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Stefan: Oh Elena, what would I do without you? I must nuzzle your delicate neck in love and angst.
Audience: Neck. Blood-crazed vampire. Blood-crazed vampire, neck! Does this not strike you as a bad combination?
Elena: Please do. There, there. Everything’s going to be okay once I STAB YOU WITH THIS VERVAIN DART
AND LOCK YOU IN THE BASEMENT TO DETOX.
Audience : Elena Gilbert, I think I love you.
Elena: Damon, get his legs.
It was a classic Vampire Diaries move, showing us the exact opposite of what we expected to see. More than that, it showed that Elena’s wit and nerve mean she can handle herself, that she’s not wrong to trust herself, and that she’s not wrong to trust Stefan. We see exactly why Elena might put her heart in Stefan’s hands, and we feel sympathy for and complicity with her decision. But then we, like Elena, have to deal with the fact that once you open the door for one monster, others might slide in.
Others like bad vampire “boyfriend” Damon. We see Damon watching a sleeping Elena, and we are both moved and disturbed by this romantic gesture à la Twilight’s Edward Cullen—because this isn’t Elena’s boyfriend. She would undoubtedly not want him in her room, beholding her unconscious, touching her hair as she sleeps: the scene was as creepy as it was revealing of Damon’s softer side.
The Vampire Diaries never shies away from the unsettling aspects of vampirism. It steers a middle course between Buffy 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 7
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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 •
the Vampire Slayer’s stance of “vampires have no souls, that’s a demon with the memory of the person you knew” and Twilight’s of “that’s the same person, but my, does he have a mad jones for some B Negative.” In The Vampire Diaries we learn, quite a way into the game, that a vampire can choose to sup-press certain human emotions. This makes a lot of sense, in that someone who used to be human and suddenly finds him- or herself having to prey on humans to survive would really need to be able to do that! It’s also very scary, in that a vampire in The Vampire Diaries is still the person you loved when they were human, but now they have not only a hunger for blood but the ability to transform into a sociopath at will and so feel no remorse about taking it.
Vampires being able to turn human emotions off and on also makes a lot of sense looking back at the actions of vampires we have seen, and shows us how clever the storytelling is.
Damon’s constant drinking once he learned that his one true love Katherine never needed him to rescue her and never loved him at all made perfect sense the first time around—
who wouldn’t drink having received that sort of news?—but can suddenly be seen in a new light when we observe Stefan drinking to control his bloodlust, remember Lexi saying that alcohol does that, and realize that Damon’s kill count has dropped dramatically.
Now we see that Damon was not dealing with loss by drinking to excess, but dealing with loss through cau-tiously reaching out to other people, Stefan and Elena and even Alaric, who may offer Damon affection as real as 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 8
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• 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 •
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Katherine’s was false. The show trusts its viewers to notice small details. Until the finale Damon could not admit that he had chosen to experience human emotion again, and it was only then that all the small hints like Damon’s drinking came together to show that Damon really was making an effort to rehabilitate himself. He had to turn on his feelings because he wanted to be loved, and to be loved, you have to love.
Also, you have to stop being a psycho killer.
Damon as the bad vampire boyfriend is not the only example of the way The Vampire Diaries refuses to flinch from how dangerous vampires can be, and thus how much danger a human mixed up with them might find herself in. Vampires are shown as having an approach to things that truly is inhuman—even the