in a guy who abused, demeaned, and ate her friend? Which one consistently dismissed the other—
and the things that were important to her—with a roll of her eyes?
From the very beginning of the show, we as the audience were told that Caroline was one of those girls. She’s shallow and she’s cutthroat and she’s fake, and yet, if you actually look at Caroline’s actions in the first season, she’s been a far better friend to Elena than Elena has been to her. In the second episode of the season, Caroline bounced back from pining after Stefan to giving Elena advice on how to make her relationship with him work—a far cry from the way most high school queen bees would have reacted upon having lost a guy to their best friend. In “Isobel” (1-21), when Elena and Bonnie were fighting, Caroline encouraged the two of them to make up, even though five episodes earlier (in “There Goes the Neighborhood,” 1-16), she had admitted to being painfully aware that she was the third wheel in their friendship. A real mean girl would have taken the opportunity to divide and conquer, but Caroline wanted her friends to make up, even though she had to have known that the second they did so, she’d be left out in the cold.
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Again.
Despite the fact that everyone—even her own boyfriend—
has made comments about Caroline being mean, shallow, and a bit of a bitch, and despite the fact that Caroline seems to believe these things about herself, I really think this is a case where the devil is in the details. Caroline can be bitchy.
She can be defensive. She consistently talks without thinking about how her words will sound. But she’s also the kind of girl who put herself in the line of fire by stepping between a friend and his abusive father, the kind who refused medical treatment until her friends had been taken care of, even when doing so may have cost her her life.
Caroline may be Elena’s opposite in almost every conceivable way, but that doesn’t make her a villain. Instead, I would suggest that Caroline Forbes is a beast much rarer than a vampire or witch: she’s a mean girl who isn’t actually all that mean, and that leaves her in a kind of teenage limbo, unsure who or what she’s supposed to be or how to make people—
including her own family—love her the way everyone loves Elena.
Family Matters
The Vampire Diaries is a show in which family matters: the entire premise revolves around Damon and Stefan being brothers; Elena’s connection first to Katherine and later to Isobel propelled season one’s dominant story arcs; Bonnie’s character went through a witchy (and sometimes bitchy) 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 150
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metamorphosis almost entirely because of her grandmother’s death; and even minor characters, like Tyler and Matt, struggled with abusive and absent parents, respectively. Given just how central family is to the show, it’s not surprising that Caroline’s second most defining relationship—after her near-sibling rivalry with Elena—is the one she shares with her mother.
From the first time we saw Caroline and her mother interact, it was obvious that there was nothing the least bit Gilmore Girls about their relationship. In contrast to Elena—the archetypal tragic orphan, who had a wonderful mother and lost her—Caroline has a mother who is very much alive, only occasionally present, and continually bewildered by and disappointed in her socialite of a daughter. In the first season, Damon got more screentime with Sheriff Forbes than Caroline did, and the chances of the Forbes women bonding over vampire hunting in the near future are slim to none—in part because the sheriff would never consider flighty little Caroline capable of standing against the dark side, and in part because the last thing Caroline wants to do is follow in her mother’s footsteps, whatever those footsteps may be.
If Caroline spent the first season desperately wanting to be as (fill-in-the-blank) as Elena, she also demonstrated an equally strong desire not to turn into her mother, a lonely, dateless single mother, forever on the outside of the In Group. While Caroline didn’t give voice to this fear until she explained why the Miss Mystic