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Today's challenge: What are five of your most unpopular opinions about TVD?! You may already know mine: 1. IMO, first few seasons of this show and even parts of the later seasons are genuinely great television, not just a 'guilty pleasure' 2. While I like Stefan, I don't love him quite as much as most of our fandom does 3. I'm a huge Elena stan for reasons we've discussed 4. I'm kind of obsessed with Mabekah and Steferine 5. I love the oft overlooked Matt and he's sneakily important to the show
I’m getting to these so late, but thank you! These are excellent opinions and I support them. :) (I love Matt, oh boy.)
1. The most well-told of Caroline’s romances, as they exist in canon, is her and Matt. Every other relationship she’s in I can’t fully buy or be invested in as much as I would like to be because of the writing. Again- this is in canon. In terms of chemistry and characterization and possibility- I think all of them work in different ways. I’m a Caroline multi-shipper I guess? I still love my vision of what Stefan and Caroline could have been. Klaus as the Love of Caroline’s Life makes SENSE. She and Tyler are very sweet and innocent at first and it feels real! I even think that she and Enzo could have worked! Caroline COULD WORK WITH SO MANY PEOPLE so it’s kind of sad that she doesn’t, canonically, really work with anyone.
2. I really, really hate how the show uses Caroline as a mouthpiece in the endless ship baiting of season 4 and, especially, season 5. It’s jarring and obvious and often pretty out of character. She deserved better. (So did Elena.)
3. I don’t see anything romantic about Damon and Bonnie. It’s not that I don’t get why people ship it because the friendship is beautiful, the love is real, and the chemistry is good (#thathug). It’s just- to me none of that translates to a romantic relationship. At all. They’re too alike in some ways and not enough alike in others. Also I just don’t ever think they’re in love. I don’t see it and I don’t think the characters see it either.
4. The show, especially in later seasons, is so wildly inconsistent about characterization that everyone is free to pick and choose what they consider canon. Everyone, at some point or another, does something RIDICULOUS and DUMB and we should all be free to say “that was a dumb decision and I don’t consider it canon”. I’m on season 7 now and it is one giant L O L.
5. This is my big one. I don’t think Stefan ever fully got over Katherine and so I don’t think that he was ever really in love with Elena. The show disagrees with me on both these points (and many other people as well, I suspect) and because the show disagrees with me I don’t have textual evidence on my side in that the show frequently (and imo heavy-handedly) contradicts me. But in a deeper sense the show does support me through characterization and actions, if not in words, and I still think I’m right. Some day I will write a thesis on it. I think he comes to care for Elena deeply and even to love her- it’s not that I think he’s lying when he says that he loves her- but I think it’s the friendship that blooms underneath the romance that’s real, not the romance itself.
I see Stefan’s romantic feelings for Elena as some combination of good ol’ delusion, desperation for a human life and love, and a need for a fresh start- a chance to undo the wounds of his Katherine past with the human and “good” version of her. The fact that Stefan is not aware of this doesn’t bother me because that’s human and real. What’s disappointing is that the show never acknowledges that, though it wrote the truths in there anyway, and so it doesn’t develop the compelling and thematically rich disconnect between why he thinks he came to Mystic Falls and why he actually did. It never explores the connections between Stefan’s relation to Katherine, vampirism, and Elena in all their true complexity and because of that Stefan’s storyline- especially re: Elena being The Love of His Life (me throwing popcorn at my screen: she’s not, you idiot)- ends up being forced and underdeveloped and personally disappointing to me because the bones of an incredible, painful, and truthful redemption arc about self-discovery and realization and growth and healing are tHERE.