The Problems with The Vampire Diaries: More Than Irksome

I am a self-professed fan of The Vampire Diaries. Yes. I am. It’s endearing, funny – at times slick and witty – action-packed and I am obsessed with the love triangles it portrays. I will try not to bring any ship-war fandom into this post.

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STELENA FTW!

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

But truly, this isn’t a Stefan versus Damon, Stelena versus Delena piece, this is about how while I tune in to the show every week and have been for the past 3 years, there are fundamental issues with TVD and they’re beginning to more than irk me.

            

Let’s start with the witch, Bonnie Bennett.

           

TVD has been running for four seasons now so the pattern concerning witches is well established: they have all been Black. The only exception to this pattern is Esther, the “Original Witch” who created vampires, and even she learned her craft from the Black witch who serves her family i.e. a woman enslaved to the family (The Vampire Diaries also glosses over enslavement while feeling self-satisfied with its subtle hints toward its presence in American history). I bring this up because most characters of colour have died on The Vampire Diaries – Anna, Connor, Luka and his father, Pearl, Bree – and if they haven’t died, they are there to serve the purpose of either helping or destroying the predominately white vampires. Nothing else.

           

Bonnie is the only character-of-colour who is in the forefront and even she is an incidental character. Indeed, she is integral in all of the supernatural creatures’ plots to either save Elena or themselves but she is not a character beyond her witchiness. They do not show her for anything else.  She is there to be used for her powers and nothing else and when she is so traumatized by an event that she can’t use them anymore, she’s told that she is not valuable (“The witch who has lost her powers is left out of the important conversations”).  It can be said that Bonnie’s character revolves around loyalty to her family, to her friends, and to, in a sense, morality and yet the only way she’s given to express that is through her magic. Caroline, Elena, Rebekah and Katherine are all given complexities and arcs that make them fuller characters. Caroline went from a neurotic, deeply insecure and seemingly shallow teenage girl to a fierce, loyal, mature and grounded vampire woman; Elena, driven by compassion and empathy is not a saint, she is selfish a lot of the time and victimizes herself to an irritating degree; conversely, Katherine who appears to be purely selfish and cold-hearted is also driven by love and loyalty; and finally, Rebekah, also deeply insecure, lonely, desperate and loyal channels her frustration through intense-vampire-bullying. Bonnie, however, lacks any of these interesting dynamics. It is not that she is a witch first, she’s a witch only; she is the contemporary Magical Negro there to serve at the pleasure of those around her. Magic is her only identity and she is the least protected character in the entire show – most characters have lost at least one family member throughout the course of the series – but Bonnie sacrifices, she and her family are the collateral damage 99 times out of 100 and she isn’t given the support of her friends.

           

This sort of segues into my next issue with The Vampire Diaries, which truthfully hasn’t been brewing as long as my Bonnie Bennett problem. As I mentioned earlier, The Vampire Diaries prides itself on giving its characters interesting dynamics so as to avoid creating stock characters (with the exception of Bonnie) and that is especially true for the two leading men: Stefan and Damon Salvatore. I will be focusing on Damon and particularly his relationship with Caroline.

Damon comes into the series as basically a psychopath who takes advantage of insecure girls, feeds on them, sleeps with them, compels them (erases their memory) and repeats – Caroline being his most prominent victim.  He also kills civilians to prove a point to his righteous, straight-laced little brother, Stefan, and tries to tempt Stefan’s girlfriend, Elena, into cheating on Stefan with him. Further, he tried to kill Caroline by draining her blood (Stefan saw to it that that didn’t happen) and he also tries to kill Bonnie and, again, Stefan saves her life.  It’s then revealed that Damon is pathologically lonely, fiercely in love with a woman (Katherine) who has led him on for over a century, ridden with suppressed guilt for the pain he has caused, and actually falls completely in love with Elena as she is someone who saw good in him and took a chance on him.

As the seasons progress, he becomes less and less psychopathic (even though his promiscuous and homicidal tendencies appear every once in a while) and allows his caring nature to shine through, mostly with Elena and with his brother, although with secondary characters too, such as with Caroline’s mother, Sheriff Forbes. In this season, Damon appears to be completely reformed and as a vampire, Elena has transformed into a different, more impulsive, “darker” woman. The two are finally together – yay for Delena fans, ehh for Stelena fans. However, Caroline reserves judgment on their relationship and takes jabs at Damon every chance she gets, which culminates into Elena vehemently defending Damon and paying no attention to his track record, criticizing Caroline for falling into bed with him in an instant and then ends with Caroline apologizing for her judgment.

            

Um, WHY SHOULD CAROLINE APOLOGIZE? The notion astounds me.

         

Indeed, Damon has changed. Elena and Stefan have both directly and indirectly turned him into a better man. However, the present doesn’t outweigh or erase the past. When Caroline transitioned into a vampire in season 2, all of her erased memories came back, which included Damon’s murder attempt and his emotional and physical abuse. While the show doesn’t directly acknowledge how Caroline feels about these memories or shows any real hostility in the Caroline/Damon relationship, Caroline is incredibly wary of Damon’s character and constantly pushes Elena to stay with Stefan who, does have a very bloody past, but who meaningfully atones for his past crimes and who has never tried to kill any of Elena’s friends. Caroline’s mistrust of Damon is well-founded and yet the show doesn’t appear to think so and constantly tries to counter her doubts so as to show Damon as a truly honorable person while forgetting or trying to make the audience forget that she has experienced a serious trauma with this person. It ventures into the Stephanie Meyer land of irresponsibility and is more than irritating and astounding.

Alas, I think I will end my post because if I go any further it will become a piece about how and why Stefan is better for Elena than Damon and that is not why I sat down and wrote this this afternoon. I am not completely writing-off The Vampire Diaries, it is a show I am completely obsessed with (probably a bit unhealthily so) but that isn’t to say that it’s not without some deep-rooted, real issues because it is, and they need to be acknowledged.

They're both Black ... So What's The Issue?

There have been many debates surrounding the choice to cast Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic “Nina”. On the one hand, there are arguments for the casting choice, which essentially say Saldana is an excellent actress and a woman of African ancestry so what’s the issue? On the other hand, there’s an argument against the choice and it specifically takes issue with Saldana’s light skin and with the Hollywood tendency to “whitewash and lightwash a lot of stories, particularly when black actresses are concerned.”

            I agree with the latter argument.

            

This isn’t an attack on Saldana or on her acting abilities (although to be honest, the movies I’ve seen her in haven’t given her the capacity to exercise her acting skills for me to judge whether or not she is a good actress). However, I do take issue with the fact that rather than finding a dark-skinned actress who looks more like Nina Simone, the writers/producers/director have chosen to cast a light-skinned woman, fix her with a prosthetic nose, afro wig and – wait for it – darken her with makeup.

             

Sure. Actors and actresses have physically altered themselves to look like the characters they play; they dye their hair, gain weight, grow a beard, put on accents. However, none of those practices are rooted in racism and carry the emotional and historical and colonial baggage that blackface does. Yes. I do consider Saldana darkening her skin to look more like Nina Simone – who incidentally wrote “Four Women” a song about the histories and skin tones of four Black women – an act of blackface. Further, I find the choice an insult to Nina Simone’s legacy in that she did not adhere to what show business at that time deemed acceptable aesthetics and celebrated her dark skin and wide nose when she was told that those features did not embody beauty.

For more context surrounding the aforementioned Hollywood tendency, one just needs to take a look at Thandie Newton and the controversy surrounding her role in the film based on Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”, which deals with the Nigerian Civil War; there is also the fact that Jacqueline Fleming, who is biracial, was cast as Harriet Tubman in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

            

As Tiffani Jones, founder of the blog Coffee Rhetoric, says: “When is it going to be O.K. to not be the delicate looking ideal of what the media considers blackness to be?”

Ship Of Souls: A Novel of Revolutionary Nature

The best way for me to describe Zetta Elliott's novel is to say that it is revolutionary but not necessarily because it makes any overt political statements (although there are a few), but because it is a rarity; Ship of Souls is a Young Adult fantasy novel and all three of the protagonists are Black teens. In my experience, it is difficult to find a YA novel about Black teens much less a fantasy YA novel. As a writer, it is my goal to achieve what Elliott has -- and that is to write a story about human relationships wherein the characters happen to be people of colour. This leads me to discuss the book itself.

For those who don't know what the novel is about, the summary is as follows: a mysterious and supernatural bird takes three unlikely friends, D, Hakeem or "Keem", and Nyla on a "perilous journey that will take them from Brooklyn to the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, and into the very realm of the dead" (from the back of the book). Not only is the fantastical element of the novel both chilling and intriguing, Elliott masterfully balances the otherworldly with the banalities of adolescence. While D is coming to grips with the fact that he can speak to a bird, he also worries about impressing the beautiful Nyla, fitting in at school, and whether or not he's "Black enough"; issues that concern Black teenage boys as well as teenage boys of other racial backgrounds. Thus, Elliott succeeds in exploring themes that reach a specific (and often overlooked) target audience without excluding other readers.

The characters were also very enjoyable to read; D, Nyla and Keem made a wonderful dynamic since all three of their personalities were wildly different. I found myself drawn to Nyla's tough and independent nature and her sassy wit made me laugh on more than one occasion. While D is the main character, Nyla is the most active out of the three, and I was immensely pleased to read about a female character who was not passive in any sense and who didn't apologize for her personality or her beauty but who did not exploit her appearance either.

This is all to say that I read Ship of Souls in one sitting and while I deeply enjoyed the novel as a reader, I also deeply respected it as a writer. Zetta Elliott is a master of balance and nuance; she is able to use specificity to achieve universal appeal and I would highly recommend this novel for any young adult.