The Vampire Diaries and Narrative Resolution

Something is not right with The Vampire Diaries.

            More specifically, something is not right with Season 4.  Now, let’s not trivialize this as being about love triangles, but really delve into the storyline. The events and finale of Season 4 do not make sense from either a narrative or ideological standpoint. For those of you just jumping in, let me explain.

The show centers around three main characters: good girl Elena, good vampire Stefan, and bad vampire Damon. At the start of the series, Elena is recently orphaned and unaware of the existence of vampires. Therefore, we have as our protagonist a girl suffering from great personal loss, but surrounded by a network of family and friends in a small town, and clinging to those ties. Upon recognizing the potential threat of vampires to her community (her vampire boyfriend, Stefan, notwithstanding), she is understandably protective. The majority of her decisions are motivated by her desire to protect her friends. She is also very adamant about her right to make her own choices when it comes to protecting these people, even if it means putting herself at risk.  

So now that we understand the ideology that informs Elena’s decisions, let’s recap the events of the past four seasons:

• ·         In Season 1, Elena and her brother deal with the emotion burden of losing their parents, and also adjust to the existence of a supernatural world. Throughout all of this, Elena keeps secrets, gives out supernatural remedies, and discourages certain personal ties, all in an effort to protect her loved ones from this newly acknowledged threat.
• ·         In Season 2, Elena becomes aware of the consequences her identity as a supernatural doppelganger could have for those around her, unwillingly involving them in “her fight.” Again, Elena keeps secrets, discourages her friends’ involvement, and even strikes up a self-sacrificial deal in order to protect her friends.  
• ·         In Season 3, Elena’s boyfriend unwillingly becomes the most evil/powerful vampire in the world’s lapdog in order to save his brother. Elena has lost Stefan, and the motivation behind all of her decisions is the desire to protect him and get him back safely.
• ·         In Season 4, Elena becomes a vampire, breaks up with her good-guy boyfriend Stefan, and starts dating his bad-boy brother, Damon. This is because Elena is supernaturally sired to Damon, which essentially means she feels the need to obey his every whim. Damon’s decisions are focused on protecting Elena, and admirable as that may be, they often directly oppose Elena’s decisions, putting her friends at risk in favor of her safety. So not only is Elena unable to make decisions based on protecting her friends, but she is unable to make decisions, period. And as you’ll recall, we have already established agency and loved ones as Elena’s two priorities.

The cherry on top of season four’s narrative is that after being supernaturally released from the sire bond, Elena declares her love from Damon. Prior to season four, Elena was deeply in love with Stefan, focused on her friends, and focused on her ability to make her own choices. Her sire bond and relationship with Damon directly challenges all of those things. By choosing Damon at the end of the season, after the sire bond has been eliminated and she can evaluate freely, Elena essentially legitimizes this ideological shift. So this is a disconcerting turn of events. To try to understand what might be going on here, I took to the internet.

A scholarly article I found about The Vampire Diaries claimed, “Layering of images that contaminate each other is an ongoing feature of the series. Stories of all kinds, historical, mythic, local, and personal, are frequently discovered as falsified or cover-ups. In this way the viewer is taught to question the validity of any story and the stability of every character” (Bridgeman). Here’s a scholar giving me permission to approach the events of season four with skepticism, so excuse me if I grab that chance and run with it.

With this healthy dose of skepticism, as critical viewers, we have to assume that this maintenance of the ideological shift at the end of season four is purposeful. Mittell’s commentary on narrative states, “Narrative events have a particular logic of cause and effect that viewers assume to be guiding the story: we assume that all main events presented in the narrative are related to one another in a chain of causality (…) If the plot does not follow up on the consequences of an event, it may feel unsatisfying to viewers or seem to lack narrative significance” (Mittell 216). With the maintenance of this ideological shift (Elena choosing Damon), the narrative is left unresolved, according to Mittell’s model. This is especially true because the show’s characters set up our expectations for the narrative’s resolution throughout the season; almost every main character, including Damon and Elena themselves, allude to Elena going back to Stefan when/if the sire bond is broken.

As critical viewers, this application of ideology and narrative expectations has shown that something is not right with the resolution of The Vampire Diaries’ fourth season. According to the conventions of these concepts, we can therefore assume that the narrative is not resolved yet. There is some sort of purposeful writing strategy being employed here. So now we need to ask ourselves about what will happen next, and ponder how future plotlines and events will return us to the expectations we hold for the actions and motivations of our heroes. One thing is (mostly) for sure: you can probably place some bets on the future plotlines of the series. With the theoretical knowledge we have about ideology and narrative resolution, we can be fairly confident in our predictions. Any takers?

Works Cited:

Bridgeman, M. (2013), Brigman Award Winner—Forged in Love and Death: Problematic

Subjects in The Vampire Diaries. The Journal of Popular Culture, 46: 3–19.

doi: 10.1111/jpcu.12013

Mittell, Jason. "Telling Television Stories." Television and American Culture. New York, NY:

Oxford UP, 2010. 213-34. Print.