A Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls - By Red Page 0,2
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 com-panionship 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
6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 2
8/27/10 10:36 AM
• W o m e n W h o L o v e V a m p i r e s W h o E a t W o m e n •
3
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 reso-lutely 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, peril-ously 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 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 3
8/27/10 10:36 AM
4
• 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 •
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