampires, as living anachronisms, the past can act upon the present in a literal and often violent way. Consider the tomb vampires: when released in the twenty-first century, they were literally dressed in clothing from 1864, holding on to fresh memories of that time. In a way, vampires enable a specific set of historical obsessions to travel through time. In The Vampire Diaries, everyone’s past bears a powerful obsessive effect on the present. Mystic Falls itself is richly embroiled in its own history and that history’s far-ranging consequences. The Civil War–era residents responsible for trapping the vampires in the tomb established a secret council to pass on to future generations their knowledge of vampires and how to fight them, and in the present day, nearly every adult of consequence in town is not only a member, but obsessively devoted to protecting their town from potential supernatural threat. High school students write history reports based on their own ancestors. (It’s not a coincidence that the class we see Elena in most often is history, or that the teacher we know most about is the one who teaches the subject.) History and the past are living and breathing characters, coloring the decisions and choices made in the present. The Gilbert family in particular is fascinated with and fixated on their own historical events and ancestors, for a variety of reasons. Elena contended with learning she was adopted, and had to unravel the mystery of more recent events, but Jeremy was also pushed into exploring the family’s past

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through Johnathan Gilbert’s diary, first as a school assignment and then via prodding from Anna. The written word thus allowed the past to reach out and touch the present. Even Elena’s diary, and its later reading by Jeremy, was a form of obsessing over the past—the modern diary was short-term history in the making and a continuation of the Gilbert family heritage. Indeed, in addition to the historical past, the short-term past has a huge impact on the characters. History is, at its basest level, what has come before. For Elena and Jeremy, that is the recent deaths of their parents. For the Salvatore brothers, that is their human lives and deaths, and Katherine. Much of their obsession with Elena stems from her resemblance to Katherine, which calls up the historic past in all its raw urgency. As long as Elena is around, they can never truly forget what was, no matter what they might claim, even to themselves. Obsession with the past is the reason for everything that happens in Mystic Falls. It is the reason the Salvatore brothers are there. It is what motivates Isobel, Katherine, Anna, and pretty much every vampire in town to pursue their own varieties of personal vendettas and reprisals. History is everyone’s obsession.

Time It’s a short trip from obsession with the past to obsession with time, or at least the measure of its passing. Time—the one thing of which vampires have plenty and humans never have

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enough—is a preoccupation of The Vampire Diaries, if not of its characters. From the show’s lavish flashbacks to the timing of the first season’s events—the 150th anniversary of the town’s founding—time is a recurring motif. Notice, too, how the “magical” Gilbert inventions all continue the chronometric trope—stopwatches, and mysterious steampunk devices with ticking clockwork mechanisms and time-based moving gears. And naturally, everyone is obsessed with either obtaining or hanging on to these items.

Revenge and Retribution They say time heals all wounds, but—at least for the denizens of Mystic Falls, especially the immortal ones—time allows wounds to fester. It gives plenty of opportunity to plot—and obsess over—revenge and retribution. In The Vampire Diaries, after the magic spell that sealed the tomb was broken, releasing all those vamps trapped inside, their first motivation was to take revenge for their plight by destroying (or in Pearl’s case, reclaiming) the town of Mystic Falls. It seemed they malingered all those years with only that one purpose. And of course Katherine had her own as-of-yet-unclear reasons for exacting revenge on the tomb vampires. Time seems to heighten any obsession; the longer a hunger goes unfed, the sharper it becomes. Consider also that, in The Vampire Diaries and according to popular tradition, if a vampire is imprisoned, it does not die from hunger but rather

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grows weaker and weaker, never quite “extinguishing,” never quite approaching that absolute zero of complete annihilation (the tomb vampires were a perfect example). The longer they remain thus, the more their vampiric state itself intensifies. After a while the only thing that remains is the hunger and the frustrated inability to feed it. For lack of other stimulation in its environment, the last definition of an eternally waning “vampire thing” is perfect obsession. It seems only natural that such a creature would, after slaking its thirst and regaining its strength, think first of revenge on those who drove it to such a state.

Life and Death It is not surprising that vampires would be preoccupied with death, given the fact that they all had to die in order to become who they are and also given the frequency with which they deal it, and with life—having it, not having it, losing it, remembering it, angsting about it. They are undead, but what exactly does that mean? A kind of animated “death lite”? A kind of “low-life” (pun intended) minus half its pleasures and consequences? Indeed, when it comes to life and death, vampires technically have neither and both. And so it would make good sense that most of the time (of which they have plenty) they are trying to fathom their bizarre state of “being.” And since being a vampire involves having all eternity with nothing better to do than think, it easily develops into an obsession.

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Viewed psychologically, the vampire, in feeding, reenacts the instance of its own creation (the moment of its death and its rebirth), but from a position of power and control. It’s no wonder some vampires take such satisfaction from it, and return to the act obsessively, again and again. Death itself is a major theme. Many of the human residents of Mystic Falls must grapple with the deaths of people close to them: Elena and Jeremy with their parents’; Alaric with Isobel’s (though it turned out to be false); Bonnie with Grams’; Matt, Tyler, and Jeremy with Vicki’s. Death surrounds them. And many of these human characters in Mystic Falls show a life-and-death obsession of their own. Elena Gilbert’s relationship with Stefan could be understood as a fascination with death, but Elena—our heroine and anchor of sanity—is an island of moderation in a sea of obsessive excess. Though she is familiar with death, through the loss of her parents and her connection to Stefan, she is not obsessed. Jeremy, however, is not so temperate. When the season began, he was in a permanent state of grief over the death of his parents and, unable to handle the pain of their loss, was searching for ways to distract himself from it. It is possible that unconsciously Jeremy recognized a kindred lost soul in Vicki Donovan, and was escaping his grief by following her example, seeking oblivion through drugs. After Vicki’s vampire death, Elena ironically asked Damon to give Jeremy a truer oblivion in the form of a memory-wipe in order to rid him of painful memories of both his parents and Vicki. But awareness of death and its many faces is something that

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Jeremy needs as a sort of personal crutch. Death, and the need to understand it and find meaning in it, filled his void. And, especially after meeting Anna and learning the truth about Vicki, that translated into an obsession with vampires. After the intense events in “Founder’s Day” (1-22), Jeremy’s decision to take the vampire blood and then overdose on pills could be seen as his own peculiar way of reasserting control over his own life and death. Vicki Donovan herself was an excellent example of an obsession with life and death. Her many drug addictions and hard partying were both a cry for help and a bid for oblivion. Long before she was a doomed vampire, Vicki was a wild lost thing in the woods, poised between the life urge and selfdestruction and literally surrounded by other partying junkies, in an orgy of hormonal madness. Blood lust was just another intense need to add to her existential cocktail of despair. Which brings us to one final interesting point . . . There is a definite meaningful relationship between obsession, growing up, and vampires. As we leave childhood and enter the hormonal ocean of young adulthood, which usually brings with it chaos and lack of control over our bodies and emotions, we become intense and obsessive. At about the same time we are particularly drawn to vampires. Do we recognize ourselves? Consider: the longer a vampire exists, the more he or she turns into an eternal extreme version of our young selves. The vampire archetype is the immortal young sociopathic wild thing inside us all—selfish and focused entirely inward, frequently

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making choices regardless of the effect of its actions on others; focused on regaining its bearings after a confusing transformation and understanding (and learning to meet) unfamiliar new needs. The vampire stands in for our very own hormone-powered predator-self, dangerous and untamed and filled with the raw life-force that drives us onward. It’s no wonder we find vampires so fascinating, so familiar—to the point of obsession. And no wonder The Vampire Diaries works so well. At heart, it’s a successful metaphor of that archetype, of our own early obsessions, playing them out repeatedly before our eyes in myriad compelling ways. We stare in the mirror and see the characters, vampire and human, bound by common obsessions, all swept up in the process of intense personal growth. Watching it all happen is a bit like flipping the pages of your own diary. I’m engaged all the way, and yes, seriously obsessed.

Ve r a N az a r i a n immigrated to the United States from the former USSR as a kid, sold her first story at seventeen, and has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, seen on Nebula Awards® Ballots, honorably mentioned in Year’s Best volumes, and translated into eight languages. A member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, she made her novelist debut with the critically acclaimed Dreams of the Compass Rose, followed by Lords of Rainbow. Her novella The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass made the 2005 Locus Recommended

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Reading List. Her debut collection, Salt of the Air, contains the 2007 Nebula Award-nominated “The Story of Love.” Recent work includes the 2008 Nebula Finalist novella The Duke in His Castle, and two Jane Austen parodies, Mansfield Park and Mummies and Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons. Vera lives in Los Angeles. In addition to being a writer and awardwinning artist, she is also the publisher of Norilana Books. Visit her website at www.veranazarian.com.

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Don't Be Fooled by that Noble Chin: Stefan Sucks • Kiersten White •

Imagine, if you will, a world in which you arrive in Mystic Falls unaware that Stefan Salvatore is supposed to be the good guy. Imagine your reaction to many of the things Stefan does, the things the viewer sees when watching The Vampire Diaries and cuts him some slack for because, well, we know he’s ultimately the hero, and we forgive him his misdeeds. Kiersten White does just this, turning our preconceptions of Stefan on their head and exploring how Stefan could well be viewed as quite a sinister character. While we don’t personally agree with everything she has to say, we have to admit Kiersten raises some very interesting and unavoidable truths about

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Stefan’s actions in the first season. Even if he’s not a bad guy, he’s certainly not the knight in shining armor many believe him to be . . .

A

h, Stefan Salvatore. That hair! That jaw! Those soulful green eyes that spend absurd amounts of time per episode directing agonized and/or lustful looks toward the object of his love and obsession! He keeps a journal, he broods, he sheds manly tears, he (generally) doesn’t drink human blood. He is a paragon of vampire virtue and a shining example of what a boyfriend should be. Except, not so much. And I’m not talking about how, when force-fed human blood, he went all crazy-junkie on us for a few episodes. That I can forgive. He’s a vampire, after all, and he can’t help being drawn to blood. No, it’s the rest of the time that Stefan creeps me out. Forget lovely murderous sociopath Damon—it’s Stefan who is the true villain of Mystic Falls. He uses guilt as a tool for manipulation (of himself and others) and, more dangerously, as an excuse to avoid acting. His nobility is, in fact, nothing more than a deep and overwhelming self-centeredness. Bad boyfriend, Stefan. Bad! I’m reminded of another mythical creature, or rather his ill-fated creator: Dr. Frankenstein. In Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein is unable to see past himself and his desire for scientific achievement. He pushes the boundaries of morality and science to create life. What he creates, a

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monster made of dead flesh reanimated, is too horrible to comprehend. And so, rather than dealing with it, he runs. But never far enough or fast enough. Because of Frankenstein’s choices, the monster, not an inherently evil creature, turns to murder and destruction to seek revenge on the man who never loved him like the monster wanted. Even though Frankenstein knows the monster is tracking him, leaving bodies in his wake, he never takes the proper precautions, protects those he loves, or takes full responsibility for what he set loose on the world. Even his beloved wife pays the ultimate price for Frankenstein’s selfish refusal to fix his mistakes. Did Frankenstein feel guilty? Sure. Did that make his lack of action justifiable? Absolutely not. By the time he finally let his guilt spur him into confronting the monster, it was far, far too late. Innocent people were dead and he was absolutely as culpable as his monster. In much the same manner, Stefan “created” Damon. Damon was all set for a natural and well-deserved death. (He had, after all, willingly and knowingly helped Katherine kill innocent people.) But Stefan, unable to see past his own desire to not be left alone and to grasp at the last remnants of his family, forced Damon to become a vampire. Katherine may have started things, but she was completely willing to abandon Damon rather than make him finish the transformation; it was Stefan who facilitated Damon’s change into a total monster. And then, knowing full well what he had created, Stefan bailed. We don’t know much about the years between his and

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Damon’s transformations and them meeting back up in Mystic Falls, but it’s apparent they didn’t spend much of it together. Stefan couldn’t handle what he’d created by forcing eternal life on Damon, so he spent his time doing—what? Going to Bon Jovi concerts with Lexi, his vamp friend? Perfecting the art of hair gel application? Obsessively keeping journals of learning how to dance in the fifties and hoping it’d someday come in handy while wooing underage beauties? We don’t know what he did. But we know what he didn’t do. He didn’t do a thing to stop a vampire he knew was actively victimizing and killing innocent people—a vampire he created. For all Stefan’s abstinence, every life drained by Damon was, by extension, drained by Stefan. Also notable is the lack of vampire violence in Mystic Falls until Stefan decided to make it his home. It wasn’t until he settled there that Damon returned, followed by a slew of other vampires. They knew Damon would find a way into the tomb, and I think Damon waited until then because he couldn’t do it without Stefan—and he knew Stefan would help him. In spite of his protestations, Stefan never really tries to stop Damon. All of his efforts are woefully inadequate, doomed to fail or be discovered. They’re self-sabotaging, even. Stefan doesn’t really want to stop Damon because he’d rather feel guilty about the past than make difficult decisions in the present. Of course, Stefan doesn’t always act in his own best interest. He did save Caroline from Damon’s murderous intentions. If Stefan hadn’t slipped vervain into her drink, she would have been dead. But, wait a second—why’d Stefan

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wait until he, personally, reached his breaking point to help Caroline? He didn’t stop Damon from manipulating and compelling Caroline out of any fear for her safety. He didn’t care about all that time Damon was essentially raping her through compulsion or regularly snacking on her blood, leaving violent scars all over her body, or that Caroline’s life was in constant danger, dependent entirely on a very unstable Damon’s whims. Stefan waited because it didn’t affect him directly (in spite of the fact that Caroline is one of Elena’s best friends and Stefan professes to care about Elena). It was never about saving Caroline. When Damon became too threatening to Stefan’s way of life, Stefan finally stepped in and used her, poisoning her blood and turning her into a tool. He could have given her vervain at any point, could have protected her in the same way he did Elena, but he never bothered. It wasn’t his problem. Sure, he’d chastise Damon, but he wasn’t going to actively do anything to help Caroline unless he benefitted. And when Stefan had Damon, who kills and kills without remorse or reason, unconscious and utterly vulnerable, what did he do? Locked him in a house, unguarded, and planned to let him wither away. Sure, Stefan felt bad when Zach died during Damon’s eventual escape, but he didn’t exactly seem shocked about it. And he certainly didn’t put up a fight when Damon demanded his ring back. Why? Because he never wanted Damon gone in the first place. He “tried,” and with that to assuage his guilty conscience, he could continue on his merry, selfish way.

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No matter how many times Stefan insists he’s done dealing with Damon, he never really tries to break off the relationship or get away from the destruction. Stefan has no problem dispatching other vampires who get in his way and has had ample opportunity to really eliminate Damon as a threat to the town. He just doesn’t want to. Granted, loyalty to family is typically a desirable trait, but Stefan’s loyalty to Damon comes at too high a cost. Stefan and Damon feed off of each other in a way far deeper than vampirism, and Stefan’s refusal to eliminate Damon doesn’t just make him loyal—it makes him an accomplice. He doesn’t just support his brother, he enables him, motivating and making possible all of Damon’s evil plans. Because of his inability to get away from Damon, it’s Stefan’s fault that all of the vampires in the tomb were released. He rushed in to “save” Elena, knowing that unless the witches lifted the spell he’d never be able to come back out. But at the back of his mind I think he knew he’d get out. Elena wouldn’t let him stay in there, and Bonnie loves Elena too much to refuse her desperate pleas. It appeared selfless, but in reality there was very little risk involved for Stefan. And, as is typical, rather than leaving crazy killer Damon inside the tomb to wither away—the exact plan Stefan had tried to use before—he dragged him out with them, once again putting everyone in the town at risk. Of course, Stefan felt guilty about this. He always feels guilty. And he let Elena know how guilty he is, so she could reassure him of his tortured nobility, and that none of it was his fault, and that he couldn’t blame himself.

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No wonder he loves her so much; she reinforces everything he secretly believes. Of course, he isn’t without guilt when it comes to her, either. After he convinced Elena that they could make the whole vampire-human thing work, Damon killed Lexi, reminding Stefan that no one is safe in his life. Realizing their relationship was wrong, Stefan broke it off with Elena for her own good. To ensure her safety and protect her, he killed Damon, left town, and never returned, knowing that without him there she wouldn’t be involved in vampire drama and would be able to lead a safe, happy life. Wait, what? You mean he broke up with her and then stayed in town, hung out at his house, and visited all of the spots he knew she’d be at to allow ample time to reunite once he’d satisfied himself that he had “tried” to do what was best for her? Ah. I see. Clearly Stefan’s heart was really in it. But theirs is a fated love. After all, he’s stalked her! He understands her! She makes him happy! And that’s all that matters to Stefan. I find it interesting—and disturbing—that he feels guilty for introducing danger into her life but not for introducing himself into her life. Stefan consistently manipulates Elena. He has lied to her in nearly every episode, hiding information in the name of protecting her. Oddly enough the information has almost always seemed to be things that would cast him in a bad light—the fact that he’s a vampire, Elena’s resemblance to Katherine, his struggles with human blood, how Damon became a vampire. Even information that Elena deserved to know he held onto. He likes to be in control and have power over her. What better way to avoid addressing the fact that you just slept with an

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exact look-alike of your former lover than distracting her with the shocker that she was secretly adopted? Oh, and that you were the reason she didn’t die in the car accident that claimed her parents’ lives? It’s kinda hard to stay pissed after hearing that; how convenient that Stefan chose to reveal it when Elena was already so emotionally vulnerable. Not satisfied with manipulating her, Stefan has made himself into the central figure of her life, separating her from her family and friends by forcing her to lie to them. He enrolled in school with no real desire to blend in or be a normal teenager like he claims. Clearly he has no interest in academics, mouthing off to the ill-fated original history teacher so he could keep eye-flirting with Elena. His brief foray into football was just another way to make sure Elena never had breathing space. Aside from his overwhelming presence, Stefan’s lack of responsibility fosters an incredibly threatening environment for Elena. But no worries—he nobly protects and saves her from the very dangers that he’s responsible for introducing into her life. He’s created a life for her in which she’s completely dependent on him, and as strong as Elena is, she falls for it. And there’s little question that Elena is strong. She’s survived the death of her parents, struggled to deal with a brother slowly sinking deeper and deeper into depression, and discovered that her family was at least in part a lie. When people she loves are threatened by vampires or the town council, she meets the menace head-on. In fact, she’s consistently more proactive than Stefan, willing to get involved

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even though she’s at a significant disadvantage. Her association with Stefan brings her down, creating a life in which she has to lie to those she loves the most and put them in danger by their very association with her. (This, I think, is where the tension will come in with Damon in future seasons. Stefan is breaking Elena down, little by little, cutting her off from everything that defined her. She’s losing her independence, and Damon is right there to take advantage of how vulnerable Stefan makes her.) Once again, Stefan doesn’t care that his actions are hurting other people and are wrong, even when the person being hurt is the woman he “loves.” Time and time again, he uses his guilt as a tool to justify getting what he wants. He feels guilty, indulges in a little self-flagellation, and then feeds off of Elena’s strength and willingness to overlook his flaws. He lets her convince him that he deserves to be happy. Happy like the history teacher whose throat Damon ripped out. Or those hikers. Or those other hikers. Or those other hikers. Or Lexi. Or “Uncle” Zach. Or Grams. All deaths that were perfectly avoidable, had Stefan taken Damon out of the picture. And what of Vicki? Poor stoner Vicki. After Stefan’s halfhearted attempt at starving Damon to death, Vicki was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up as Damon’s plaything. When Damon turned her, Stefan encouraged her to accept death—exactly the way he didn’t—because maybe if he could get her to go gracefully it would make him feel better about himself and the fact that she was in this situation because of him. He even went so far as to trap her in his

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house, trying to force the “noble” choice on her. The noble choice that he didn’t make. The noble choice he deliberately kept Damon from making. Who is he to make the choice for her? She got out and drank human blood—without killing— and became a vampire. Suddenly Stefan was on high alert. Oh no! A vampire is in town! That could be dangerous! And what happened when Vicki threatened someone that he loves? She got a stake to the heart, immediately, remorselessly. After all, Stefan can’t allow vampires to go around killing innocent people! He’s just awesome like that. Wait, Damon wants to kill someone? Damon’s using compulsion on Caroline for violent sex? Damon’s threatening Elena’s life to get what he wants? Well, that’s okay. (I’m as enamored of Damon’s piercing blue eyes and wicked oneliners as the next girl, but let’s face it: dude is a killer. Sure, he’s prettier than Vicki, but I’m standing by my assertion that he deserves to die. Although if Stefan is going to insist on letting Damon get away with murder, the least he could do is make Damon quit killing interesting side characters and instead send him after skeezy Tyler and Matt’s mom. That’s some neck-chomping I could get behind. Yet another way Stefan disappoints.) Stefan professes a desire to “save” Damon, but what he really wants is to assuage his own guilt. If he killed Damon, like he should and could have at any number of points, it would have been better for humanity as a whole and saved who knows how many innocent lives. But it would have ruined Stefan’s imagined shot at redemption—if he can save

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Damon, he can save himself and finally forgive himself for creating the monster in the first place. So, once again, Stefan’s needs take priority over everyone and everything else. He needs Damon as an emotional crutch, and so Damon is allowed to kill and terrorize at will. Not even the death of Stefan’s alleged best friend, Lexi, not even Damon’s direct threats against Elena, move him to act. In the season one finale we were given a glimpse at a new Damon—one capable of remorse, who just may yet turn out to be an okay guy. But I would argue that nothing Damon does from this point on can make up for the last hundredplus years of murder and terror. Years Stefan could have prevented. Is offering Damon a shot at redemption worth the piles of bodies it’s taken to get him there? Stefan is incapable of thinking outside himself and his own needs. He needs Damon alive, and so everything else is necessary collateral. He can’t truly empathize with others because he doesn’t care. For all the show’s talk about an emotional switch, Stefan’s concern and guilt are never about anyone else. He doesn’t value people for anything other than how they impact him. Whether that’s a switch Stefan forgot to flip or if human Stefan was also like that, I don’t know, but for vampire Stefan it’s all about himself, all the time. He loves Elena because of the way she looks and makes him feel, not because of who she is. He keeps Damon around to feed his need to feel guilty and his sense that he’s seeking redemption. Everyone else—Bonnie, Caroline, Matt—is a tool he uses to get closer to Elena or to manipulate situations in his own favor. And in Stefan’s

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warped worldview, that’s okay, because he still sees himself as noble. During the season finale Stefan informed Damon that trying to do the right thing only counts if you’re doing it without any benefit to yourself. I actually laughed. I can’t think of a single “right thing” Stefan has done since he came to town that didn’t directly (and usually immediately) benefit him, usually by increasing Elena’s love and devotion. No wonder Damon’s so screwed up; with an example of “goodness” like that, we all would be. But Stefan’s imagined nobility is important to him. We saw his entire world fall apart when he was genuinely tempted by blood, because so much of how he defines himself is by what he isn’t—he isn’t a killer. Damon mocks it, Elena admires it, but really, what does this say? Stefan is noble because he doesn’t kill people? I can see his dating profile now: Stefan Salvatore Age: Hey, check out my abs! Interests: Scrapbooking, Not Killing People, Vintage Cars Looking for: A much, much, much younger woman Sounds like a catch to me! If avoiding murder is all it takes to be noble, I should get an award. I’ve never once killed anyone! Come to think of it, this is something I should be praised for more often. And like Elena, I know my numberone requirement in potential boyfriends was the ability to refrain from murder. Though it weeds out surprisingly few candidates.

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Sorry, Stefan. I don’t care how tempted you are, spending all day every day not murdering people doesn’t make you noble. It just means you’re not a killer. And yet Stefan continues to cling to the notion of his own nobility as a balance to his guilt. One of my personal favorite “noble Stefan overwhelmed with guilt” moments is when he decided that, having attacked the Miss Mystic Falls contestant, he didn’t deserve to live. He was so distraught that he resolved to kill himself. How? By leaving his sun-proof ring in clear sight so that Elena would know exactly what he was doing, then going to the one place he knew Damon would think of. There he planned to wait, perfectly visible, on the banks of the quarry pond until the sun came up. Or until Elena showed up to talk him out of it. Whichever came first. And trust me, he knew which one would come first. He doesn’t want to die. He wants to think he’s willing to make the ultimate sacrifice just so that he can reassure himself that he’s good. (His real commitment to killing himself was also evidenced in how long it took him to accept Elena’s assurance that the brave choice was to keep living—it was all of about ten seconds before he accepted the ring and moved in for a hero’s kiss. Gee, struggled with that one, didn’t you, Stefan?) If he really wanted to sacrifice for the good of the world, he’d give up on trying to redeem his brother and stake him instead. And then, rather than trying to grasp at a life he can’t (and shouldn’t) have with Elena, he could make it his mission to kill all of the violent vamps, at which point he’d be welcome to greet the sun ringless. Like

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Elena’s vampire birthmother said in “Isobel” (1-21), “I don’t want that life for [Elena].” If Stefan really loved her, he wouldn’t want it for her, either. It seems to me that Stefan is confused about his guilt. He constantly feels guilt for things that he either has no control over (his own desire for blood) or things that happened over a century in the past (accidentally killing his father and turning Damon). He uses his guilt as an emotional crutch to avoid facing the reality of the present—that he is every bit the monster Damon is. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, in creating a monster and allowing it to become a murderer, Stefan is the true monster. He manipulates others by using his false sense of nobility to elicit sympathy and justify pursuing his own twisted view of happiness. A view of happiness that just so happens to endanger the lives of everyone he professes to love and care about. Sorry, Stefan, you don’t deserve to be happy. You kinda suck. Good thing you have that chin to make up for it, right?

Ki e rs te n W h i t e lives with her family near the ocean, where her life is perfectly normal. This abundance of normal led her to a fascination with all things paranormal, including vampires, faeries, and pop culture. Visit her at kierstenwhite.com, and please don’t hate her for bashing Stefan. She still thinks he’s pretty.

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Case Notes: Salvatore, Stefan and Salvatore, Damon • Heidi R. Kling •

Family relationships can be complicated at the best of times, even with the most laid-back of relatives. To say the relationship between Damon and Stefan Salvatore is less than ideal would be somewhat of an understatement; after all, they’ve had decades longer than the rest of us to let resentment stew and to learn how to push each other’s buttons most effectively. Throw in the preternatural strength that allows them to escalate physical fights to throwing each other across the room rather than furniture, and most viewers have to wonder where the brothers would start trying to rebuild their relationship, if it’s even possible to do so. Heidi Kling puts herself in the position of a therapist watching the boys’ interaction over 117

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the course of the first season, exploring their rather unique and troubled relationship, and comes up with a few suggestions for keeping the peace between the Salvatores in the future.

Note: Since the subjects are fictional characters, rather than sit down with them separately or together, the therapist viewed twenty-two hours of tape footage (one “season”) depicting their interactions with one another and with others.

Stefan Salvatore Observations Appearance Stefan Salvatore is male, Caucasian, appearing to be about seventeen years old (younger than his stated age of 162). Stefan stands approximately 5’10”. With a coif of stiff “James Dean” hair, a black leather jacket, and expensive designer pants, he resembles a rebellious—albeit wealthy and wellgroomed—teenager from the 1950s. Other than an ornate ring he wears no jewelry. His build is athletic, with an emphasis on weightlifting; the thin black T-shirt he wears reveals clearly defined pectorals. Though Stefan is officially undead, he appears healthy.

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Mood, Affect, and Interpersonal Characteristics It is sometimes difficult to even remember Stefan is a vampire. He presents initially as the vampire version of the prototypical “nice guy”: the soft-spoken, quarterback boyfriend you can take home to Mom and Dad. His manners and eye contact are excellent, and he has high social intelligence, including an aptitude for discerning what others want from him. He works hard to please those he deems worthy, including girlfriend Elena Gilbert and the other human inhabitants of Mystic Falls. Stefan’s classic expression is the furrowed brow, head tilted slightly to indicate he is focusing on what others are saying (though at times I observed what appears to be a slightly condescending smirk when speaking to those younger or less knowledgeable than himself). Overall, Stefan appears to be emotionally healthy and well adjusted, with the notable exception of the weeks immediately following his ingestion of human blood at the end of hour seventeen (“Let the Right One In”). During this period, Stefan exhibits classic addictive behavior and uncontrolled mood swings, inappropriately shifting from state to state without appropriate stimuli. He presents as alternately suicidal (he refuses to eat, wishes he were dead) and homicidal (he stalks and drinks from a teen girl at the Miss Mystic Falls pageant). However, since there are no DSM1 criteria for the undead, determining an accurate diagnosis and course of 1 The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is used as the psychiatric standard for the classification of mental disorders.

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action is difficult. For a human being, typical treatment would include committing Stefan to a psychiatric hospital for detoxification and for the safety of himself and others; this is in effect what his brother, Damon Salvatore, and Elena do when they imprison him in the Salvatore basement. While Stefan continues to exhibit strong feelings of guilt once clean, his self-control and previous disposition seem to have returned to normal.

Analysis I believe that beneath Stefan’s even-keeled exterior is an underlying tension surrounding his preoccupation with control. His need to control his own behavior—in particular his thirst for blood—seems to extend to his relationship with others. Much of Stefan’s guilt appears to stem from his inability to control Damon’s negative behaviors, and Stefan’s actions toward Elena, particularly in withholding information, demonstrate a desire to control their interactions. At this time, it is difficult to tell whether his distaste for human blood originated from the ethical implications of the act of taking it or from the impact on his self-control. It is my observation that Stefan does not have a clear grasp on who he is. He knows who he wants to be—a hero, a “good guy,” in control—but though he works very hard to convince others that he is all these things, he does not appear able to convince himself. He exhibits a tendency toward overcompensation and perfectionism and has a difficult time forgiving himself for failing to live up to his own impossibly high standards.

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Damon Salvatore Observations Appearance Damon Salvatore is undeniably male, Caucasian, and like his brother appears younger than his stated age of nearly two centuries. Also like his brother, he is well groomed. He favors clothing that highlights his form; his height is comparable to his brother’s, and though he possesses a somewhat slimmer build, his appearance suggests a similar interest in physical exercise. Other than his classification as undead, he, too, appears to be in excellent health.

Mood, Affect, and Interpersonal Characteristics Damon presents as charming, magnetic, and attentive, quite aware of the reaction he gets from others. It is clear the other residents of Mystic Falls—as well as (in the interest of full disclosure) this therapist—respond to his presence and personality. But while Damon can be and frequently is charming, he also has great capacity for violence, both physical and emotional. He uses sarcasm, in addition to fists and fangs, as a weapon. Like his brother, Damon is adept at reading those around him and, also like his brother, uses that information to achieve his aims. However, while Stefan wants others to like him, Damon cares only about the opinions of a select few. Though he enjoys attention from others, he appears to

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receive no satisfaction or sense of self-worth from pleasing others. Damon is clearly the superior of the two in sense of self. He speaks and acts unapologetically, indicating confidence in and acceptance of who he is. Vampires have the ability to “turn off” their feelings, and initially it appears that Damon has done just this—we see him kill frequently and without remorse, though he appears motivated more by utility than pleasure (in the case of Vicki Donovan, his motivation may even have been pity). However, as his interactions with others in Mystic Falls have increased, his tendency to kill, except in defense of others, has decreased, and he has verbally claimed to again have “turned on” his ability to feel. Ascertaining whether this is true, or likely to continue, will require further observation.

Analysis During the course of these twenty-two hours we see Damon undergo significant positive transformation, but there is one characteristic that does remain constant: the impact those he cares about have on his self-image and behavior. Love is a strong motivating favor for Damon, and the majority of his actions are best understood within this framework. He is most likely to show his better qualities when acting on behalf of those toward whom he has a strong emotional attachment—his brother, Elena, Katherine—but his willingness to do anything for those individuals can bring out his most destructive qualities as well. And when betrayed, he can lash out viciously, driven by emotions.

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If those he cares for return his regard, however, he demonstrates great capacity for love and loyalty—and for change. His love for Katherine led to his transformation into a vampire (in addition to other noncharacteristic violent behaviors previous to the change itself), and his love for Elena appears to be the source of his newfound humanity. There is some concern, however, that—just as his interest in becoming a vampire dissipated once he believed Katherine dead— should Elena spurn him as Katherine did, his commitment to his humanity may fall by the wayside.

Relationship between Stefan and Damon Salvatore Observations All available information indicates that, before Katherine’s arrival, older brother Damon and younger brother Stefan had a typical fraternal bond: one marked by competitiveness but otherwise warm and supportive. Damon showed physical affection toward Stefan and teased him goodnaturedly, and Stefan, in defending his brother’s choice to opt out of combat, demonstrated a similar level of regard for Damon. The arrival of Katherine Pierce and the events that followed, in particular the events surrounding their transformation into vampires, appear to have altered their relationship. In the present day, their interactions are characterized by hostility but also by moments of concern and protectiveness—moments

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that increase in frequency as they spend time in each other’s company. At the start of the season, their relationship is clearly unhealthy and antagonistic. Damon enjoys tormenting Stefan in a fashion that is in part reflective of typical sibling relationships but that also appears to reflect a deeper well of negative feeling. As Damon explains, he promised Stefan an “eternity of misery” and is just “keeping his word” (hour one, “Pilot”). His infliction of that misery is not just verbal; Damon and Stefan’s conflicts frequently have physical repercussions, not only for them, but also for those around them. Some of those repercussions (for Vicki, for Mystic High history teacher William Tanner) have proved fatal. Stefan’s response is to ignore and avoid Damon whenever possible, which only appears to exacerbate Damon’s behavior. Stefan claims to hate his brother and seems to just want Damon to go away and leave him alone. But he later confesses to Elena that “I try so hard to hate him. I guess it’s just pointless” (hour twenty-two, “Founder’s Day”), and he is obviously reluctant to cause Damon permanent harm, even in service of preventing Damon from hurting others. And despite his own acts of aggression toward Stefan, Damon regularly defends Stefan against external threats. As he explained after saving Stefan’s life in hour six (“Lost Girls”), “If someone’s going to kill you it’s going to be me.” Damon also assists Elena in Stefan’s detoxification. Though this is likely as much for Elena’s sake as for Stefan’s, Damon notably ceases encouraging Stefan to consume human blood—one of his most frequent forms of taunting—after Stefan has recovered.

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Though the relationship between the two improves in strength and quality during these twenty-two hours, it still retains a sharp edge, particularly when it comes to Elena. As Damon’s feelings for her increase, Stefan’s behavior toward Damon becomes more and more aggressive. Stefan appears to be more anxious about and threatened by Damon’s positive intentions toward Elena than he was by Damon’s previous threats on Elena’s physical well-being.

Analysis If one were to point to the single greatest factor affecting the current state of Stefan and Damon’s relationship, it would be their interactions with Katherine. Before her appearance, their interactions appear to have been well within normal, healthy parameters—especially notable given that their father demonstrated a clear preference for Stefan and barely concealed disdain for Damon. As the elder Salvatore replied to Damon’s assertion that he never asked for his father’s respect, “Good for you, Damon. Because all I have is disappointment” (hour thirteen, “Children of the Damned”). This family dynamic was no doubt partly responsible for the competitiveness Katherine was able to use to her advantage, turning the two against each other. However, our relationships are shaped as much by our own choices as by those of others, and Katherine cannot shoulder the blame for the choices Stefan and Damon made. Stefan chose to consume his father’s blood, then kidnap a girl to coax Damon into drinking. Damon chose to kill her—and to

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not only blame but continually punish Stefan for Katherine’s capture and his own death and transformation. In the present day they continue to choose to treat each other badly. Each sees only the ways the other hurts and betrays him, not the ways the other supports and protects him. They choose to allow competition over Elena, like competition over Katherine, to drive them apart. Though the two are able to come together to defend themselves and those they care about against outside enemies, acting as brothers and even friends, the alliance dissolves once the threat has passed. They immediately return to blaming each other for their problems rather than taking responsibility for their own actions and working to make amends. Not just Stefan and Damon, but also those around them, tend to suffer from the fallout.

Recommendations One option to minimize the damage of their relationship is for Stefan and Damon to part ways, this time permanently. It could be that their shared past is burdened with so much pain, betrayal, harmful words, and manipulations that reconciliation or even respectful coexistence is impossible. However, I believe that their relationship can be saved. They clearly care for and desire a relationship with one another: Damon’s constant needling is an unambiguous attempt to attract and hold Stefan’s attention, and Stefan’s continuous cycle of hope and disappointment at Damon’s behavior is a clear indicator of his desire to regain the loving,

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trustworthy brother he feels he lost. Rebuilding their relationship won’t be easy, but while their past cannot be undone, it is in both their best interests to find a way past their differences and heal the rift between them. They are brothers, and undead ones at that. Why fight for an eternity if they don’t have to? The first step is to find a way to let go of blame and start taking responsibility for the role they each played in the events of 1864 and in the dissolution of their bond. Both boys have made mistakes, and both boys have betrayed and deeply wounded each other. The second step is to begin treating each other with respect. Damon is no longer killing to feed, which means (morality aside) that Stefan can no longer use that as an excuse to look down on or reject him. If Stefan can be forgiven for his behavior after consuming human blood, then Damon must be afforded the same consideration. Damon must stop using sarcasm as a defense mechanism and learn to be honest about what he wants from Stefan instead of using violence and insults to get his attention. Finally, they must not allow history to repeat itself: they must prevent their feelings for Elena, and Katherine’s return, from dividing them. Competition, especially when it comes to love, is their biggest weakness, but if they can remain faithful to one another, they may yet be able to change their future. Though Katherine’s return to Mystic Falls may provide another external enemy against whom Damon and Stefan must come together to defeat, they must learn that they need

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not always wait for the next enemy attack to lean on each other and to be brothers. They can forgive each other, move past their problems, and be on each other’s side no matter what is going on. Day-to-day problems can be just as challenging as a tomb of rabid vampires bent on revenge. Together, they have faced insurmountable odds. They have hurt one another, but they have also healed one another. How they proceed in this next chapter of their lives is up to them.

H ei di R . K l i ng is an author of books for teens and adults. Her debut novel, Sea, a romantic adventure story of hope after tragedy, takes place in the aftermath of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. Sea, a Summer 2010 IndieNext pick, is available at bookstores now. Kling earned an MFA in Writing from The New School, directed children’s theatre for years, and is an avid Vampire Diaries fan. Visit Heidi at heidirkling.com for touring information and up coming projects, and be sure to follow her on Twitter @heidirkling, where she hopes @iansomerhalder will one day tweet to her.

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Damon Salvatore: Vampire Hunter • Mary Borsellino •

Not since Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a TV series devoted so much screen time to those who hunt the creatures of the night. In this essay, Mary Borsellino explores the role of vampire hunters in The Vampire Diaries: how they are portrayed as neither heroes or villains, but as people who simply want to protect their homes and families from the vampires out to do them harm. Of course, you can’t talk about Mystic Falls’ vampire hunters without exploring the town’s most unlikely protector, Damon Salvatore, who’s out hunting his own kind—not on a path to redemption as Angel was in Buffy, but because it suits his need to do so and, as Damon himself would probably tell us, because he finds he actually enjoys it. 129

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V

ampires who kill other vampires have been a mainstay of mythology for almost as long as vampires themselves, but they’ve been enjoying a period of particular popularity in the last few decades. The modern world makes it hard to believe in noble, shining-armor heroes the way we might have, once upon a time. Things are too complicated and messy and there are too many compromises to be made. That shining armor tarnishes quickly. But a fallen hero, a savior with a dark side, is something we can understand and relate to. Even Buffy, who seemed at first to be the brightest and bubbliest of vampire killers, was more like a vampire’s mirror image than its foe by the time her show concluded: she’d come back from the dead—quite literally risen from the grave, like the title of one of Dracula’s better-known movies—and her superhuman strength was revealed to have come from the same demonic forces as that of the monsters she killed. These days, if you throw a stone at popular culture, you can hit a vampire who kills other vampires without even trying. In Japanese anime there’s the quiet schoolgirl Saya of Blood: the Last Vampire, the enigmatic wanderer D of Vampire Hunter D, or the cruel gangster Alucard of Hellsing. In America there are the charismatic, tortured title characters of the Blade films and TV shows such as Angel and Moonlight, to name just a few. Even Pete Wentz 130

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of the rock band Fall Out Boy played one for one of the band’s videos. And there’s Damon Salvatore, too. Damon’s not the only vampire of The Vampire Diaries to kill other vampires, but his killings aren’t split-second decisions of defense in the way Stefan’s killing of Vicki was or the sheer bloodthirstiness of Logan. For his own crafty and selfserving reasons, Damon throws in with the vampire hunters of Mystic Falls and becomes a vampire hunter himself, attending meetings of their secret council and engaging with their social world. Damon is a vampire who kills other vampires, but his approach to the whole business of undead homicide is rather different than that of earlier, similar figures in fiction. What may have once seemed like the ultimate hypocrisy—hunting and killing those who are most like yourself—becomes a total lack of hypocrisy: why should Damon treat vampires with any more regard than he treats humans? As he’s said himself, he’ll kill anyone, at any time, in any place. Whether that person is a human or a vampire doesn’t seem to enter into his consideration at all. The creepy thing about classifying Damon as a vampire hunter when everything he does is for his own agenda, his own ends, is that it’s hard to argue why the selfishness of his motives is in itself an argument against calling him by that title. The idea of vampires who kill other vampires has always been a complicated one, even if it’s become decidedly more so in recent years. Our modern understanding of the

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idea originated in southeastern Europe, where folklore included the figure of the dhampir. A dhampir is sometimes said to be the son of a vampire, a half-vampire, or even just a child unlucky enough to be born on a Saturday. The name literally translates as “drinking with teeth,” and the difference between a dhampir and a vampire is one largely of semantics. The one definitive trait a dhampir possesses, in addition to the usual vampire attributes, is that a dhampir is very, very good at killing vampires. In Bulgarian folklore, the same terms are used interchangeably to describe vampire offspring and vampire hunters. Part of the appeal of the dhampir figure seems to come from the idea of the vampire’s evil containing (quite literally) the seed of its own destruction. But with a few rare exceptions in modern pop culture, the idea of vampires having children has largely been discarded in favor of the idea of the full vampire who takes up a stake against its brethren. They are the heroes who are not inherently good, for whom virtue and bravery do not come easily. They fight against their own wicked natures as much as against any exterior enemy. Unless, of course, they’re Damon Salvatore, in which case they kill other vampires with the same self-serving reasoning that they do everything else. This isn’t the Clockwork Orange-style philosophical dilemma that Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Spike posed when his brain was surgically implanted with a chip that only allowed him to hurt evil creatures rather than the humans he previously liked to snack on. In the case of Spike, the question

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was whether goodness still “counts” when the person in question has no choice about it. Damon’s got free will in spades, and the decisions he chooses to make show him to be a breed apart from both the heroes and villains of vampire stories past: he chooses to be bad, or to be good, as it suits him at a given moment. He’s not playing for Team Dark Side or Light, he’s just playing for Team Damon. In the original Vampire Diaries book series—in which, as a human, Damon is an Italian nobleman in the Renaissance— he chooses to find a new calling as a vampire among the condottieri, the parties of mercenary soldiers who would fight for whomever could pay for them. Few backstories could make it plainer that this is a character for whom loyalty to others is a complication best abandoned, in case it starts interfering with his greater loyalty to himself. In the television show, Damon’s human past has become that of a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War, but his dedication to self-interest above allegiance remains: he is a deserter. The obvious reason behind Damon being a soldier for the Confederacy is that The Vampire Diaries takes place in Virginia. But within the history of vampires who kill other vampires, it ties Damon to another modern figure of the type: Jasper Whitlock of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. The Twilight novels exist within the universe of the Vampire Diaries TV show, though they’re not mentioned by name. Damon, after reading Caroline’s copy of one of the books, reacted scathingly toward them and lamented that the days of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles had passed. But even if it

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was for reasons of dismissal, bringing up the Twilight novels on the show invited audiences familiar with both to draw comparisons between them. Caroline wanted to know why Damon doesn’t sparkle in daylight, as the Twilight vampires do. He replied that it’s because he lives in the real world, where daylight makes vampires burn. But Damon, provided he has his lapis lazuli ring on, doesn’t burn in daylight. No matter how Damon might protest, the fact is that he has just as much in common with the Twilight vampires as he does with older, more traditional versions of vampire mythology. Twilight’s Jasper, like Damon, was a Confederate soldier during the American Civil War. After Jasper was turned into a vampire by Maria—who sounds like a dead ringer for Damon’s Katherine: “a tiny brunette with a soft and musical voice”—they proceeded to cut a bloody swathe through the vampire population of South America, killing any vampire they didn’t see a potential use for. By the time readers of the Twilight novels meet Jasper in the modern day, he’s gone “vegetarian,” killing only animals to slake his blood thirst. But even though he’s sworn not to kill people anymore, Jasper is still more than willing to train his friends and family in how to kill other vampires. Killing vampires, within the mythology of Twilight, is not nearly so terrible as killing people. Compare that to Interview with the Vampire, which is the first book in the Vampire Chronicles series that Damon misses so much. In Interview, the vampire Claudia is put to death by a coven of French vampires for what they see as the

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greatest crime possible: she tried to kill her own kind, in attempting to destroy the vampire who created her. The moral code of these vampires is the exact opposite of Jasper’s: they couldn’t care less how many thousands of humans Claudia has killed over her years as a vampire. The only death that she needs to be punished for is that of another vampire. And then, reading and commenting on both Jasper and Claudia’s stories, we’ve got Damon, who would almost without a doubt prefer that nobody try to punish him for any of the deaths he’s brought about, be they human or vampire casualties. Damon’s moral compass—and he does have one, with true north pointing squarely at his own best interests— isn’t that of either Anne Rice’s or Stephenie Meyer’s stories. Killing a human isn’t worse than killing a vampire, and killing a vampire isn’t worse than killing a human. Living or undead, if someone’s demise serves Damon’s purposes, or makes his life easier, then that’s all that’s important. He feels no allegiance to other vampires—as was made plain when he killed Stefan’s friend Lexi in order to trick the vampire hunters in Mystic Falls into thinking that he was one of them. But neither does he have a compassion for humankind that drives him to battle his vampire nature— and if anyone tries to suggest that he does, he’ll commit murder right in front of them just to prove the point. This refusal to swear allegiance to either species is not something that only came to be present in Damon after his death, either, which is arguably an important thing to keep in mind when considering what passes for ethics in the world

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of Damon Salvatore. Flashbacks set before his death showed him helping Katherine hunt people, up to and including kissing her when her mouth was slick with gore after feeding. If he was willing to be a human who helped vampires hunt humans, it’s not really very surprising that he’s happy to be a vampire who helps humans hunt vampires. Aside from self-preservation, the closest thing to a personal motive that Damon expressed prior to launching his Damon-the-Vampire-Hunter game was his reaction to discovering that Stefan was shot with wooden bullets. If anybody’s going to be killing Stefan, Damon declared, then it’s going to be him. In the world of The Vampire Diaries, love and hate are much stronger influences on a person’s actions than good and evil. Much later, when Damon was firmly entrenched within the vampire-hunting community, he assured Stefan that he still hated everybody—“I just love that they love me.” Damon’s sketchy motives aren’t really all that much murkier or more convoluted than those of the other vampire hunters in Mystic Falls. His “uncle” Zach grew vervain, the herb that counteracts vampire powers, and supplied it to the other hunters in town, despite knowing that Damon would kill him if Damon knew. But that doesn’t mean that Zach’s loyalty was ultimately to humanity and to the hunters: he also concealed Damon and Stefan’s true nature from his supposed allies, even when it was clear that Damon had no interest in being a “vegetarian” vampire while in town. Zach was no purer or more divinely driven in his actions as a hunter than Damon himself.

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What drives much of the drama in The Vampire Diaries is the concept of protecting those whom one considers to be family, and of enacting revenge against those who’ve done you harm. Historically, vampire hunters could be assumed to be acting out of piety and faith, defending the world from creatures born from evil. But the battle of good versus evil is, at best, a secondary consideration for all the sides of the fight in the Vampire Diaries; personal alliances and enemies are of far greater importance. With the show’s human vampire hunters, as with Damon, objective concepts of good and evil are trumped by subjective ideas of love and hate, both of which can act as driving forces. The modernday Johnathan Gilbert’s vampire hunter activities were driven by hatred, while Alaric Saltzman’s protective instincts are central to his character and choices—he is a schoolteacher as well as a vampire hunter. And yet John was also acting from attachment to Isobel and a desire to protect Elena; Alaric became a vampire hunter because he wanted revenge for his wife’s death. Each acts according to their own passions and their own nature, rather than an abstract notion of a “greater good.” Damon, with his selfserving motives, is a natural fit amongst the other vampire hunters of Mystic Falls. Vampire hunting in Mystic Falls isn’t centered around a defining objective doctrine, and so the vampire hunters there are more complicated and less morally righteous than the traditional incarnations of such figures. They are as much like the vampires they hunt as they are like the people they protect. Smudging the lines that separate the vampires from

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their hunters even further, Alaric and John both have (in John’s case, had) magical rings that allow them to return from the dead if killed. Alaric also reflects back on Damon’s character in another way. Damon and Alaric have similar heartbreaks in their histories: each believed that their lover was dead (or entombed), only to discover later that she was alive (albeit now a vampire, in the case of Alaric’s wife, Isobel) and had abandoned him. The show plays heavily with mirror-image and double characters—Katherine and Elena function as inversions of each other, Stefan and Damon likewise. Damon and Alaric make another such pair, with the differences in how they grieve similar losses, and their motivations in vampire hunting, putting them in contrast to one another. Yet the relationship of something approaching honesty and camaraderie they have developed suggests that their similarity of purpose—protecting the humans of Mystic Falls against the nonhuman threats—is stronger than their differences. Caroline Forbes’ mother, too, is a vampire hunter worthy of closer study, largely because she is so quick to trust Damon, and because, of all the members of the Founders Council, she’s the one he decides to manipulate most heavily. In some ways, Sheriff Forbes is the perfect foil to Damon when it comes to vampire hunting. Like him, she does not draw a distinction between vampires and humans when it comes to doing her duty—she polices them both. In a dark twist of the old saying that the cobbler’s children go barefoot, it’s Sheriff Forbes’ own daughter who is often

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under the greatest threat from vampires. One of the scenes that most strongly demonstrates the ways in which Damon is a dark parody of the sheriff’s good intentions occurred when the sheriff went to the Salvatore residence to discuss vampires with Damon. He escorted her outside, which would be beyond Stefan’s earshot if Stefan were human, and explained that he was trying to protect Stefan from the truth about vampires. The action was believable to the sheriff because she was employing the same tactic with her daughter: doing what she could to shield Caroline from the dark reality of the town. Ignorance was no kind of protection, though, as Caroline was constantly and violently preyed on by Damon. It was Stefan, seeking to attack Damon by proxy, who administered vervain to Caroline for the first time. If the sheriff had given the herb to Caroline from the start, rather than “protecting” her from the truth by concealing it from her, Caroline would have been safe from Damon’s predations. Damon, by pretending to follow the same plan as Sheriff Forbes and “protecting” Stefan, highlights the massive flaws he’s found in the hunters’ methods. Rather than point out this weakness to Sheriff Forbes, as an objectively “good” vampire hunter might do, Damon simply utilizes the weakness for his own benefit. Which brings us to the last way in which Damon’s role as a vampire who hunts vampires differs remarkably from older examples of the character type—typically, it’s a lonely role. Blade, Angel, Saya, and D, as diverse as they are as characters, all share a distance from those around them. To be a

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creature who kills its own kind is to be out of step with any community that may have embraced them: they can work with other hunters, but will always be a freak, a wolf among sheep, when they do that. And they don’t fit in with other vampires, because they’ve sworn themselves as the enemy of their own nature. But Damon’s sneaky ability to get in underneath Sheriff Forbes’ radar has given him the opportunity to be the rarest of all creatures, a vampire who hunts vampires and has a social life. In fact, his social life in Mystic Falls stems directly from the identity he’s built for himself as a member of the vampire-killing team. Damon’s relationships with Elena and Alaric are largely built on his acts of vampire hunting; in addition to its other uses, Damon’s role as hunter functions as a social networking tool. When Mrs. Lockwood challenged Sheriff Forbes to find a bachelor to auction off for charity, Sheriff Forbes turned around and recruited Damon for the role. Damon jokingly asked her if this was what she did when she wasn’t hunting vampires. Such a question could never be seriously asked of most vampire hunters in modern media, much less a vampire hunter who is also a vampire. Most recent stories of battles against evil teach that you cannot be the guardian of happiness and security and also have these things for yourself. Blade, Saya, Angel, D: their immortality means that happy endings are eternally out of their reach, and all of their stories end with them setting off to face another battle because all they have is the fight against the dark that they are actually a part of.

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This idea isn’t confined to the vampire genre: The Lord of the Rings ends the same way, with Frodo’s own chance at a happy life sacrificed so that others might have their own. This idea of sacrifice permeates deep into our modern concept of what it is to be the bearer of a burden. Unless you’re Damon Salvatore, of course, whose own magical ring lets him walk around in the sunshine, who wasn’t afraid to taste blood before he was a vampire, and who gets roped into bachelor auctions by his fellow vampire hunters. Damon may complain about Twilight playing fast and loose with vampire mythology, but he’s broken more genre tropes and mainstays in a few hours’ worth of television than most other fictional characters manage in their entire existences. He’s a vampire who kills other vampires, but what that means is no longer as simple and as easy to define as it was before. These days, it pretty much just means whatever Damon wants it to mean at a given moment. Damon’s role as a vampire hunter has become such an undeniable facet of his character that others—even those like Alaric who know what he is—treat him as a trusted ally against potential vampiric threats. Damon’s not just playing at being a vampire hunter; this is something that he actually is. It just happens that through being a vampire hunter, Damon has completely rewritten the definition of what being a vampire hunter means. And seeing how the wider mythology of vampires who kill vampires manages to evolve after Damon’s done screwing with conventions will make for fascinating viewing indeed.

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M a r y B o rs el l i n o’s Wolf House novels were described by Melbourne’s Age newspaper as “rock ’n‘ roll, sex, tattoos, feminism, bisexuality, and a sense of what teens really are about,” which fails to mention the kitten named Bikini Kill or the vampires. Still, you can’t fit everything in a pull quote, I suppose. Check her out at maryborsellino.com.

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Sweet Caroline • Jennifer Lynn Barnes •

Being bitchy doesn’t make you a bitch, just as wanting to be loved doesn’t make you selfish or shallow—it just makes you a human being. Jennifer Lynn Barnes perfectly encompasses what makes Caroline Forbes the most heartbreakingly human character on The Vampire Diaries—no matter what everyone else in Mystic Falls says about her.

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’ve prepared a speech about Caroline Forbes. Please don’t interrupt me, because I have a lot to say on the matter, and I really want to get this right. By this point, you may already be wondering why I would choose to write about Caroline when there are brooding vampires and butt-kicking heroines to be discussed and a dark and twisty Damon Salvatore to be pondered, adored, and dissected. The answer is simple: in a world of vampires, witches, and tragically beautiful girls who never asked to be loved nearly so well as they are, Caroline is an exception to nearly every rule—even the ones she tries desperately to follow. Tactless, shallow, materialistic, and quick to judge, our Miss Forbes is the latest in a long line of loveable TV bitcas, heir to the throne of One Tree Hill’s Brooke Davis, Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Cordelia Chase. But this Mystic Falls mean girl is a new brand of power princess: overeager, self-aware, and—unlike her predecessors—far from the top of the food chain (in more ways than one). More than any other character on the show, Caroline is defined by what she wants and cannot have. Even Damon occasionally swerved from his single-minded pursuit of Katherine, but throughout the first season, Caroline never stopped wanting simple, everyday things: to be special, to be loved, to be seen and not found wanting. By her own tearful

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admission, she works so hard, and no matter what she does or who she does it with, she’s never number one. She volunteers at school and in the community, dresses for success, puts a smile on her face when she feels like crying, and still, no one notices. No one cares. Caroline has appeared in nearly every episode of the show, but it’s as easy for the audience to overlook or dismiss her as it is for her family and friends. After all, what’s the everyday drama of wanting to be liked compared to the life or death stakes of love with a vampire? Who really cares about Caroline’s relationship with Matt when Damon is making pithy one-liners about keeping soccer moms in the fridge? I love Caroline. I’m writing an essay about her, and even I had to look up her last name online. It would be easy to dismiss her as a bit of a witch—and not the kind who can cast spells that unlock ancient tombs—but Caroline wants so badly to be something or someone more than that, and I would argue that of all of the characters on the show, she’s the one who truly exemplifies the high school experience. As much as the rest of us might like to be the Chosen One, smart and savvy and beautiful and good, the kind of girl who other people just can’t help but love, most of us aren’t Elena. We don’t have a Stefan—let alone a Damon, too. We’re just people who want to love and be loved and feel like if we disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, someone would care. From her stint as Damon’s chew toy to her third-wheel friendship with Bonnie and Elena and her

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heartbreakingly sincere (and almost definitely ill-fated) relationship with Matt, Caroline is the embodiment of this very human desire. In the next few pages, we’ll dive into the shallow end of the kiddie pool and explore the idea of Caroline as the ultimate in-style outsider—and the true comingof-age story in a world where everyone else seems to discover very quickly who they are and where (and with whom) they belong.

The Anti-Elena Once upon a time, there were two girls: one light-haired, one dark, both from Founding Families—lifelong friends with the same taste in boys. One was brave and kind and apt to sitting in cemeteries, writing in her diary and thinking Deep Thoughts, and the other was . . . not. From the very first episode, Elena and Caroline were set up as yin and yang—if yin got absolutely all of the good qualities and yang got all of the flaws. Elena’s first voice-over made it abundantly clear that she was a girl with real problems: she was tragic, she was deep, and she could not seem to care about all of the stupid little things that used to matter to her. Enter Caroline, bright-eyed and chipper, who dispensed sound-bite sympathy and flounced off to do each and every one of the things that Elena had outgrown. Thrown together their entire lives, the two often seem more like siblings than friends, and by the end of the first episode, it was clear that they were polar opposites in almost every conceivable way,

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not the least of which was their attitude toward romance and the opposite sex. When the Salvatore brothers first returned to Mystic Falls, Elena wasn’t looking for love. Caroline, in contrast, started planning a June wedding the moment she set eyes on Stefan. Unfortunately, her future Mr. Caroline Forbes proved to be the kind of guy who went for the doe-eyed, cemetery-sitting type, not perky, overeager blondes. Long before Stefan met Caroline—or even Elena—he was so enthralled with the latter that perky, overeager Caroline Forbes never stood a chance. Stefan didn’t even bother to let her down gently and instead declared his permanent and irrevocable disinterest in anything Caroline had to offer romantically. Ever. Another tactless mean girl might have lashed out—think Cordy and Xander, circa season three of Buffy, or Blair Waldorf putting down a popularity coup—but Caroline didn’t get mad. She didn’t get even. She got drunk and sad and painfully honest about the fact that no matter how hard she tries, she’s always the loser, and Elena always, always wins. Despite the popular girl façade, Caroline was and is the underdog in what appears to be a zero-sum game, and she knows it. While Caroline’s assertion that of course life is one giant round of Caroline/Elena competition after another may seem like the melodramatic declaration of a middle sister, forever orbiting around her older sister’s sun, there is some reason to think that Caroline might actually be right. It appears to be a law of The Vampire Diaries universe that Caroline and Elena

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can never be happy at the same time. While Elena was falling in love with a vampire with a conscience, Caroline was playing the blood bag for a guy who treated her like beef jerky, played with her mind (literally), and gave voice to every single one of her fears about being nothing and no one and just plain not good enough. In Caroline and Elena’s three-way friendship with Bonnie, Caroline was continually the third wheel—right up until the point where Bonnie and Elena had a falling out and Caroline suddenly became Bonnie’s Elenareplacement. In the season one finale, Elena managed to save those dearest to her—and Caroline ended up on the operating table with an uncertain prognosis for the future. Perhaps most convincingly, the only episode in season one in which Caroline actually did manage to obtain something that hovered just out of her reach—the Miss Mystic Falls title—was the exact same episode in which Elena began to lose the things that mattered most to her, starting with her relationship with Stefan and Jeremy’s trust. Elena’s losses are always Caroline’s gains, even when the two aren’t actually competing against each other. Given that Elena is the protagonist, that her heart is always in the right place, and that she always seems to find the strength to do what needs to be done, that doesn’t leave much for Caroline—and the true tragedy here is that Caroline knows it. She knows Elena is nicer. She knows Elena is smarter, and on the off chance that she didn’t, there’s always someone waiting in the wings to tell her—just like there’s always someone waiting to tell us, as the audience, that Caroline is . . . well . . . Caroline.

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But take a step back for a moment and really look at these two characters. When the two of them went out on a double date (in “There Goes the Neighborhood,” 1-16), which one of them cozied up to the other one’s honey? Which one of them knew that the other one was being mind-raped by a vampire and went for weeks without handing over some vervain? Which one of them then proceeded to have no problems seeing the good in a guy who abused, demeaned, and ate her friend? Which one consistently dismissed the other— and the things that were important to her—with a roll of her eyes? From the very beginning of the show, we as the audience were told that Caroline was one of those girls. She’s shallow and she’s cutthroat and she’s fake, and yet, if you actually look at Caroline’s actions in the first season, she’s been a far better friend to Elena than Elena has been to her. In the second episode of the season, Caroline bounced back from pining after Stefan to giving Elena advice on how to make her relationship with him work—a far cry from the way most high school queen bees would have reacted upon having lost a guy to their best friend. In “Isobel” (1-21), when Elena and Bonnie were fighting, Caroline encouraged the two of them to make up, even though five episodes earlier (in “There Goes the Neighborhood,” 1-16), she had admitted to being painfully aware that she was the third wheel in their friendship. A real mean girl would have taken the opportunity to divide and conquer, but Caroline wanted her friends to make up, even though she had to have known that the second they did so, she’d be left out in the cold.

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Again. Despite the fact that everyone—even her own boyfriend— has made comments about Caroline being mean, shallow, and a bit of a bitch, and despite the fact that Caroline seems to believe these things about herself, I really think this is a case where the devil is in the details. Caroline can be bitchy. She can be defensive. She consistently talks without thinking about how her words will sound. But she’s also the kind of girl who put herself in the line of fire by stepping between a friend and his abusive father, the kind who refused medical treatment until her friends had been taken care of, even when doing so may have cost her her life. Caroline may be Elena’s opposite in almost every conceivable way, but that doesn’t make her a villain. Instead, I would suggest that Caroline Forbes is a beast much rarer than a vampire or witch: she’s a mean girl who isn’t actually all that mean, and that leaves her in a kind of teenage limbo, unsure who or what she’s supposed to be or how to make people— including her own family—love her the way everyone loves Elena.

Family Matters The Vampire Diaries is a show in which family matters: the entire premise revolves around Damon and Stefan being brothers; Elena’s connection first to Katherine and later to Isobel propelled season one’s dominant story arcs; Bonnie’s character went through a witchy (and sometimes bitchy)

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metamorphosis almost entirely because of her grandmother’s death; and even minor characters, like Tyler and Matt, struggled with abusive and absent parents, respectively. Given just how central family is to the show, it’s not surprising that Caroline’s second most defining relationship—after her near-sibling rivalry with Elena—is the one she shares with her mother. From the first time we saw Caroline and her mother interact, it was obvious that there was nothing the least bit Gilmore Girls about their relationship. In contrast to Elena—the archetypal tragic orphan, who had a wonderful mother and lost her—Caroline has a mother who is very much alive, only occasionally present, and continually bewildered by and disappointed in her socialite of a daughter. In the first season, Damon got more screentime with Sheriff Forbes than Caroline did, and the chances of the Forbes women bonding over vampire hunting in the near future are slim to none—in part because the sheriff would never consider flighty little Caroline capable of standing against the dark side, and in part because the last thing Caroline wants to do is follow in her mother’s footsteps, whatever those footsteps may be. If Caroline spent the first season desperately wanting to be as (fill-in-the-blank) as Elena, she also demonstrated an equally strong desire not to turn into her mother, a lonely, dateless single mother, forever on the outside of the In Group. While Caroline didn’t give voice to this fear until she explained why the Miss Mystic Falls pageant meant so much to her and how her mother was the only female in

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their family not to win it, the chasm that separated mother and daughter—and their inability to understand each other—was clear much earlier on. When we were first introduced to Sheriff Forbes in the aptly named “Family Ties” (1-4), it was clear that she and Caroline had a somewhat strained relationship, and it wasn’t until “You’re Undead to Me” that the sheriff momentarily shifted her focus from the town council to her own daughter—a welcome change given that, by this point, Caroline had already been attacked, bitten, compelled, and belittled by a much older vampire right under the good sheriff’s nose. But when the elder Forbes asked Caroline if she was having boy troubles, the latter immediately shut down her mother’s tentative overtures with what was quite possibly her truly bitchiest moment of the entire first season, saying, “If I want to talk about boys, I’ll call Dad. At least he’s successfully dating one.” As blunt as she is, Caroline rarely says things with the explicit intention of hurting someone else, but she routinely makes an exception for her mother, who is single, alone, and does not appear to have a real friend in town. Caroline wants so much to be noticed, and every time she looks at her mother, she sees her greatest fears for her own future—a fear that was realized, in part, when Caroline introduced herself to Matt’s mom and was dismissed for being, among other things, her socially inept mother’s daughter. For her part, Sheriff Forbes seems to view her daughter with the same eye-rolling condescension that Caroline gets

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from the vampires, her friends, and Matt. On Career Day, when Caroline proudly declared an interest in broadcast journalism, she was immediately shut down by her mother’s incredulous and dismissive reply, and yet, the moment the words were out of the sheriff’s mouth, you could see her wishing that she’d thought about the way they would sound before she’d said them. It was a Caroline moment for Caroline’s mother and the impetus for Caroline climbing into the car of yet another vampire, out for her blood. Much like her rivalry with Elena, Caroline’s relationship with her mother marks her as the “normal” teen on the show, the one who struggles with hating and loving, disappointing and being disappointed by her mom. These conflicting desires—promising herself she won’t turn into her mother while secretly wishing her mom would be proud of the person she is—are quintessentially teen. While Caroline’s mom-drama may not be as shocking or sensational as the twists and turns of Elena’s extended family tree, it’s real in a way that vampire birth-moms and doppelgänger ancestors are not. Caroline wants to believe that she won’t grow up to be the kind of woman who men can abandon, and she wants, just for once, to be something other than a disappointment to the woman her dad left behind. To return to the Elena comparison, Caroline wants what Elena had with her mother—and deep down, she already knows that she’s never going to get it, just like there is a part of her that believes she will never find a fairy-tale kind of romantic love.

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Unlucky in Love On the surface, Caroline has a very straightforward approach to romantic love: “Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Sex!” (“Night of the Comet,” 1-2). At the show’s start, Elena’s the one who doesn’t take sex lightly and Caroline is the . . . well . . . you know. Let’s put it this way: it was always clear that there was never going to be a Very Special Caroline Loses Her Virginity episode; whereas Elena, like the Joey Potters, Marissa Coopers, and Buffy Summers before her, got the full heroine treatment in between the sheets. Whether or not Stefan was Elena’s first, their first time together was a momentous occasion—the kind of momentous that girls like Caroline just don’t get. But despite Caroline’s seemingly blasé attitude toward getting frisky with the opposite sex and her willingness to “drink until someone is hot enough to make out with” (“162 Candles”), it’s clear that the issues and insecurity that Caroline has with her mother and her friends follow her into every romantic relationship she’s had on the show thus far. She wants someone to love her. She wants to be the kind of girl who someone could love, and over and over again, she’s been told in little ways and in big ones that she just isn’t that girl. Period. For Caroline, Damon was a way of one-upping Elena, but almost immediately, she began to search for assurances in their “relationship” that Damon wasn’t willing to give. She came to him wanting to feel special and left feeling like nothing. Damon didn’t just use her. He didn’t just bite her

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and feed off her and tell her, in a psychotically gentle way, that he was going to kill her. He put her down in a thousand little ways that had nothing to do with him being a vampire, or her being a chess piece on his metaphorical board, and long after Caroline had stopped wearing scarves and started wearing vervain, those things stuck with her. He told her she was stupid. He said she talked too much. He called her shallow and useless. To Damon, Caroline might never have been anything more than a ploy, but to Caroline, Damon was the voice in her ear, telling her over and over again that she would never be worth a moment of anyone’s time. Arguably the most perceptive person on the show, Damon knows what to say and do to get under someone’s skin, and unlike Elena, Caroline didn’t get the chance to be strong. She couldn’t look him in the eyes and slap his face, and she couldn’t weather every blow he dished out with beauty and grace. Caroline doesn’t get to be the strong female protagonist because that role is already taken. After everything she’d suffered at Damon’s hands, all Caroline could do was feel smaller and smaller and want someone to love her more and more, while Damon went about his business growing a soul for Elena. And then there was Matt. Despite being the “nice guy” on the show, Matt initially conformed to the general expectation of interactions with Caroline—namely, that being dismissive and kind of a douchebag is completely legit, so long as Caroline Forbes is the girl on the receiving end of said douchebaggery.

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Within twenty-four hours of their first couple-y moment (in “162 Candles”), Matt had told Caroline that being deep wasn’t her strong suit, snuck out of her bed in the middle of the night without saying good-bye, and accused her of making a “lame girl move” when all she wanted was an acknowledgement that something had happened between them and that she wasn’t the kind of girl who even a nice guy like Matt could hook up with and brush off (“History Repeating,” 1-9). When Matt finally did come to apologize, he prefaced it by making one thing clear, telling her that he most emphatically didn’t like her, and he never had. With romantic confessions like this one, is it any wonder that Caroline has an inferiority complex? Despite their rocky beginnings, Caroline’s relationship with Matt evolved into something steadier, and though even Isobel could tell, after five minutes of talking to Caroline, that the relationship was headed nowhere, Caroline’s relationship with Matt marked a significant turning point in the Vampire Diaries canon: it was the first time that any of the major characters had an on-screen romantic relationship wherein both parties were fully human and stayed that way. In a sea of vampires, witches, ring-wearing vampire hunters, and whatever Tyler is (the good money here is on “werewolf”), that Caroline managed to have a fully human relationship for more than half a season is remarkable and underscores that, shallow or not, one of those girls or not, Caroline is the voice of normality in the show: the one with ordinary relationships and ordinary traumas and a very human desire to connect with another person and really matter.

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Taken together, Caroline’s relationships with Elena and Bonnie, her mother, and the men in her life all show a consistent image that suggests that the kiddie pool might not be so shallow after all. Caroline is a mean girl who isn’t mean, a shallow girl who wants things so deeply it hurts, and the voice on the show of every girl who’s been treated badly, dismissed, or told a million times over that she’s just not good enough—for a boy, for her friends, for her parents, or any or all of the above. So cut Caroline some slack—because if she doesn’t wake up at the beginning of season two, you’re going to miss her.

J e n n i f e r Ly n n B a r n es is the author of seven books for young adults, including Tattoo, Fate, the Squad series, and Raised By Wolves, a paranormal adventure about a human girl raised by werewolves. Jen graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a degree in cognitive science and Cambridge University in 2007 with a master’s in psychiatry. She’s currently hard at work on a PhD.

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Dear Diary . . . • Karen Mahoney •

The show is titled The Vampire Diaries, so it’s no wonder that the humble diary should be the subject of an essay of its own. While the diary entry voice-overs may have been short-lived, journals have been the key to many of the first season’s major events. Karen Mahoney delves into the use of diaries within the series as tools of narration and as a method of connecting the past and present within the story itself.

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h, diaries . . . repositories for our innermost thoughts and most private dreams. In literature throughout the ages, diaries have allowed us to get closer than ever to characters we seek to know better. A sneaky peek at someone’s journal equals a window right into his or her heart and soul; dark secrets are often revealed. We love the confessional aspect— especially, it seems, when it includes teen angst and tales of paranormal love. But a diary is a written format. Sure, journal entries have been a common storytelling device used in fiction throughout the years, but on TV? How does that translate? Putting aside the original books written by L.J. Smith, how exactly does a TV show like The Vampire Diaries bring a character’s diary successfully to the screen and make it (a) work within the confines of a visual medium and (b) retain relevancy to the ongoing story lines? The answer, at least to the first part of that question, lies in the extensive use of voice-overs. I don’t think I can be blamed for going into the first episode assuming that the focal point for viewers would be our heroine, Elena Gilbert. She is the viewpoint character; the bereaved seventeen-year-old girl that the audience must empathize with and relate to as the story progresses. After all, a lot of the prepublicity for the show focused on similarities between the Twilight franchise and The Vampire Diaries. Just as Bella is at the center

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of Twilight, so we might reasonably expect to see Elena at the center of this new TV show, one that would most likely appeal to large numbers of female teens and young adults. Yet despite this, it was Stefan Salvatore, her vampire boyfriend-to-be, whose voice-over actually opened the pilot episode—he also keeps a journal: Stefan: For over a century, I have lived in secret. Hiding in the shadows. Alone in the world. Until now. I am a vampire—and this is my story.

Wait a minute . . . It’s Stefan’s story? When I first saw the pilot I had to rewind and hear that again: a teen vampire drama that, traditionally, would place the greatest emphasis on the teenage main character (i.e., Elena), instead challenged that very notion by putting another person’s thoughts and feelings up front and center alongside hers. Viewers were immediately alerted to the fact that this TV show wouldn’t follow preconceived notions of traditional storytelling. The Vampire Diaries is as much Stefan’s story as it is Elena’s and, as the series develops, we learn that many more characters find their voices through the use of journal entries. The journals these entries are from aren’t only kept by modern people. Often they are the voices of history, as long-dead characters rise up to give their take on the crucial events of 145 years ago, and The Vampire Diaries is their story, too. The impact of the past on the present is seen over and over again throughout the show, not only through Stefan and Damon’s

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relationship with Katherine—and then how it plays out with Elena in the present—but also in the importance of journals. In fact, on The Vampire Diaries, it sometimes seems as though everyone is keeping a journal at one time or another. Even mild-mannered Alaric Saltzman keeps a journal. His is less old-fashioned, however, as he writes it on a computer— which seems sort of perfect for a modern-day vampire slayer who teaches history by day and kills vampires with the help of vervain-infused darts by night. But our early and perhaps most comforting sight is of Elena as she sits in her favorite journal-writing spot—the window seat in her bedroom—scribbling in the green diary that played such a prominent role in the pilot episode: “Dear Diary,” she wrote/said, “today will be different.” Little did Elena know just how different her day—and her life—would be from that moment on. With Stefan’s portentous voice-over ringing in our ears (“I must know her”), we were assured that Elena’s fate was sealed. And what was the very thing that brought her and Stefan together? The thing that truly connected them? Why, their shared love of keeping a diary, of course. When Elena ran from the cemetery after being terrorized by spooky shenanigans, she left behind her treasured diary. Of course it was Stefan who returned it to her. And of course, “Stefan the Good” didn’t even sneak the tiniest peek at his future girlfriend’s inner thoughts. Stefan: Don’t worry, I didn’t read it. Elena: No? Why not? Most people would’ve.

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Stefan: Well, I wouldn’t want anyone to read mine. Elena: (in a voice that means this is Very Significant): You keep a journal? Stefan: Yeah, if I don’t write it down I . . . forget it. Memories are too important. Elena: (giving Stefan the Eyes of Love): Yeah . . . (“Pilot,” 1-1)

Contrast Stefan’s behavior with Damon Salvatore’s when he found and read his brother’s journal, mocking him in classic Damon style: “Very Emerson, the way you reveal your soul with so many adjectives” (“Friday Night Bites,” 1-3). The mention of Ralph Waldo Emerson was surely not accidental; he was an eminent American essayist and philosopher, especially notable for his antislavery stance during the Civil War—a war that plays an important role in the Salvatore brothers’ early lives together. Talking of history, there’s a literary precedent for keeping journals, especially within the supernatural genres and even more especially when it comes to vampires. In the original “Bit Lit” novel, Dracula, Mina Murray (later Harker) keeps a diary that helps move the action along while shining a light on her heartfelt hopes and fears for the safety of her fiancé (and later husband), Jonathan Harker. I can’t help but find it interesting that The Vampire Diaries presents to us another “Jonathan” fighting the good fight against the fanged threat to humanity. But we’ll get to Johnathan Gilbert, Elena’s historical ancestor, later.

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In fact, with Dracula, Bram Stoker revived the popularity and fortunes of the epistolary novel1—and he did it in some style. Novels written in the medium of letters were quite common by the mid-eighteenth century, having risen in popularity from the mid-seventeenth century onward. Samuel Richardson met with particular success when he published Pamela in 1740, about a fifteen-year-old maid whose rich master becomes infatuated with her and— Bluebeard-style—locks her up in one of his houses in an attempt to seduce her. However, it seems that critics were also waiting in the wings to mock this stylistic choice, with Henry Fielding writing an epistolary parody just the following year: Shamela (1741).2 By the late eighteenth century, the epistolary novel had fallen out of favor. Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker produced his literary—and epistolary— masterpiece and proved that there was (if you’ll pardon the pun) life in the format yet. The Vampire Diaries seems to take a leaf out of Dracula’s book by having many different characters keep journals. In Stoker’s work of Gothic horror we have Jonathan Harker’s

1 An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings, and other docu ments are sometimes used. 2

Wikipedia’s entry for Fielding’s wicked satire makes me smile, especially when thinking about Elena Gilbert’s journal writing: it describes Shamela’s female narrator as regularly “wielding a pen and scribbling her diary entries under the most dramatic and unlikely of circumstances.”

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Journal, Dr. Seward’s Diary, Mina Murray’s Journal (later Mina Harker’s Journal), and Lucy Westenra’s Diary. Not to mention all the other forms of documentation (telegrams, a ship’s log, and various newspaper clippings) that appear throughout the story. In her entry for July 26, Mina reveals her motivations for keeping a journal in the first place: I am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here; it is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.

Not wishing to be left out, Mina’s best friend, Lucy, wants to try some journaling of her own—all the cool kids are doing it, after all: Hillingham, 24 August—I must imitate Mina, and keep writing things down.

As Lucy spends much of the novel trying to emulate the high example of her good friend, it seems only right that this should extend to keeping a diary. Perhaps she even learns what Mina already knows: writing down your deepest hopes and fears can be good for the soul. You can take the time to figure things out and work through mysterious truths. It is— dare I say it—therapeutic. On TV, The Vampire Diaries had an earlier precedent where journal-writing characters are concerned in the

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paranormal series Roswell, also based on a series of Young Adult books—Roswell High. The show ran for three seasons,3 and throughout the entire run we were treated to main character Liz Parker’s inner thoughts and angst-filled longing for hot alien boy Max in her diary entries. The voice-over worked well to introduce viewers to the residents of the small town of Roswell, New Mexico, and it helped encourage audience identification with sensitive, likeable Liz. However, whereas the Roswell TV series introduced the diary voice-over as an original element, The Vampire Diaries necessarily retains the journaling device between the books and the TV show. I say “necessarily” because, when something is called The Vampire Diaries, there really does need to be a significant emphasis on the journal element. With Roswell, I always found myself wondering exactly why we needed to see Liz scribbling in her diary. Couldn’t her thoughts and feelings be communicated in other ways? Perhaps through her intense conversations with feisty best friend Maria, or during the many soulful heart-to-hearts with Max. Still, diaries can be a powerful way of playing with format and enhancing a story—even in a visual format—like in The Vampire Diaries when by the start of episode two Elena and Stefan’s voice-overs intertwined to give them jointly narrated lines. This served to cement their growing connection: Roswell aired on the CW’s antecedent, the WB—an interesting, if not necessarily significant, correlation.

3

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Elena: Dear diary, this morning is different. There’s change. I can sense it, feel it. Stefan: I’m awake. For the first time, in a long time, I feel completely and undeniably wide awake. Elena: For once, I don’t regret the day before it begins. Stefan: I welcome the day. Elena & Stefan: Because I know . . . Stefan: I will see her again. Elena: I will see him again. For the first time, in a long time, I feel good. (“Night of the Comet,” 1-2)

Later on, at the very end of the episode, we learned that it was Elena’s mother who gave Elena her first journal and started her on the writing path. She arrived at Stefan’s house and they watched the comet together as Elena confessed: I got home tonight, planning on doing what I always do: write my diary, like I have been since my mom gave me one when I was ten. Where I get everything out, everything I’m feeling. It all goes in this little book that I hide on the second shelf behind this really hideous ceramic mermaid. And then I realized that I’d just be writing things that I should probably be telling you. (“Night of the Comet,” 1-2)

It was at this point that Elena proceeded to tell Stefan what she would’ve written in her journal about how she was feeling about him: her hopes and fears. Mostly fears. Stefan quickly countered with what he would write about his feelings, having met her. (Elena’s version of what she’d write

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down was long and angst-filled. Stefan’s? Rather surprisingly, not so much: “I met a girl. We talked. It was epic.”) It was truly a game-changing conversation, and not only because it ended with their first kiss; here were two damaged and guarded individuals, coming together and opening themselves up to each other for the very first time. They were both admitting that writing in a diary can sometimes—not always, but sometimes—be a safe way of expressing the things that we’re too afraid to voice. Really voice. As in, out loud. And putting those words down on paper is an alternative that appeals to the romantic poet hidden in the heart and soul of many a fictional character. The characters of The Vampire Diaries are no exception. The Gilberts, we learn, are a family of writers, not least of whom is Johnathan Gilbert, the Civil War ancestor whose journal everyone wanted to get their hands on by the middle of the season. Jeremy Gilbert was the first person to find it (thanks to Aunt Jenna), and after reading it he lent it to Alaric Saltzman. Anna stole the journal from Alaric. Stefan and Elena got a photocopy of it from Alaric. Damon took it from Anna. Really, it’s a very popular diary, and its appearance marked a change in the way the “diaries” element of The Vampire Diaries was presented. We saw far less of Elena and Stefan scribbling furtively in their journals and a lot more running around searching for an actual artifact. The secret life of diary writers had been uncovered and brought out into the open, which perfectly mirrored the uncovering of truths between the show’s main characters—especially our star-crossed lovers.

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Finding diaries and unearthing their secrets is another storytelling device used to great effect in The Vampire Diaries. Just as young wizard Harry in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets finds himself in the possession of Tom Riddle’s diary, so young Jeremy Gilbert discovered his ancestor’s journal—with consequences that reverberated throughout the rest of the first season. Jeremy, like Harry, is “in training” for something, maybe even for something greater than he fully realizes. Until he fell for Anna, he seemed destined to take up the vampirehunting mantle, just like his uncle and the other members of the town’s Founding Families had before him. It was Alaric, aware of Jeremy’s family history, who gave Jeremy an extra-credit assignment, a paper on the history of Mystic Falls, that lead to his discovery (“History Repeating,” 1-9). Jeremy rummaged through the box of Gilbert heirlooms and found a journal that dated back to 1864—the year that Stefan and Damon were turned into vampires. When he read from Johnathan Gilbert’s journal, the viewer was introduced to a new kind of voice-over, one that often led into flashbacks that presented the viewer with a crucial glimpse into the history of the Salvatore brothers: I live in fear. It consumes me. In the early evening, when I see the sun begin to fade, the fear comes because I know that the night brings death. (“The Turning Point,” 1-10)

In fact, we later learned that all of the Founding Families kept journals so that they could be passed down through their family line in order to help keep Mystic Falls safe from the

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undead threat. In “The Turning Point,” Logan Fell told Damon that the Founding Families passed these journals onto their children, describing vampire lore and the secret activities of the Founders Council that was formed to oppose them. When Anna started hanging around with Jeremy, determined to help him with his history paper on the “vampires” of Mystic Falls, the audience was suspicious of her motives (“Bloodlines,” 1-11). We felt the same way when Alaric borrowed the journal from Jeremy. It was supposedly just to get his history teacher’s geek on, but we knew otherwise. By then we had figured out that Johnathan Gilbert’s journal must have held something far more significant—and potentially more deadly—than simple stories of things that go bump in the night. This was confirmed when Stefan caught Damon searching for their father Giuseppe Salvatore’s journal; he wanted to find any information he could about his lost love Katherine, the tomb she was trapped in, and how to open it (“Unpleasantville,” 1-12). Together, the Salvatore brothers learned that the location of Emily Bennett’s grimoire was actually revealed in Johnathan Gilbert’s journal—the one that Alaric then had in his possession. The one that Anna was so desperate to get hold of. And so, the race was on: who would get to the journal first? Whoever won would ultimately be in possession of the knowledge that could free Katherine and the other tomb vampires. Not only was this a powerful example of how dangerous a diary’s secrets can be, but we were also made aware of how closely linked the past and the present truly are.

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The Vampire Diaries went relatively quiet on the issue of journals after the events of “Children of the Damned” (1-13), where Emily’s grimoire was finally retrieved. That is, until “Under Control” (1-18), when Jeremy, suspicious of his sister’s attempts to placate him after Vicki Donovan’s body was dug up, read Elena’s diary and learned the truth about Vicki’s death and how his memory was erased by Damon. In between, we were left without the familiar framing device of Elena’s and Stefan’s thoughts, and also without the search for the historical Gilbert journal. It was only a gap of four episodes, and yet as a viewer I found it quite significant. There is often just as much power in silence as there can be in words. So what did the “silence” of these journal-free episodes say? For me, it was like the calm before the storm: a way of subtly preparing us for a Big Reveal of some kind. There was a buildup of energy, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in episode seventeen, “Let the Right One In,” the storm broke—literally—and rain poured down on the inhabitants of Mystic Falls. Stefan was captured and tortured by the tomb vampires; Elena fed him her blood in order to save him; Caroline found Vicki’s buried remains after her car broke down in the storm. All the pieces were put in place for the final dramatic arc of the season. Whether the writers intended for the lack of journal voiceovers to be significant doesn’t really matter; the silence still spoke volumes. We were kept in the dark, finding things out alongside the characters, just as Jeremy had been kept in the dark by Elena. Reading his sister’s journal—invading her privacy in that way—was a betrayal that Jeremy knew was

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difficult to justify, and yet, as he told himself, how much worse was it that Elena arranged to have his memories tampered with in a misguided attempt to remove his suffering? All of the many secrets she had been keeping from him, including the truth about the vampires in Mystic Falls, came to the surface. From that point on, there was no going back. The diary could not just be closed and the truth—and lies— be easily forgotten (well, not unless Damon got his hands on Jeremy again). When Jeremy searched Elena’s room for her diary, we knew that nothing would ever be the same again. And yet . . . even he was unsure about whether or not he would have preferred the truth stay locked away among the pages of his sister’s hastily scribbled thoughts: There’s a part of me that’s so angry that she covered up what happened to Vicki and erased my memory, but there’s also this other part of me, that’s glad. I don’t want to remember Vicki like that. (“Miss Mystic Falls,” 1-19)

Because, as Stefan suggested in the very first episode, maybe the main purpose served by journals is that they help us to remember. Journals have the special ability to allow our thoughts to transcend time, and also connect us to others in a way that everyday conversations can’t. This is as true for fictional characters as it is for real people. Would characters like Bridget Jones or Princess Mia Thermopolis have come alive in quite the same way if we’d been introduced to them

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through a more “standard” form of narrative? I don’t think so. I can’t imagine I would have been quite so intrigued by a book called Bridget Jones’s Adventures, as I was by Bridget Jones’s Diary. Mia’s exploits in The Princess Diaries—based on Meg Cabot’s own angst-filled journals—wouldn’t have had the same impact if they were told in anything other than diary entries. The storytelling device of diaries simply brings something more potent to the mix. Especially when it comes to teenage stories of love and betrayal. Add in a potent helping of blood, sex, and revenge, and it really is no wonder that a show like The Vampire Diaries is so successful. There is plenty of scope for developing such a world, with its rich mythology and characters who have lived for centuries. We have Stefan’s Diaries to look forward to—a brandnew trilogy of books based on the world-building setup during the TV series, and taking place during the Civil War.4 Dear reader, it is at this point that I must ask you: do you keep a diary? Even if you don’t write your secrets down in a book, using your favorite pen as you sit in your special journal-writing spot, you may be a secret diarist without even being fully aware of it. If you keep a blog then your answer is probably “yes.” Blogs are the modern-day equivalent of the centuries-old practice of baring your soul on the page, and the number of blogs and online journals has increased to incredible levels in the past decade. It seems that we all enjoy serving up a slice of our secret selves—our darkest thoughts alongside the most banal of daily happenings. Even Facebook The first book of the trilogy is due for release by HarperTeen in November 2010.

4

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status updates and tweets are a kind of journaling—shorter, and more transient, but even now enterprising companies are coming up with ways to archive them in physical or electronic form for you to someday show your kids. Yes, both blogs and status updates are generally conceived of as being written for an audience; they are usually intended for public consumption. However, this is just as true of handwritten journals—albeit with a different definition of public. Why keep them, otherwise? Ultimately, writing down your private thoughts is more than just an exercise in self-therapy. Diaries are meant to be shared, whether with oneself at a later date (like Elena’s) or with one’s descendants to pass on important knowledge (in the case of Johnathan Gilbert’s and the Founding Families of Mystic Falls). Besides, we all need some sort of outlet. We all feel the urge to, as Damon put it so well to Stefan in the final scene of “Isobel” (1-21): “Say it, whatever it is. Purge. Get it out.” Maybe he’s right. And if so, there’s no better place than a journal.

Ka r e n M a h o n e y has been published alongside some of her favourite authors in paranormal anthologies like The Eternal Kiss (2009) and Kiss Me Deadly (2010). She is still in complete shock about this. Her debut Young Adult novel, The Iron Witch, will be published in the United States by Flux in February 2011 and makes significant use of journal entries. She is British, but hopes that you do not hold this against her. Please visit her at www.kazmahoney.com.

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A Visitor's Guide to Fell's Church A BOOK SERIES PRIMER FOR TV SERIES FANS • Red and Vee •

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ne of the questions we’re asked most (other than “Does Paul Wesley have a Twitter account?”) is, “What happens in the books?” We’ve come to expect a flood of breathless emails following every cliffhanger, fans begging us to tell them what happens next because they may fall down and DIE, DIE I tell you! before the following week’s episode. And our answer is always the same: We don’t have a clue. As we write this, The Vampire Diaries TV series is preparing for its second season, and we’re as excited as you are to follow the romantic entanglements, twisted family dynamics, and, yes, those heart-stopping cliffhangers that have come to define Thursday nights. Because, again, we have no idea what’s going to happen next. And that is why the show is fun for those of us who have read the books. We have the benefit of experiencing every surprise the writers throw at us each week and the background information to pick up on the subtle and not-sosubtle book references scattered throughout the series (Druid Room! Honoria Fell! Oh my, that’s a very large full moon you’re standing under, Tyler!). As different as the story translation is from book to screen, and how much certain characters have been altered from their book origins, book DNA

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runs through the TV series’ veins, and it’s a treat when the writers toss out nuggets for the fans. This is not to say you’re missing out if you’re a fan who hasn’t read the books. But we’re sure that many of you will be interested in reading The Vampire Diaries in its original form on the page for the same reasons that you love the TV series: the core themes of love, friendship, and being true to oneself against all odds. And, after all, L.J. Smith’s series has maintained a loyal and passionate following for nearly two decades. That has to spark some curiosity in TV series fans, right? Whether your enjoyment of the show will be affected by reading the books is up to you; your own mileage will vary when encountering the numerous differences. And to help ease the transition between these parallel universes, we humbly offer this primer, free of major spoilers, for your potential excursion into book territory. Where do we begin?

Okay, wait a sec why is Elena blonde? The first thing you’ll notice when you start reading The Vampire Diaries is a difference between many of the book characters and their TV series counterparts, in both appearance and personality. The most startling character change is that of Elena Gilbert. She’s still an orphan, though she has had a few years to wrap her mind around that fact, and she still writes in her

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beloved diary. That’s where the similarities end. Blonde, blue-eyed, and sure of herself, the Elena Gilbert of the books is the queen of Robert E. Lee High School. She knows what she wants, and she makes sure that she gets it, no matter what the cost. She is, on the surface, rather selfish and materialistic and many readers find her hard to identify with as the heroine of a story. But stick with it, because Elena’s journey is one of the focal points of The Vampire Diaries; she evolves from a self-centered teenager, who has everything she desires, to a young woman stripped bare of all she has, who is the better for it as she realizes the most important things she can possess are love, friendship, and family.

Stefan, Damon, and Katherine are from fifteenth century Europe? Where are the corsets, the suspenders, the Confederate uniforms?! There are still plenty of Civil War costumes to be had in the books, but the town’s history has nothing to do with the Salvatore brothers. Here, Stefan and Damon are 500-year-old Italian noblemen, recently moved over to the United States from Italy, complete with sexy Italian accents. Sadly, the accents don’t stick around; Stefan’s ability to go from foreigner to native within a few short weeks is used as an example of vampires’ impressive ability to blend in with their surroundings and evade detection. The brothers’ relationship will seem very familiar for the most part, as there’s certainly a huge wedge between them

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over the subject of their lost love, Katherine. Really, though, she was just the final straw between siblings who already had a strained relationship. Unlike in the TV series, the preKatherine period wasn’t all sunshine and football between the Salvatores. The brothers never got along—just for starters, Damon blames Stefan for their mother’s death—and Katherine merely provided yet another reason for them to hate each other. In fact, you probably won’t recognize Katherine. When Stefan and Damon knew her, she wasn’t a wicked woman, and was actually kind and loving, if tremendously naïve. Katherine is still responsible for turning the boys into vampires, though the events leading up to their transformation are very different. She falls in love with the Salvatore boys when her father sends her to live in Italy so she can recover from her latest illness. What only her (non-witchy) handmaid, Gudren—and, later, Stefan and Damon—is aware of is that she didn’t survive the illness, and was instead turned into a vampire to save her life. A fan of the Stefan diet (she enjoys snacking on doves), Katherine retains her kind, childlike nature, and her dream is to live forever with both of the Salvatore brothers at her side. (See? It’s still pretty kinky.) In a misguided attempt to get them to overcome their animosity toward each other, Katherine inadvertently causes them to hate each other even more, setting into motion the tragic events that culminate in the modern-day circumstances of the books. Alas, in some cases, love really does not conquer all. Another difference between the books and TV series is who exactly loved whom. The TV series portrays Damon as

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the one who is truly in love with Katherine, and Stefan as compelled to accept her vampirism. In the books it is Stefan she confides in, and likely Stefan is the one she loves the most. Damon, on the other hand, initially goes after Katherine just to spite Stefan, and later continues his pursuit because of the power she can offer him. How deep and genuine his feelings are for Katherine, only Damon knows.

What about the other characters? As in the TV series, Bonnie is one of Elena’s best friends. She’s also a witch, though she leans more toward psychic visions and being used as a hotline for the dead to communicate through. She is short and bubbly with flaming red hair, a love of boys and the color pink, and a tendency to talk a little too much. Descended from Druids rather than the Salem witches, Bonnie has a Scottish heritage—her last name is McCullough, not Bennett—and a witchy grandmother she spends the summer with in Edinburgh prior to the beginning of the story. As in the TV series, it’s from her grandmother that Bonnie learns about her powers, and while she doesn’t take them seriously at first, it’s not long before everyone is relying on them to save each other and the town. You may have a hard time recognizing Caroline Forbes (yes, same name), too. While she was friends with Elena prior to the beginning of the story, by the time we meet her in the books she is most definitely Elena’s enemy, and not

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the bubbly Caroline we know and love from the TV series. She is jealous of Elena’s popularity, and is both manipulative enough and selfish enough to start a campaign to knock Elena off her throne at school and ruin her social standing. In fact, you’re likely to see more of the TV series version of Caroline in Bonnie McCullough than in her vain and calculating book counterpart. Tyler Lockwood is a bit of a jerk, but you can’t help feeling some sympathy toward him, and even liking him. He’s a product of his upbringing, with a self-centered mother and a father who believes in parenting by violence. You can understand why he’s the way he is, and deep down feel that there may be hope for him. Tyler Smallwood, on the other hand, is an unlikeable bully through and through, lacking in intelligence and common sense, easily angered, and with no respect for his fellow students. As far as he’s concerned, he’s top dog, and everyone should acknowledge that. Both versions of Tyler do share a certain . . . animalistic trait that makes itself known toward the end of the original books and that we hear will be further explored in the second season of the TV series. Fell’s Church’s substitute history teacher doesn’t share the same background as his TV series counterpart, being fortunate enough not to experience losing his wife to a sudden case of I Wanna Be a Vampire. In fact, he’s kind of sweet on Meredith by the end of the story (more on her later). Alaric Saltzman is a parapsychology major from Duke University, called in by leading members of the Fell’s Church community (the Founders Council does not exist in the books) to

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deal with their vampire problem. Alaric’s experience with vampires—much like the rest of the town—is limited to anecdotal evidence from reading lore and interviewing supposed vampire victims. Suffice to say, for a guy who’s simply interested in the paranormal, he’s in way over his head. (But he does come up with nifty wood-tipped bullets for shooting vampires.) Despite this lack of experience, his heart is in the right place, and he’s firmly on board with helping save the town, and fully prepared to reevaluate his conclusion that all vampires are bad. Given the number of characters who have undergone transformations from book to screen, fans of Matt Donovan will be relieved to find much of his character and appearance intact within Matt Honeycutt. He’s still the same loyal, kind, and caring football player we know and love, and he’s still utterly in love with Elena. Despite differences in family background—Matt Honeycutt’s father is dead, his mother is definitely not a drunk, and he doesn’t have any siblings—they are both pretty much the same core character. In the books, Matt is also Stefan’s only human friend, giving the vampire a chance despite evidence that says Stefan’s a bad guy, and even when he finds out what Stefan is. Vicki Donovan is as tragic in her own way as Vickie Bennett of the books. Sadly, poor Vickie Bennett isn’t as feisty and doesn’t even get the perks of becoming a vampire. Instead, she’s attacked, used, and abused, and then left as a fragile shell of a girl at the end of it all.

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Who is this Meredith chick? She’s awesome. Fans of the Vampire Diaries books were universally disappointed to discover that Meredith Sulez was cut from the first season of the TV series. She has long been a fan favorite and has her own unique role in the story. Meredith is actually more Elena’s best friend than even Bonnie. She is calm, sophisticated, and the voice of reason. Where Bonnie is excitable and somewhat easily manipulated, Meredith is able to stand up to Elena; she grounds Elena, providing her with advice and offering the occasional innuendo-laden quip, and gives a voice to Elena’s conscience. Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec have promised Meredith will make an eventual appearance in the show, but who knows under what circumstances? Another missing character is the mysterious Mrs. Flowers. The owner of the boardinghouse in which Stefan lives, she comes across as a dotty old lady. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that there’s something more to her than everyone originally assumed. In the TV series, Mrs. Flowers was replaced by Damon and Stefan’s descendant, Zach Salvatore. Aside from being caretakers of their respective boardinghouses, Mrs. Flowers and Zach share a passion for growing things, puttering about in basements, and hideous sweaters. Other characters you won’t exactly recognize: Judith and Margaret Gilbert, Elena’s aunt and sister. Judith is an older lady, the sister of Elena’s father, and the legal guardian of the Gilbert girls since the death of their parents. The same role

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is played by Jenna in the TV series, with Jenna as a hipper, younger aunt, and someone with whom Elena generally identifies and has an amicable relationship. Judith’s relationship with Elena, however, is somewhat strained and becomes more so when Stefan and Damon enter the picture. Margaret is Elena’s four-year-old sister, a cute and innocent child who likes kittens. While she’s not a major character, she does feature heavily in a few plot points. In the TV series, she’s been replaced by the much older—and certainly hotter— Jeremy Gilbert. This change in character allows the writers more flexibility with the story. And, let’s face it, Steven R. McQueen probably wouldn’t look good in a dress, anyway. (He would, however, look adorable clutching a kitten.)

So, no vampires in tombs? Not exactly. Stefan and Damon do spend some quality time with each other in the Salvatore family crypt after an unfortunate incident with some pointy steel objects, and we will say that another crypt features heavily in the story later on, but there’s no tomb containing twentysomething mummified vampires plotting revenge on Fell’s Church. In fact, compared to the show, there aren’t that many vampires featured in the original book series: they add up to a grand total of five, including the good guys. But, trust us, that’s more than enough to wreak havoc on the town. The extensive changes to and expansion upon the basic plot also leads to very different motivations for individual

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characters, though you may be surprised at how the TV show has managed to remain remarkably true with your favorites, even when their history and their circumstances have changed (Alaric being the prime example). It’s also interesting to note that the ultimate fates of Vickie/Vicki and Mr. Tanner are the same in book and show, but the events that lead to said fates happen in distinctly different ways.

How about the vampire mythology? The TV series has, for the most part, taken the mythology of the books and built upon it to better serve the story it’s trying to tell. Vervain, for instance—what is little more than a glorified weed that prevents mind control in the books—has become a veritable kryptonite for vampires in the TV series. Daylight rings in the show—created for specific owners using magic—are more commonplace in the books, due to the inherent mystical properties of the gemstone lapis lazuli that protects vampires from the sun, no extra witchy ju-ju necessary. Lapis is as interchangeable as Kelly Donovan’s drink preferences, and any vampire in the know is safe from the harmful effects of a great big dose of UV. Mental powers in the books are also a little more sophisticated. Along with the ability to control people’s minds, vampires are able to speak to each other using telepathy and can also sense each other’s Power over distances . . . provided the vampire they’re trying to sense isn’t stronger than them and deliberately blocking them.

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Then there’s the shape-shifting. The crow is a bird that is synonymous with Damon in the books, to the point that it’s perhaps the most well-known symbol fans think of when they think of the series. The process of becoming a vampire has also been expanded on in the TV series. The method in the books is as simple as dying with enough vampire blood in your system to cause the change to happen. Being turned by accident is something that can happen easily if vampires aren’t careful with sharing their blood, and a newly turned vampire could, in theory, live their unlife without ever tasting human blood. Newly turned vampires in the TV series are burdened with a darker dilemma; they must feed on human blood to complete the transformation, or they will die. While the vampires of the books can effectively choose to leave humans alone and live guilt-free, the TV series vampires are likely burdened with the fact that they began their current existence at the expense of human life—possibly the lives of people they care about.

Whoa, Stefan bites Elena in the books? On a regular basis? When it comes to biting, the show certainly takes the award for being more painful (and, if we’re honest, probably more realistic). In the books, vampire bites can be savage, with throats torn at in a gruesome manner, but they can also be tender, even pleasant. When vampires feed with a view to

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being gentle, they simply leave two holes behind to mark where they’ve been snacking, and—providing the victim is relaxed—it can be a very pleasant experience. Both Elena and Matt give blood willingly in the books and come away from it none the worse for wear. Indeed, Elena and Stefan exchange blood as an intimate expression of love in lieu of sex. Given the vicious nature of bites in the TV series—seen in graphic detail with Caroline’s expressions of pain and the hideous marks left all over her flesh—it’s hard to see blood exchange involving biting ever being something as gentle and romanticized as it is in the books.

You weren't kidding about the book and the TV series being completely different, were you? Aside from basic character, mythology, and story similarities, the books and the TV series do take very different directions from each other. The biggest reason for this is that the TV series has more time to expand on the story, allowing for many more subplots and character introductions. If it stuck to the book content alone, then the whole thing would be over and done with in five episodes! Where’s the fun in that? So the result is that the TV series uses elements from the books—the love triangle between the brothers and Elena, Katherine’s machinations—and introduces its own unique story lines for everyone to sink their teeth into. Vampire Diaries fans long ago realized that using the books to work out what was going on in the TV series was an

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exercise in getting a first-class headache, and TV series fans will also realize that when they read the books themselves. On a positive note, it does mean that everyone gets to enjoy the books and the TV series without one spoiling the other. Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it? That’s not to say that the books have been ignored. As we mentioned, the TV series is littered with all kinds of shoutouts to the novels. The fun is in trying to spot them, from mentions of well-known place names, to key events, to scenes that have been adapted to fit in with the TV series, but are instantly recognizable to fans of the books.

You know, despite all the differences, I recognize these themes love, friendship, family, loyalty . . . While characters and events differ between the books and the TV series, the themes of love, family, and friendship remain a central focus in both. Though relationships and the events that shape them may be different from what you expected, the core story of Elena’s love for Stefan, her family, and her friends remains intact. It is a story about how love makes people stronger, about how standing together as a family—be it forged by blood or friendship—makes it possible to overcome the darkness. While Elena in the TV series certainly appreciates the family she has, especially in light of losing her parents, and goes to drastic lengths to protect those she loves from harm and anguish, Elena’s

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journey in the books leads her to the realization that her family and friends are what matter to her most, leaving her willing to do anything to protect them from the outside forces threatening the town of Fell’s Church, no matter what the cost. Both the books and the TV series are also, at heart, a love story between Elena and Stefan—a story of events that tie the two together. Theirs is a love that should, by all rights, be doomed, and yet their passion for each other helps them overcome the odds, and not even death can keep the pair apart.

Welcome to Fell's Church. We hope you enjoy your stay as much as we do. Still with us? While delving into the Vampire Diaries book series won’t provide much insight into the twists and turns of the show, you may come away with a better understanding of the old-school Vampire Diaries fandom’s inside jokes, cryptic references, and why certain hints get some of us so excited. (After all, it’s the book fandom that fueled the anticipation of Tyler’s little secret for months before the first hint was ever dropped in the show, though Michael Trevino himself has certainly reveled in those possibilities from the start.) And, perhaps, it will provide you with a new appreciation for how the TV show has adapted facets of the books into its own unique vision.

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While it took us a while to adapt to the nature of the TV series, we are as passionate about seeing the story unfold on the screen as any other fan. We hope that you, in turn, will be entertained as you turn the pages of the books and see The Vampire Diaries’ story in an entirely new way.

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R e d a n d V e e are the co-runners of Vampire-Diaries.net, the first fansite devoted to the Vampire Diaries TV and book series. They have been friends for over a decade, having met through their mutual, longtime love of the book series. Now they regularly argue over the TV show and obsess over when/how in the world the Founders got their hands on Emily Bennett’s grimoire. Red hails from the United Kingdom, Vee from Arizona, and they can be found on Twitter at @tvdnews. And they stick by their mantra: “It’s Stefan, not Stephan.”

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