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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 pho-tographs, 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 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 93
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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 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 94
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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