girls like Caroline just don’t get.
But despite Caroline’s seemingly blasé attitude toward getting frisky with the opposite sex and her willingness to “drink until someone is hot enough to make out with” (“162 Candles”), it’s clear that the issues and insecurity that Caroline has with her mother and her friends follow her into every romantic relationship she’s had on the show thus far. She wants someone to love her. She wants to be the kind of girl who someone could love, and over and over again, she’s been told in little ways and in big ones that she just isn’t that girl.
Period.
For Caroline, Damon was a way of one-upping Elena, but almost immediately, she began to search for assurances in their “relationship” that Damon wasn’t willing to give. She came to him wanting to feel special and left feeling like nothing. Damon didn’t just use her. He didn’t just bite her 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 154
8/27/10 10:36 AM
• S w e e t C a r o l i n e •
155
and feed off her and tell her, in a psychotically gentle way, that he was going to kill her. He put her down in a thousand little ways that had nothing to do with him being a vampire, or her being a chess piece on his metaphorical board, and long after Caroline had stopped wearing scarves and started wearing vervain, those things stuck with her.
He told her she was stupid.
He said she talked too much.
He called her shallow and useless.
To Damon, Caroline might never have been anything more than a ploy, but to Caroline, Damon was the voice in her ear, telling her over and over again that she would never be worth a moment of anyone’s time. Arguably the most per-ceptive person on the show, Damon knows what to say and do to get under someone’s skin, and unlike Elena, Caroline didn’t get the chance to be strong. She couldn’t look him in the eyes and slap his face, and she couldn’t weather every blow he dished out with beauty and grace.
Caroline doesn’t get to be the strong female protagonist because that role is already taken.
After everything she’d suffered at Damon’s hands, all Caroline could do was feel smaller and smaller and want someone to love her more and more, while Damon went about his business growing a soul for Elena. And then there was Matt. Despite being the “nice guy” on the show, Matt initially conformed to the general expectation of interactions with Caroline—namely, that being dismissive and kind of a douchebag is completely legit, so long as Caroline Forbes is the girl on the receiving end of said douchebaggery.
6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 155
8/27/10 10:36 AM
156
• 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 •
Within twenty-four hours of their first couple-y moment (in “162 Candles”), Matt had told Caroline that being deep wasn’t her strong suit, snuck out of her bed in the middle of the night without saying good-bye, and accused her of making a “lame girl move” when all she wanted was an acknowledgement that something had happened between them and that she wasn’t the kind of girl who even a nice guy like Matt could hook up with and brush off (“History Repeating,” 1-9). When Matt finally did come to apologize, he prefaced it by making one thing clear, telling her that he most emphatically didn’t like her, and he never had.
With romantic confessions like this one, is it any wonder that Caroline has an inferiority complex?
Despite their rocky beginnings, Caroline’s relationship with Matt evolved into something steadier, and though even Isobel could tell, after five minutes of talking to Caroline, that the relationship was headed nowhere, Caroline’s relationship with Matt marked a significant turning point in the Vampire Diaries canon: it was the first time that any of the major characters had an on-screen romantic relationship wherein both parties were fully human and stayed that way. In a sea of vampires, witches, ring-wearing vampire hunters, and whatever Tyler is (the good money here is on “werewolf”), that Caroline managed to have a fully human relationship for more than half a season is remarkable and underscores that, shallow or not, one of those girls or not, Caroline is the voice of normality in the show: the one with ordinary relationships and ordinary traumas and a very human desire to connect