. . .
Bree DeSpain 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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The 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.
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• T h e W a r b e t w e e n t h e S t a t e s •
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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 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 37
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• A V i s i t o r ’ s G u i d e t o M y s t i c F a l l s •
important than the color of her hair? Blonde Elena from the books is the “queen bee”