why tvd worries me (sometimes)
I've seen so many people, men and women, root for Damon Salvatore and that obviously worries me, but it's still nearly not as worrying as when I see teenage girls romantically obsess over this character. I mean, it's kinda just as worrying because if you're a grown adult, why are you ignoring every red flag being throttled your way? Ignorance, perhaps. But teenagers are just oblivious, they don't know that men like this exist in real life... in the worst way. I used to be one of those girls when I was around the age of 14. I preferred Damon because he was funny, loud with his love, and his whole character was about how he just wanted love. I re-watched the show when I was 16 and I suddenly realised I had been a complete idiot and well… so was my best friend at the time. My sister was. My mother was. All the reactors on YouTube who were screaming at their screens were.
And personally, as a lifelong vampire fan, it pains me that the show has a narrative that abusive behaviour is synonymous with being a vampire. Which it's not.
To Damon Salvatore, people are pawns, they are nothing.
He feeds, compels, rapes, kills, turns them when he's bored, he does whatever he wants to them just because he can. Because he wants to. He makes that very clear EVERY season. He doesn’t feel guilt 99% of the time, he feels nothing about it, other than pleasure.
In terms of Caroline, one of the most beloved characters in the show, who is a teenager like most of the characters (except for Damon)… the abuse she suffered because of Damon is what really solidified him as a piece of shit, vampire or not. I mean, not only does he verbally abuse her, take away her free will most of the time with compulsion and rapes her… but he also feeds on her like a human bloodbag and leaves horrible bite marks all over her body, as opposed to healing her with his blood. I’d like to remind people that anyone could’ve seen those and he didn’t heal her because he planned on killing her and tossing her body in a muddy ditch (like he did with Vicki’s body). It’s not until Elena, Katherine’s doppelganger, sees the bites, that his smugness falls. And that’s because Elena becomes his new obsession, even before he learns Katherine wants nothing to do with him. He is a sociopath who views Elena as the exception to his "dastardly ways" because she is a kind person and doesn't vow to write him off straight away, despite what he does to people.
In Season 1, Damon starts getting involved in parts of Elena's life that he has no right to. For instance, telling her that she doesn’t have to speak to Isobel and there was this stare off between them... as though he was giving her permission or something. Like, yeah... we don't need you of all people to say that. Then not long after that, things escalate when he tries to be her “white knight” when she has a falling out with her brother, Jeremy. Jeremy is perfectly in his right to be pissed off with her too. But Damon follows him, mocks him, starts manhandling him (baring in mind, Jeremy is like 15-16 maybe and Damon is a grown man even without the vampirism) and then forcefully tells Jeremy to lay off Elena. Thankfully Stefan gets involved and puts his brother in his place by telling him he of all people shouldn’t be getting involved and points out how odd it is for him to do that, especially because it’s not out of the goodness of his heart, it’s to get in Elena’s good books (just like how I think him thanking Bonnie for de-spelling the device was about doing the same; get in good with Elena’s best friend, have someone on his team, makes it easier to get to Elena).
But since Elena is quite deeply in love with his brother, Stefan, it'll never get to that point where the obsession is reciprocated. Which leads to this:
After forcing himself on Elena and being rejected fairly nicely, Damon kills Jeremy right in front of her. The fact that Jeremy came back to life doesn't make a damn difference.
This quote specifically is what outlines the obsession he has with Elena. "Have" being the key word. You don't "have" people. What he would've said, if he was a normal person, was "I'm in love with a woman I can never be with." But he didn't say that because in his mind, he has to have her, he has to own her. If he has her, then he wins. He wins this whole made up game in his head: Winning the Doppelganger. Stefan got Katherine and Elena’s love. Damon didn’t. And he thinks he somehow deserves one of them, namely Elena, because he believes it’s not too late to, what, make her love him?
Truthfully, he is not in love with Elena. He has no idea what love is because as we've seen, he's never even seen real love. In terms of familial love, his parents sucked. He slept with Katherine but the love wasn’t real, at least not as real as he wanted it to be. Charlotte, that one girl in Bourbon Street, became obsessed with him.
He is a sociopath. That in itself would've been an interesting premise; you know, having a sociopathic character who we aren't supposed to like at all but he's interesting in terms of his psyche. But instead, what happened was, around the time the writers decided they were gonna put Damon with Elena “for real”, they changed shit. They went back and tried to turn Damon into a deeper character, turn him into something he isn't. They tried to change who he was and what their relationship was really like.
Like making it so that Damon and Elena really met in a more profound, romantic way, as opposed to him scaring the shit of her with the crow, the fog, and then appearing behind her in the Boarding House. Because the writers were trying to manipulate people when it came to Damon. "He's not as bad as he seems, even though we've had him do all of this horrific stuff, he's just misunderstood and he needs love and attention." That's what they were trying to sell people.
But since they couldn't completely change who he was while he entered a relationship with Elena, it ended up suffering when compared to Stefan's relationship with Elena. And as expected, was just a huge toxic mess that they were trying to paint as a kinda Jax and Tara (from the show, Sons of Anarchy) relationship where they're in so deep that they can't let go of each other.
Damon and Elena just spent their entire time having vanilla sex.
And then they would argue about how they wanna break up because Damon being Damon and Elena being Elena together was just all too unbearable.
Then they would have sex. And then argue some more. Then they would kiss in the rain or dance together. Have some more sex. Like dude, wtf have you done to the show?
Like the Spike and Buffy relationship, what the fans get isn't always what they wanted all along but they lick it up because for some reason, they're desperate for toxicity anyway, they're desperate for the "wounded warrior" or the "guy who deserves more love because he's depressed and hates himself, that's why he hurts other people" to get the girl. I really don't get it. The show tells you time and time again that Damon is awful, that his and Elena's relationship would realistically never work out (and if sex didn't exist, it wouldn't have lasted in the show) and somehow, fans of Damon's just ignore it all and focus on the few bits of sympathy shit.
If someone tells you over and over (while proving it) that they are bad for you, that they are cruel to the core... believe them! It comes across as "woe is me" because it is. That is called manipulation. Truth of the matter is, when Damon and Elena got together, they were miserable, they were making false promises, they were doing things because they felt like they had to, they solved everything with sex and refused to communicate etc. They stayed together because, for Elena, it was too late to go back and like I said earlier, Julie Plec was living out her bad boy fantasy through her. Damon stayed because he was clinging to the one thing he "won" and because it made him feel good sometimes; she chose him after everything, which allows him a free pass on evolving into a better person.
It's fucking weird and it's unhealthy, and it puts out the most awful message to young girls who are watching these shows, wishing they were Elena Gilbert, wishing they had someone obsessed with them to the point where they spiral into a frenzy without them.
