always be a freak, a wolf among sheep, when they do that. And they don’t fit in with other vampires, because they’ve sworn themselves as the enemy of their own nature.
But Damon’s sneaky ability to get in underneath Sheriff Forbes’ radar has given him the opportunity to be the rarest of all creatures, a vampire who hunts vampires and has a social life. In fact, his social life in Mystic Falls stems directly from the identity he’s built for himself as a member of the vampire-killing team. Damon’s relationships with Elena and Alaric are largely built on his acts of vampire hunting; in addition to its other uses, Damon’s role as hunter functions as a social networking tool.
When Mrs. Lockwood challenged Sheriff Forbes to find a bachelor to auction off for charity, Sheriff Forbes turned around and recruited Damon for the role. Damon jokingly asked her if this was what she did when she wasn’t hunting vampires. Such a question could never be seriously asked of most vampire hunters in modern media, much less a vampire hunter who is also a vampire. Most recent stories of battles against evil teach that you cannot be the guardian of happiness and security and also have these things for yourself.
Blade, Saya, Angel, D: their immortality means that happy endings are eternally out of their reach, and all of their stories end with them setting off to face another battle because all they have is the fight against the dark that they are actually a part of.
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• D a m o n S a l v a t o r e : V a m p i r e H u n t e r •
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This idea isn’t confined to the vampire genre: The Lord of the Rings ends the same way, with Frodo’s own chance at a happy life sacrificed so that others might have their own.
This idea of sacrifice permeates deep into our modern concept of what it is to be the bearer of a burden.
Unless you’re Damon Salvatore, of course, whose own magical ring lets him walk around in the sunshine, who wasn’t afraid to taste blood before he was a vampire, and who gets roped into bachelor auctions by his fellow vampire hunters. Damon may complain about Twilight playing fast and loose with vampire mythology, but he’s broken more genre tropes and mainstays in a few hours’ worth of television than most other fictional characters manage in their entire existences.
He’s a vampire who kills other vampires, but what that means is no longer as simple and as easy to define as it was before. These days, it pretty much just means whatever Damon wants it to mean at a given moment. Damon’s role as a vampire hunter has become such an undeniable facet of his character that others—even those like Alaric who know what he is—treat him as a trusted ally against potential vampiric threats. Damon’s not just playing at being a vampire hunter; this is something that he actually is. It just happens that through being a vampire hunter, Damon has completely rewritten the definition of what being a vampire hunter means. And seeing how the wider mythology of vampires who kill vampires manages to evolve after Damon’s done screwing with conventions will make for fascinating viewing indeed.
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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 •
Mary BorSellino ’s Wolf House novels were described by Mel-bourne’s Age newspaper as “rock ’n‘ roll, sex, tattoos, feminism, bisexuality, and a sense of what teens really are about,” which fails to mention the kitten named Bikini Kill or the vampires. Still, you can’t fit everything in a pull quote, I suppose. Check her out at maryborsellino.com.
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Sweet Caroline
• Jennifer Lynn Barnes •
Being bitchy doesn’t make you a bitch, just as wanting to be loved doesn’t make you selfish or shallow—it just makes you a human being. Jennifer Lynn Barnes perfectly encompasses what makes Caroline Forbes the most heartbreakingly human character on The Vampire Diaries—no matter what everyone else in Mystic Falls says about her.
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I’ve prepared a speech about Caroline Forbes. Please don’t interrupt me, because I have a lot to say on the matter, and I really want to get this