The Vampire Diaries

At the beginning of The Vampire Diaries, episodes taken from the series of books started by Lisa Jane Smith and continued by other authors, I was so disliked by Damon Salvatore that I didn’t even see him as handsome, despite — played by actor Ian Someralder — handsome he is up to the impossible. He was the bad-bad, unscrupulous, arrogant, evil, while his brother Stefan was the good. The bad and the good vampire, in short, in the wake of all the new bloodsuckers of urban fantasy of the 2000s. But when, at the end of the first season, he dances with Elena, his brother’s girlfriend, it is now difficult to remember that he is not the one to love. And when, in Season 6, Elena lets herself be hypnotized to forget she loved him, she herself wonders — like me at first — how Damon Salvatore could be found attractive.

Both brothers have to deal with who they are. Much, in fact, is based on self-acceptance. Stephan convinced Damon to drink human blood but then spent the rest of his days regretting it. Damon has accepted himself, the fact that he has turned into a predator, he knows that the actions he takes are natural for someone like him. He is a monster only to the extent that nature also contemplates monsters. But he can redeem himself and he will. Not always, not completely and with continuous relapses.

Nothing is definitive in The Vampire Diaries, redemption comes for everyone, even in the darkest of undead hearts a part of humanity lurks. The role of bad and good between Stefan and Damon is constantly reversed. For this reason Elena, so honest, correct and selfless, is ready to accept, without being too picky, anyone in her life, even those who have committed the worst crimes, because there is always hope for everyone. She too, over the course of eight long seasons of the series, will have her dark moments. Once she is vampirized, she too will perform actions she will have to repent of. The same goes for Caroline, the sweetest, most generous of vampires. At one point someone asks: “So there are good vampires and bad vampires?”. And to the affirmative answer then comments: “But even the good ones killed someone.”

It is so. No one is all good or all bad. There is always a baddest villain, who in turn will be able to succumb to the perverse charm of goodness, rediscover the residue of humanity hidden in the depths of his black heart.

The protagonists of The Vampire Diaries bite, bleed, quarter, impale without too many remorse, as a necessary evil, then, perhaps, they are capable of creating abysmal and adolescent feelings of guilt for a kiss given or accepted. The most important feelings are love, friendship and loyalty to family. These are the values ​​that cannot be betrayed, everything else is secondary. Killing is not so serious, the massacres are only “side effects”, means to reach a higher end, such as that of saving a friend. Also because death is not so irreversible, it is never definitive. Whoever dies then returns, as a vampire, as a ghost, as an active presence in the “other world”, that place where the souls of those who have left us linger.

If anything, a negative value is old age. Nobody is ugly in Mystic Falls and nobody ever gets old. Even the huntress rejuvenates in the seventh season, because there is no place for physical decadence in this series and, at the height of age, one is looking at most forty.

The love between Damon and Elena grows inexorably minute by minute, episode after episode. It is one of those loves that shouldn’t exist, that mix good with evil, light with dark, and, for this very reason, they explode. It is not like the simple and luminous love that binds Elena and Stefan, the two good and generous doppelgängers, or Stefan to Caroline. Rather, as Damon himself states, it is “a consuming love”, a deep and unstoppable passion, the attraction to what is dangerous and exciting at the same time. Damon teases Elena’s dark, hidden side, and Elena brings out the best in Damon. It is the promise of immortal love, the one that always remains as in the early days, between two eternally beautiful and eternally young people.

In the seventh and eighth seasons, however, it is no longer love that reigns supreme. The main feeling is the bond between the Salvatore brothers. Stefan is inextricably linked to Damon, his black soul, and he will never be able to live peacefully as long as he is close to him and will have to deal with him, with his problems, his mistakes, his misdeeds. However, the “brothersbond” (yes, the very one that the two actors then exploited to market their Bourbon) is stronger than everything and transforms The Vampire Diaries into a sort of bromance.

A story of torment, of guilt, of damnation and redemption. Don’t look for verisimilitude in this series, for a credible and coherent secondary world, because you won’t find it. Don’t ask yourself why on so many murders and disappearances anyone never investigates, where people who have been in a coffin for a thousand years find the money to live as nabobs, how can they integrate into a modern and unknown world in a few minutes, or, more trivially, how can the teenage protagonists also study or work, in the midst of vampirizations, murders, witchcraft, wars and feuds. Trifles. What matters is the dark atmosphere, even if a little repetitive in the contents, mixed with the allure of an American young adult series, between school dances, quarter backs and cheerleaders, and above all, the interiority of the characters we end up loving, knowing and feeling as “family”, as happens with all the long and famous series. In the end, we are all a little orphaned by the tender ripper Stefan, the dark and beautiful Damon, the brave witch Bonnie and the limpid Elena.

I mean, it’s Mystic Falls, baby!