TO BEGIN: I HEAVILY rework and expand upon doppelganger lore so it's best to at least skim this to get the #Vibes. It's also important as I have completely reworked the travelers because the canonical ones read too much to me like a very ugly stereotype of the Romani and similar groups like Irish Travelers.
ย A DOPPELGรNGER IS A TRAVELER. WHAT IS A TRAVELER?
A traveler is an entity from another dimension that has found a way to travel into our reality. This beings can vary wildly in motive, intentions, danger, intelligence, form etc. They can be anything from an invisible ghostly being, a mindless meat monster to something that seems totally human. That final one is the Doppelgรคnger.
The doppelgรคnger is one of the earliest known travelers to come here, back in the neolithic and was part of a small community of similar entities. The Doppelgรคnger was the most successful physical assimilation, almost totally indistinguishable from humans, even down to the genetic level. Her name was Amara and she learned that as she was seen as the most expendable, she was going to be used as a sacrifice by her people to give them more power. She came to realize she had been betrayed by the woman she served, Qetsiyah who was one of their leaders, who chose the group and power over her life. Silas, another powerful traveler, offered to help her but she knew he was dangerously obsessed with her and his "help" would likely be worse than death.
So she came up with a plan. She was powerless to truly stop them, but she could find a way to continue her own life. She would die, but she would live, and live far away from those who would try to hurt her. So she ran away, found a human man and had a child with him, a child that carried inside it the Seed of her spirit. Once the child was born she ran away from the man and allowed herself to be captured and killed. But in every generation since there has been a girl who is exactly like her born. Because they are her.
ย WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
Basically, the Doppelgรคnger is a kind of reincarnation, somewhere between perfect cloning and a hivemind of individuals. The succession of doppelgรคngers after Amara are not just her descendants who look like her, they're facets of her. Like the regenerations of the Doctor in Doctor Who, with there being a long term interconnected memory/intelligence between all the doppelgรคngers though unlike the Doctor, they all look the same. However, the context in which they are born and the course of their lives has a lot of impact on them.
So like, if you took a 5yo Elena and a 5yo Katherine and you raised them in featureless white rooms they'd end up exactly the same because their core is the same. But because Katherine was born in the 1500s and lived the life she did and Elena was born in the 1990s and lived the life she did, they're more like sisters or cousins in terms of similarity in personality.
ย SO LIKE, WHAT DOES THIS DO OR MEAN OR WHATEVER?
โ๏ธ Elena and Katherine aren't as different you'd first think (something Katherine just looooooves :/)
โ๏ธ Elena is part of a hivemind, she's the latest in a millennia old line of doppelgรคngers. Most of the time the only way she really taps into this is in her dreams, but with the right stimulus she can do it while awake (ex. if someone started to talk in Bulgarian she could understand it and reply in the same language without even realizing what was going on). When she's actively trying and isn't getting magical help she can achieve something like 1-50% synchronization/understanding of the hivemind/past lives.
โ๏ธ Elena cannot do magic herself without a lot of loophole abuse (ex. Bonnie doing something Crazy and using her blood or whatever to make her a wish-granting amulet or some bullshit like that)
โ๏ธ Every part of her body is HIGHLY magical, not just her blood. As all travelers are beings from another dimension, even the weakest ones are incredibly magically potent, given they work outside the bounds of Nature and had to push through the veil between worlds to get here. The Doppelgรคnger is considered one of the rarest and most potent magical ingredients and many have been bled, butchered and used down to the last hair as magical fuel over the centuries.
โ๏ธ Elena cannot take human medicine as she is not actually human, the only medical treatments that work for her are magical in origin.
โ๏ธ Doppelgรคngers essentially work by brood parasitism. I will not elaborate.
โ๏ธ Doppelgรคngers, like all travelers, are elements of chaos. For the Doppelgรคnger this element of chaos comes in the form of being a weirdness and danger magnet.
โ๏ธ Because the Doppelgรคnger is always in danger and has no natural physical ability, as well as only being able to continue its own hive-life via procreation/maintaining its genetic line, Doppelgรคngers are peternaturally attractive/alluring. This supernatural attractiveness is a means of securing a partner who will both protect them and enable them to reproduce.
โ๏ธ This supernatural allure, along with the fact they're otherwise pretty much just normal girls though, means they they tend to garner all kinds of unwanted sexual and romantic advances and attention.
โ๏ธ All doppelgรคngers have a very strong reproduction drive and the vast majority die very young.
โ๏ธ Doppelgรคngers alive at the same time can speak telepathically, share their senses/bodies and become more alike the longer they're near each other. This is one of those things they'll only notice after prolonged contact.
โ๏ธ The sameness of the doppelgangers can confuse certain spells/kinds of magic. Ex. a locator spell might confuse Elena and Katherine but since Katherine most likely has had an anti-locator spell defense on her for at least a century, you might not see two dots appear on the map if you were looking for only Elena. But if you were looking for Katherine, you would definitely see Elena.
โ๏ธ All doppelgangers are genetically the exact same. The doppelganger code overwrites the human DNA it piggybacks on. Essentially Amara is using these human bloodlines as a metaphysical surrogacy for her own regeneration.
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