#tvdmeme

And Caroline is damn right.

After only watching one season, it becomes obvious that The Vampire Diaries has a far more competitive canon than the average. The stakes are high and they’ll likely get higher (and I know they will get higher, since I’m spoiled about a lot of things in this show). If you’re too soft, if you don’t have enough power or enough people (and the right people) willing to protect you, you’ll likely end up dead (except, apparently, if you’re Matt-freaking-Donovan. Your irrelevancy and lack of anything close to resembling charm will protect you LOL).

And it’s not just that it is a competition to survive, but that one of the most precious commodities, if not THE most precious one, the one Caroline is talking and worrying above up there? It’s male attention.

This is not exclusive to TVD, but this show is damn cutthroat about it. I’ve lost count of how many times Elena survived this season exclusively because the Salvatore brothers are in love with her. Caroline is the other side of the coin, where she’s gotten repeatedly hurt because she’s seen as not as good as Elena (Damon abuses her, Stefan uses her as a tool, etc.). Even Matt’s opinions, as low hanging fruit as he is, contribute.

Bonnie is not even in the running, and she ends up losing the only real support she had... because Stefan had to follow Elena into the caves. Anna and Vicky are killed because they only had Jeremy in their corner, and that’s so not enough -the respective power each male character wields matters a lot here; Stefan and Damon are vampires facing measly humans, and basically the whole hierarchy of the female characters in the season is decided by Stefan’s opinions on the matter: Vicky is not worth saving, he rejects Caroline and that directly leads to her meeting Damon, etc. And of course, Elena is at the top; even Damon’s opinion is swayed, since he moves from fixating on Katherine to falling for Elena.

One thing that I find really interesting is comparing this show with Legacies, which has become one of my favorite shows in the past few years. It’s important to note that male attention isn’t as much of a factor -it’s there; I don’t think it’s easy to completely get rid of it, but the truth is that none of the male characters in Legacies is relevant enough for his opinion to be the end-all-be-all of it all.

As a result, the stakes for the female characters are significantly lower; getting rejected hurts, someone preferring another girl might hurt them or humiliate them, but they’ll survive. And the competition is framed and focuses in very different ways.

In the last episode of Legacies, the characters are presented with a magical simulation they all have to go through, and it’s described almost like a game. Lizzie’s immediate reply is a cheeky “How do I win?”. The teacher doesn’t reprimand her for it, or tries to moralize about how they must treat this seriously, she just explains the rules. There’s room for playfulness in this competition.

And of course, at the end of the day, what was the episode about? The Merge. THE competition in this show. Josie vs. Lizzie. The thing the twins have tried to ignore and repress the entire season. And there are only two factors in the competition: their raw power (which the show has established would favor Josie; OTOH, I think Lizzie is a lot more creative when it comes to magic, for example), and their emotional investment in each other and their willingness to die instead of killing the other. Hope could be a third factor, given how she’s almost positioned in a “love triangle” with the twins LOL (in this episode her simulation self killed Josie before she could kill Lizzie -for real, and not just in the simulation).

I ended up talking almost more about Legacies than about TVD xD. My point is, it is a competition. This could seem like a throwaway line, or just proof of Caroline’s shallowness and vanity. But what matters is that it gets at the core truth of the show, in a really unpolished way, from the very beginning. And that’s why I picked it over flashier, “deeper”, more impactful quotes.