A Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls - By Red Page 0,19
the single event that drove every element of the first-season finale: Damon’s near-death in the fire, Stefan’s decision to rescue 4 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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• 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 •
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 African-American 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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• 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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ClauDia Gray 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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The 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,