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 pica-yune (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 number-one 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