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The Vampire Diaries is what happens when True Blood and Twilight have a surly, murderous, really hot baby.
No, seriously.
You would think, from the shorthand--teenage girl torn between two vampire brothers--that that is total bullshit. And if that was what the show was about in its entirety, you might be right. That's just shorthand, though. The actual story is more like "teenage girl torn between two vampire brothers realizes, like, two months in that if that was her entire problem, her life would be SO MUCH FUCKING SIMPLER".
Also, it is balls-out awesome.
TEAM SALVATORE
(Kind of a misnomer, as Stefan may or may not still be on Team Salvatore, and getting more than three of these guys in on any plan at any given point is like herding cats, but TS is easier to type than "vampire-hunting cabal made up of people in the credits", so here we are.)
ELENA GILBERT
Elena Gilbert is actually pretty normal for a teenage girl. Her parents died just over a year ago, leaving her and her younger brother Jeremy to be raised by their aunt Jenna. Her priorities have changed; now the (former) cheerleader just wants to be introspective and write in her diary and try and make the best of things.
Then she meets Stefan, and everything goes straight to hell.
See, in addition to being a typical teenage girl, Elena's also A) the descendent of Katherine, Stefan (and Damon's) ex-girlfriend and sire, and her exact physical doppelganger, which makes sense because she's also B) the Petrova Doppelganger, the lynchpin in a curse that kept the world's first vampire from turning into something worse. Her best friends have turned out to be a witch and a vampire, she's developed a really irritating tendency towards a martyr complex when under stress, and she gets kidnapped, like, a lot.
She also breaks furniture to make stakes when cornered by crazed vampires, escapes police custody because she has No Time For This Shit, and pimp-slapped Damon in the face two days after meeting him. I love her.
STEFAN SALVATORE
If we're using Dionysus vs. Apollo scoring scale, Stefan Salvatore is Apollo. Having been turned into a vampire in 1864, he tends to go off the rails more than he'd care to admit; a few decades back he decided to mend his ways and became vegan (for a vampire, anyway: he only drinks animal blood), and try to have a semblance of a normal life.
The thing about Apollo that no one ever remembers? He's sort of a dick, too. And when Stefan goes off the rails, it's--you ever see Unstoppable? It's like that. No, not the part with Chris Pine. The part with the train.
Which is not to say that Stefan's not a good guy; he is. He works hard at being one. He's loyal, smart, surprisingly funny, self-depricating, and charming. And all of that's probably just gone out the window, because to save Damon's life, he went back on human blood and agreed to become Klaus's Dragon.
As an example: he used to be called "Ripper", and he once ate a migrant village in Monterry in the early 1900s. One suspects his return to Mystic Falls will go about as well.
DAMON SALVATORE
Damon Salvatore is batshit crazy.
I really could end it there, because that sort of says it all: Damon Salvatore is batshit crazy. He's in love with his brother's girlfriend, just remembering how "having friends" works, and dealing with what appears to be a quarter-season's worth of guilt over his friend-with-benefits Rose being killed by werewolves in his place that left him with a decent-sized death wish. Also, he's admitted he's best friends with the guy whose wife he slept with and turned, he's also friends with the sheriff that wants every vampire in town dead, and people keep torturing him. (Nothing beats Pearl putting out his eyes from last year, but this year's "baby werewolf builds a stake-collar like it's Saw III" comes kind of close.)
He's also a mind-fucking, vicious, brutal son of a bitch who still kills waaaaaaaay more people than he should, whammies ladies into sleeping with him because he hates himself, and keeps a flamethrower around for recreational uses. He's like a shark that's remembering how to be a real boy.
You need to keep something in mind, though: he might look like a real boy, and hope to one day be one again, but right now? Still a shark.
BONNIE BENNETT
Bonnie's heard her whole life that she's a witch. But that's just par for the course when your grandmother teaches Occult at the local college--no, I know, that's not a thing; just go with it--and is sort of a local kook, if a literate one. And it's not like she's not a little strange: sometimes she knew things before they happened, like with Heath Ledger, and she gets feelings about people when she first meets them. Nothing that strange, really.
That's not a witch. A witch can make things float and give people aneuryisms when they irritate her: that's a witch. And that's what Bonnie is.
This isn't an isolated incident; Bonnie comes from a long line of witches ("Bennett witches", in the canon, meaning they have a rep), descending from her ancestor, Emily Bennett, Katherine's "maid" and former friend. It's actually thanks to Damon that Bonnie's alive at all, through a really complicated Xanatos Gambit Emily busted out in 1864; Damon and Bonnie are equally irritated by this, since they hate each other, though in light of the whole "let's not let Klaus kill Elena" thing, they've sort of agreed to find each other necessary. This does not stop Bonnie from bursting blood vessels in his head every twenty minutes, which is delightful.
Bonnie's also had classically bad luck with dating/being attracted to guys who are either evil or end up dead, so she changed this up by dating Jeremy...and then he got killed in the finale, necessitating Bonnie bring him back with magic. That, unfortunately, has had consequences. But we'll get to that in a bit.
CAROLINE FORBES
Caroline Forbes' life didn't start 'til she died.
--well, no, that's not really true. She was pretty, and popular, and had two best friends; she had not the best luck with guys 'til she started dating Matt, Elena's ex-boyfriend (with Elena's permission, thus not breaking Girl Code); she had a mom who was busy being sheriff and a dad who was busy with his boyfriend. She was nice, in a really vague way, and a little neurotic, and kind of jealous of Elena and Bonnie's friendships with each other, and smarter than people gave her credit for being. She was a person, just like everyone else.
And then she became a vampire. And she got better.
See, what they don't tell you about becoming a vampire is that you can shut your emotions off; it's almost hard not to, because vampires feel everything at a constant state of It Goes to Eleven. Not Caroline. Caroline feels everything, good and bad, and it's made her a stronger person. She loves more fiercely, and lets herself feel despair when she's sad, and gets irritated when people do stupid shit. She's the same as she ever was, if faster and with brand-new teeth, and she never, ever gives up. Which is why fandom loves her, and why you should, too.
ALARIC SALTZMAN
Alaric Saltzman, the town's resident steampunky vampire killing history teacher, moved to Virginia from North Carolina, ostensibly to take over the position as history teacher at the high school after Mr. Tanner was killed by a mountain lion. (COUGH.) In reality, he was a historian and self-taught vampire hunter, there to kill the vampire that had murdered his wife: Damon Salvatore.
Of course, that didn't really work, because a) he was self-taught and therefore not all that great, and b) Damon is really, really good at killing people. Their confrontation ended with Alaric being killed. It didn't take, thanks to Alaric wearing a Gilbert ring--long story--but Alaric decided to stick around anyway. He's currently the front-runner for being Elena and Jeremy's legal guardian, as they are flat-out of relatives and he was sort of Elena's stepdad.
Also, through a process literally too confusing for the characters--seriously, you can see it sometimes: "Why are we friends?" "I have no fucking idea."--he and Damon are best friends. No, seriously: Alaric is beffies with the guy who killed him. Granted, it's the sort of friendship predicated on killing vampires and getting shitfaced a great deal, but still: friends. He's even told Damon that to his face. Damon's response...really needs to be seen to be believed.
Both his wife and his girlfriend have ended up A) vampires and B) dead, so one suspects he's gonna be taking a break from dating for a while.
TYLER LOCKWOOD
Tyler hasn't had a great year: his girlfriend vanishes and turns up dead in a shallow grave, then his dad dies in a remarkably weird fire the same night he freaks out and gets into a car accident, ending with his best friend's girlfriend in a coma. Then Uncle Mason shows up, and hey! Guess what! Uncle Mason's a werewolf! And after a really awkward incident at a masquerade ball where a girl ended up dead, so is Tyler!
Then everything goes to hell. Jules, Mason's friend, comes to town to teach him about being a werewolf, except Jules and her friend also tell him Caroline - who's now a vampire, and who Tyler's developed feelings for - has been lying to him about everything, including what happened to Mason (hint: Damon happened). Tyler, in shock, watches Caroline get tortured, then leaves town as much because Caroline's furious with him (FOR GOOD REASON, LOCKWOOD, JESUS) as because he wants to learn more about his new "condition". He returned to town just in time to almost be used in the curse-breaking ceremony Klaus had planned, but Damon's timely rescue - no, I know - saved him, and Tyler, luckily, managed to sit out the usual season finale batshit-insanity that hits Mystic Falls, usually accompanied by people in Civil War reenactment uniforms. (Seriously.)
That's okay, though. There's always this year.
MATT DONOVAN
Matt's year has been just about as weird as Tyler's: "I have a girlfriend! No I don't! I miss her! I am working like 50+ hours a week because my mom keeps skeeving off to hang out with whatever boyfriend she's currently following around like the Grateful Dead, and as she's a single parent, I am basically raising myself in addition to going to school full-time and possibly still playing football! My sister was murdered a while back, and no one seems to give a shit! Now I have a girlfriend again and HOLY SHIT SHE'S A FUCKING VAMPIRE."
After a brief stint of informing on Team Salvatore to Sheriff Forbes, Matt did possibly the most sensible thing anyone's ever done on this show: dusted off his hands, basically told Caroline "I'm out", and walked away from the entire clusterfuck. Seriously, that is gangbusters. I want to hug the guy.
I mean, it won't last, because he's managed to make it through two seasons without having an actual storyarc until the last six episodes of season two, but we live in hope.
JEREMY GILBERT
Jeremy is, on the face of it, Mystic Falls' unluckiest panda: he keeps dating girls who end up dead, he's orphaned, he ended last season with a suicide attempt and the knowledge that Damon screwed with his head on Elena's say-so. (Admittedly, screwing with Jeremy's brain has mostly resulted in him not dealing drugs anymore and getting better hair, but it's the principle of the thing.)
So, naturally, he winds up with a Gilbert ring and a hot witch girlfriend. And, as a result of Bonnie code-cheating reality by bringing him back from the dead, the ability to see dead people.
Oh, no, this won't go poorly at all.
OUR VILLAINS
KATHERINE PIERCE/KATERINA PETROVA
Katerina Petrova was born to die.
This seems like a fairly obvious statement: everyone is, in the end. But this one's literal: as the first Petrova Doppelganger (see Elena), Katerina's blood could be used to break the curse placed on Klaus hundreds of years previously. Katerina, who, by the tender age of 18-mumble, was already pretty much Romania's original Action Girl, found out and did exactly what anyone would do in that situation: found a vampire to trick into thinking she loved him, then got wounded enough for him to give her blood to keep from dying and promptly snap her own motherfucking neck, making herself a vampire.
Yes. Katerina Petrova is basically her own sire. That is just how she rolls.
Katerina spent the next 500 years on the run from Klaus, who holds onto grudges like they are small helpless animals, and eventually wound up in Fell's Church, VA, in 1864, where she--now calling herself Katherine Pierce--either did the best thing or the dumbest in her entire long life: she started messing around with the Salvatores. (She also gave George Lockwood a moonstone and turned over 26 other vampires and Emily Bennett to the town council to save her own skin, but for real: that Salvatore thing is the one with the real lasting consequences.)
As part of her own Xanatos Gambit, Katherine let Damon--who spent the next 145 years desperately in love with her--think she was trapped underground while she was, in fact, walking around and trying to avoid Klaus. She also made allies with her descendant, Isobel Flemming--Elena's birth mother and Alaric's wife--and eventually returned to Mystic Falls with the intent of turning Elena over to Klaus and saving her own skin.
Things did not go as planned. Obviously.
Katherine, however, remains alive and a constant irritation: no one trusts her, everyone hates her, and she does not give a shit about either. She will use whatever methods are necessary and do whatever she has to to survive, thus making her the smartest person on this entire show.
KLAUS
Klaus is the world's oldest vampire.
No, wait, he's one of the world's oldest vampires, along with his brothers and sisters, all of whom are (mostly) dead by his hand.
No, wait, he's actually a werewolf-vampire hybrid, which is what happens when you become a vampire and your dad was a werewolf and your werewolf-triggering curse is blocked by a group of really on-the-ball witches.
No, wait, he's actually Alaric Saltzman. (This one was true for about a 36-hour period.)
--okay, so we don't really know who Klaus is yet, except that he has a Plan of some kind, and is exactly four times smarter than anyone else on Team Salvatore. So that...does not bode really well, does it?
DESIGNATED HUMANS
CAROL LOCKWOOD
Tyler's mom and the current de facto mayor of Mystic Falls following the "accidental" death of her husband in a weird-ass electrical fire--actually, he got taken out by the Gilbert device and stashed in the basement of his office along with a lot of other vampires (including Damon), one of whom snapped his neck--Carol's also the current head of the Town Council, a group of humans from the Founding Families (Lockwood, Forbes, Gilbert, Fell, and Salvatore) dedicated to making sure vampires never get a foothold into Mystic Falls again.
This gets much funnier when you realize that A) Damon's been on the Council since he killed his "uncle" Zach and B) her entire family comes pre-loaded with werewolves.
LIZ FORBES
Caroline's mom and the current sheriff of Mystic Falls, Liz has had not the best few years. She was raised to hate vampires, only to find that both her daughter and one of her closest friends (Damon--no, I know) are vampires; even worse, she had to get confirmation from Matt Donovan, because Caroline was (understandably) too freaked out to tell her mom and risk death or--worse--her mom not loving her anymore. Thankfully, Liz seems to have come to grips with Caroline's wacky new medical condition, and is trying to be okay with it.
The Damon thing is sketchier, since she was shooting at him when she hit and temporarily killed Jeremy, but we'll see.
DEAD PEOPLE OF NOTE
(I wanted to call this "The Lists of the Dead", but in two seasons they've killed off 48 people, so that...would be a prohibitively long post.)
ELIJAH
Up until recently, Elijah was Klaus's only surviving sibling. This may or may not have been because he left his side a couple hundred years ago and spent the intervening time trying to figure out a way to kill him. He hooked up with Team Salvatore primarily because of Elena, who was the key to breaking Klaus's curse.
And then, of course, Klaus straight-up lied to Elijah, who then totally did not murder him like he was supposed to, and Klaus--as befits this show--turned around and killed him. Which is why we should not trust evil people! Evil murderers! Who are also liars! AT SOME POINT SOMEONE SHOULD REMEMBER THIS.
ROSE
Rose being here is all Katherine's fault. No, really.
After being changed at sometime around the 1500s--we never got a specific year--Rose ended up best friends with a vampire named Trevor. If that name sounds familiar, it should; he was the poor bastard Katherine pretended to love in order to become a vampire herself. Klaus found out about Trevor's part in helping Katherine escape--and Rose, by proxy--and spent the next 500 years hunting them down, because that guy holds onto grudges the way most people hold onto family photos. She and Trevor kidnapped Elena as part of an overly-complicated plot by Elijah to get her to trust him; after Elijah killed Trevor--sorry, Trev--for screwing up, Rose bolted and ended up allying with Team Salvatore herself to try and stop Klaus. She and Damon also became friends, with added benefits. (For those of you who've been watching the show, she was in the early stages of being his Lexi, but with sex.)
Rose ended up being the prime example of what happens when a werewolf bites a vampire. Damon was forced to mercy-kill her before she could degenerate any further.
ISOBEL FLEMMING
Isobel's story intersects with Team Salvatore's in three very important ways.
First: while in high school, she became pregnant by her then-boyfriend, John Gilbert. Realizing she couldn't keep the child, John arranged for the child--Elena--to be adopted by his brother Grayson and Grayson's wife Miranda.
Second: Either in college or shortly thereafter, Isobel met and married Alaric Saltzman and started grad school, focusing on parapsychology, most likely because her hometown was adjacent to Mystic Falls and she'd heard the rumors of vampires being real. Her research proved the legends were real, and, for whatever reason, she decided she wanted to become a vampire herself.
Third: John arranged for her to meet Damon Salvatore, who slept with her and turned her into a vampire. She disappeared, leaving no body behind and police suspicious that Alaric had murdered his wife and disposed of her body. Instead, she became used to her new life as a vampire, choosing to shut off her emotions and allying herself with Katherine.
Unfortunately, Isobel learned what most vampires do--the whole thing is really overrated--and ran afoul of Klaus, who compelled her to kill herself (shortly after handing Alaric over so Klaus could temporarily possess him).
JENNA SOMMERS
Elena's mom's little sister came back to Mystic Falls to balance grad school with trying to parent a couple of teenagers. She worried a lot that she couldn't do it; she wondered if she was messing up about every ten minutes, while rolling her eyes at asshole exes (Logan "Scum" Fell!) and getting compelled, like, every other episode. But for a woman just shy of thirty trying to deal with a couple of kids, one of whom started off as a nascent drug dealer, she did pretty well. She liked her wine (and wine's badass cousin, tequila); she liked Alaric even more. She coped remarkably well once she found out about the whole vampires/werewolves/witches thing. (It's hard not to like a lady who points a crossbow at her boyfriend because she thinks he might still be possessed by the world's first vampire. It's even harder not to like her when she's known about all this for roughly six hours.)
So, of course, this being Mystic Falls, Klaus used her as part of Plan B and turned her into a vampire only to sacrifice her to break his blood curse. Because if there's one thing you can count on in Mystic Falls, it's that it'll break your heart at the worst possible moment.
Jenna is buried in the Gilbert family crypt, along with her sister Miranda, Miranda's husband Grayson, and John Gilbert.
VICKI DONOVAN
Vicki Donovan--Matt's little sister, Jeremy's sort-of ex-girlfriend, Tyler's definite ex-girlfriend--is, sadly, most often used as a cautionary tale instead of a person. She died at the beginning of season one, having been turned into a vampire by Damon in some sort of drunken fit of pique and killed by Jeremy to keep her from going after Elena.
So, of course, now that Jeremy's seeing dead people, who's the second person he sees? Vicki.
Yeah. This is gonna go great.
Season 3 starts on Thursday, September 15, at 8 PM EST. The first two seasons are currently available on DVD. You can marathon it in a week if you try. You can marathon it in a weekend if you don't sleep and judiciously time your food and pee breaks. GET ON IT.
No, seriously.
You would think, from the shorthand--teenage girl torn between two vampire brothers--that that is total bullshit. And if that was what the show was about in its entirety, you might be right. That's just shorthand, though. The actual story is more like "teenage girl torn between two vampire brothers realizes, like, two months in that if that was her entire problem, her life would be SO MUCH FUCKING SIMPLER".
Also, it is balls-out awesome.
TEAM SALVATORE
(Kind of a misnomer, as Stefan may or may not still be on Team Salvatore, and getting more than three of these guys in on any plan at any given point is like herding cats, but TS is easier to type than "vampire-hunting cabal made up of people in the credits", so here we are.)
ELENA GILBERT
Elena Gilbert is actually pretty normal for a teenage girl. Her parents died just over a year ago, leaving her and her younger brother Jeremy to be raised by their aunt Jenna. Her priorities have changed; now the (former) cheerleader just wants to be introspective and write in her diary and try and make the best of things.
Then she meets Stefan, and everything goes straight to hell.
See, in addition to being a typical teenage girl, Elena's also A) the descendent of Katherine, Stefan (and Damon's) ex-girlfriend and sire, and her exact physical doppelganger, which makes sense because she's also B) the Petrova Doppelganger, the lynchpin in a curse that kept the world's first vampire from turning into something worse. Her best friends have turned out to be a witch and a vampire, she's developed a really irritating tendency towards a martyr complex when under stress, and she gets kidnapped, like, a lot.
She also breaks furniture to make stakes when cornered by crazed vampires, escapes police custody because she has No Time For This Shit, and pimp-slapped Damon in the face two days after meeting him. I love her.
STEFAN SALVATORE
If we're using Dionysus vs. Apollo scoring scale, Stefan Salvatore is Apollo. Having been turned into a vampire in 1864, he tends to go off the rails more than he'd care to admit; a few decades back he decided to mend his ways and became vegan (for a vampire, anyway: he only drinks animal blood), and try to have a semblance of a normal life.
The thing about Apollo that no one ever remembers? He's sort of a dick, too. And when Stefan goes off the rails, it's--you ever see Unstoppable? It's like that. No, not the part with Chris Pine. The part with the train.
Which is not to say that Stefan's not a good guy; he is. He works hard at being one. He's loyal, smart, surprisingly funny, self-depricating, and charming. And all of that's probably just gone out the window, because to save Damon's life, he went back on human blood and agreed to become Klaus's Dragon.
As an example: he used to be called "Ripper", and he once ate a migrant village in Monterry in the early 1900s. One suspects his return to Mystic Falls will go about as well.
DAMON SALVATORE
Damon Salvatore is batshit crazy.
I really could end it there, because that sort of says it all: Damon Salvatore is batshit crazy. He's in love with his brother's girlfriend, just remembering how "having friends" works, and dealing with what appears to be a quarter-season's worth of guilt over his friend-with-benefits Rose being killed by werewolves in his place that left him with a decent-sized death wish. Also, he's admitted he's best friends with the guy whose wife he slept with and turned, he's also friends with the sheriff that wants every vampire in town dead, and people keep torturing him. (Nothing beats Pearl putting out his eyes from last year, but this year's "baby werewolf builds a stake-collar like it's Saw III" comes kind of close.)
He's also a mind-fucking, vicious, brutal son of a bitch who still kills waaaaaaaay more people than he should, whammies ladies into sleeping with him because he hates himself, and keeps a flamethrower around for recreational uses. He's like a shark that's remembering how to be a real boy.
You need to keep something in mind, though: he might look like a real boy, and hope to one day be one again, but right now? Still a shark.
BONNIE BENNETT
Bonnie's heard her whole life that she's a witch. But that's just par for the course when your grandmother teaches Occult at the local college--no, I know, that's not a thing; just go with it--and is sort of a local kook, if a literate one. And it's not like she's not a little strange: sometimes she knew things before they happened, like with Heath Ledger, and she gets feelings about people when she first meets them. Nothing that strange, really.
That's not a witch. A witch can make things float and give people aneuryisms when they irritate her: that's a witch. And that's what Bonnie is.
This isn't an isolated incident; Bonnie comes from a long line of witches ("Bennett witches", in the canon, meaning they have a rep), descending from her ancestor, Emily Bennett, Katherine's "maid" and former friend. It's actually thanks to Damon that Bonnie's alive at all, through a really complicated Xanatos Gambit Emily busted out in 1864; Damon and Bonnie are equally irritated by this, since they hate each other, though in light of the whole "let's not let Klaus kill Elena" thing, they've sort of agreed to find each other necessary. This does not stop Bonnie from bursting blood vessels in his head every twenty minutes, which is delightful.
Bonnie's also had classically bad luck with dating/being attracted to guys who are either evil or end up dead, so she changed this up by dating Jeremy...and then he got killed in the finale, necessitating Bonnie bring him back with magic. That, unfortunately, has had consequences. But we'll get to that in a bit.
CAROLINE FORBES
Caroline Forbes' life didn't start 'til she died.
--well, no, that's not really true. She was pretty, and popular, and had two best friends; she had not the best luck with guys 'til she started dating Matt, Elena's ex-boyfriend (with Elena's permission, thus not breaking Girl Code); she had a mom who was busy being sheriff and a dad who was busy with his boyfriend. She was nice, in a really vague way, and a little neurotic, and kind of jealous of Elena and Bonnie's friendships with each other, and smarter than people gave her credit for being. She was a person, just like everyone else.
And then she became a vampire. And she got better.
See, what they don't tell you about becoming a vampire is that you can shut your emotions off; it's almost hard not to, because vampires feel everything at a constant state of It Goes to Eleven. Not Caroline. Caroline feels everything, good and bad, and it's made her a stronger person. She loves more fiercely, and lets herself feel despair when she's sad, and gets irritated when people do stupid shit. She's the same as she ever was, if faster and with brand-new teeth, and she never, ever gives up. Which is why fandom loves her, and why you should, too.
ALARIC SALTZMAN
Alaric Saltzman, the town's resident steampunky vampire killing history teacher, moved to Virginia from North Carolina, ostensibly to take over the position as history teacher at the high school after Mr. Tanner was killed by a mountain lion. (COUGH.) In reality, he was a historian and self-taught vampire hunter, there to kill the vampire that had murdered his wife: Damon Salvatore.
Of course, that didn't really work, because a) he was self-taught and therefore not all that great, and b) Damon is really, really good at killing people. Their confrontation ended with Alaric being killed. It didn't take, thanks to Alaric wearing a Gilbert ring--long story--but Alaric decided to stick around anyway. He's currently the front-runner for being Elena and Jeremy's legal guardian, as they are flat-out of relatives and he was sort of Elena's stepdad.
Also, through a process literally too confusing for the characters--seriously, you can see it sometimes: "Why are we friends?" "I have no fucking idea."--he and Damon are best friends. No, seriously: Alaric is beffies with the guy who killed him. Granted, it's the sort of friendship predicated on killing vampires and getting shitfaced a great deal, but still: friends. He's even told Damon that to his face. Damon's response...really needs to be seen to be believed.
Both his wife and his girlfriend have ended up A) vampires and B) dead, so one suspects he's gonna be taking a break from dating for a while.
TYLER LOCKWOOD
Tyler hasn't had a great year: his girlfriend vanishes and turns up dead in a shallow grave, then his dad dies in a remarkably weird fire the same night he freaks out and gets into a car accident, ending with his best friend's girlfriend in a coma. Then Uncle Mason shows up, and hey! Guess what! Uncle Mason's a werewolf! And after a really awkward incident at a masquerade ball where a girl ended up dead, so is Tyler!
Then everything goes to hell. Jules, Mason's friend, comes to town to teach him about being a werewolf, except Jules and her friend also tell him Caroline - who's now a vampire, and who Tyler's developed feelings for - has been lying to him about everything, including what happened to Mason (hint: Damon happened). Tyler, in shock, watches Caroline get tortured, then leaves town as much because Caroline's furious with him (FOR GOOD REASON, LOCKWOOD, JESUS) as because he wants to learn more about his new "condition". He returned to town just in time to almost be used in the curse-breaking ceremony Klaus had planned, but Damon's timely rescue - no, I know - saved him, and Tyler, luckily, managed to sit out the usual season finale batshit-insanity that hits Mystic Falls, usually accompanied by people in Civil War reenactment uniforms. (Seriously.)
That's okay, though. There's always this year.
MATT DONOVAN
Matt's year has been just about as weird as Tyler's: "I have a girlfriend! No I don't! I miss her! I am working like 50+ hours a week because my mom keeps skeeving off to hang out with whatever boyfriend she's currently following around like the Grateful Dead, and as she's a single parent, I am basically raising myself in addition to going to school full-time and possibly still playing football! My sister was murdered a while back, and no one seems to give a shit! Now I have a girlfriend again and HOLY SHIT SHE'S A FUCKING VAMPIRE."
After a brief stint of informing on Team Salvatore to Sheriff Forbes, Matt did possibly the most sensible thing anyone's ever done on this show: dusted off his hands, basically told Caroline "I'm out", and walked away from the entire clusterfuck. Seriously, that is gangbusters. I want to hug the guy.
I mean, it won't last, because he's managed to make it through two seasons without having an actual storyarc until the last six episodes of season two, but we live in hope.
JEREMY GILBERT
Jeremy is, on the face of it, Mystic Falls' unluckiest panda: he keeps dating girls who end up dead, he's orphaned, he ended last season with a suicide attempt and the knowledge that Damon screwed with his head on Elena's say-so. (Admittedly, screwing with Jeremy's brain has mostly resulted in him not dealing drugs anymore and getting better hair, but it's the principle of the thing.)
So, naturally, he winds up with a Gilbert ring and a hot witch girlfriend. And, as a result of Bonnie code-cheating reality by bringing him back from the dead, the ability to see dead people.
Oh, no, this won't go poorly at all.
OUR VILLAINS
KATHERINE PIERCE/KATERINA PETROVA
Katerina Petrova was born to die.
This seems like a fairly obvious statement: everyone is, in the end. But this one's literal: as the first Petrova Doppelganger (see Elena), Katerina's blood could be used to break the curse placed on Klaus hundreds of years previously. Katerina, who, by the tender age of 18-mumble, was already pretty much Romania's original Action Girl, found out and did exactly what anyone would do in that situation: found a vampire to trick into thinking she loved him, then got wounded enough for him to give her blood to keep from dying and promptly snap her own motherfucking neck, making herself a vampire.
Yes. Katerina Petrova is basically her own sire. That is just how she rolls.
Katerina spent the next 500 years on the run from Klaus, who holds onto grudges like they are small helpless animals, and eventually wound up in Fell's Church, VA, in 1864, where she--now calling herself Katherine Pierce--either did the best thing or the dumbest in her entire long life: she started messing around with the Salvatores. (She also gave George Lockwood a moonstone and turned over 26 other vampires and Emily Bennett to the town council to save her own skin, but for real: that Salvatore thing is the one with the real lasting consequences.)
As part of her own Xanatos Gambit, Katherine let Damon--who spent the next 145 years desperately in love with her--think she was trapped underground while she was, in fact, walking around and trying to avoid Klaus. She also made allies with her descendant, Isobel Flemming--Elena's birth mother and Alaric's wife--and eventually returned to Mystic Falls with the intent of turning Elena over to Klaus and saving her own skin.
Things did not go as planned. Obviously.
Katherine, however, remains alive and a constant irritation: no one trusts her, everyone hates her, and she does not give a shit about either. She will use whatever methods are necessary and do whatever she has to to survive, thus making her the smartest person on this entire show.
KLAUS
Klaus is the world's oldest vampire.
No, wait, he's one of the world's oldest vampires, along with his brothers and sisters, all of whom are (mostly) dead by his hand.
No, wait, he's actually a werewolf-vampire hybrid, which is what happens when you become a vampire and your dad was a werewolf and your werewolf-triggering curse is blocked by a group of really on-the-ball witches.
No, wait, he's actually Alaric Saltzman. (This one was true for about a 36-hour period.)
--okay, so we don't really know who Klaus is yet, except that he has a Plan of some kind, and is exactly four times smarter than anyone else on Team Salvatore. So that...does not bode really well, does it?
DESIGNATED HUMANS
CAROL LOCKWOOD
Tyler's mom and the current de facto mayor of Mystic Falls following the "accidental" death of her husband in a weird-ass electrical fire--actually, he got taken out by the Gilbert device and stashed in the basement of his office along with a lot of other vampires (including Damon), one of whom snapped his neck--Carol's also the current head of the Town Council, a group of humans from the Founding Families (Lockwood, Forbes, Gilbert, Fell, and Salvatore) dedicated to making sure vampires never get a foothold into Mystic Falls again.
This gets much funnier when you realize that A) Damon's been on the Council since he killed his "uncle" Zach and B) her entire family comes pre-loaded with werewolves.
LIZ FORBES
Caroline's mom and the current sheriff of Mystic Falls, Liz has had not the best few years. She was raised to hate vampires, only to find that both her daughter and one of her closest friends (Damon--no, I know) are vampires; even worse, she had to get confirmation from Matt Donovan, because Caroline was (understandably) too freaked out to tell her mom and risk death or--worse--her mom not loving her anymore. Thankfully, Liz seems to have come to grips with Caroline's wacky new medical condition, and is trying to be okay with it.
The Damon thing is sketchier, since she was shooting at him when she hit and temporarily killed Jeremy, but we'll see.
DEAD PEOPLE OF NOTE
(I wanted to call this "The Lists of the Dead", but in two seasons they've killed off 48 people, so that...would be a prohibitively long post.)
ELIJAH
Up until recently, Elijah was Klaus's only surviving sibling. This may or may not have been because he left his side a couple hundred years ago and spent the intervening time trying to figure out a way to kill him. He hooked up with Team Salvatore primarily because of Elena, who was the key to breaking Klaus's curse.
And then, of course, Klaus straight-up lied to Elijah, who then totally did not murder him like he was supposed to, and Klaus--as befits this show--turned around and killed him. Which is why we should not trust evil people! Evil murderers! Who are also liars! AT SOME POINT SOMEONE SHOULD REMEMBER THIS.
ROSE
Rose being here is all Katherine's fault. No, really.
After being changed at sometime around the 1500s--we never got a specific year--Rose ended up best friends with a vampire named Trevor. If that name sounds familiar, it should; he was the poor bastard Katherine pretended to love in order to become a vampire herself. Klaus found out about Trevor's part in helping Katherine escape--and Rose, by proxy--and spent the next 500 years hunting them down, because that guy holds onto grudges the way most people hold onto family photos. She and Trevor kidnapped Elena as part of an overly-complicated plot by Elijah to get her to trust him; after Elijah killed Trevor--sorry, Trev--for screwing up, Rose bolted and ended up allying with Team Salvatore herself to try and stop Klaus. She and Damon also became friends, with added benefits. (For those of you who've been watching the show, she was in the early stages of being his Lexi, but with sex.)
Rose ended up being the prime example of what happens when a werewolf bites a vampire. Damon was forced to mercy-kill her before she could degenerate any further.
ISOBEL FLEMMING
Isobel's story intersects with Team Salvatore's in three very important ways.
First: while in high school, she became pregnant by her then-boyfriend, John Gilbert. Realizing she couldn't keep the child, John arranged for the child--Elena--to be adopted by his brother Grayson and Grayson's wife Miranda.
Second: Either in college or shortly thereafter, Isobel met and married Alaric Saltzman and started grad school, focusing on parapsychology, most likely because her hometown was adjacent to Mystic Falls and she'd heard the rumors of vampires being real. Her research proved the legends were real, and, for whatever reason, she decided she wanted to become a vampire herself.
Third: John arranged for her to meet Damon Salvatore, who slept with her and turned her into a vampire. She disappeared, leaving no body behind and police suspicious that Alaric had murdered his wife and disposed of her body. Instead, she became used to her new life as a vampire, choosing to shut off her emotions and allying herself with Katherine.
Unfortunately, Isobel learned what most vampires do--the whole thing is really overrated--and ran afoul of Klaus, who compelled her to kill herself (shortly after handing Alaric over so Klaus could temporarily possess him).
JENNA SOMMERS
Elena's mom's little sister came back to Mystic Falls to balance grad school with trying to parent a couple of teenagers. She worried a lot that she couldn't do it; she wondered if she was messing up about every ten minutes, while rolling her eyes at asshole exes (Logan "Scum" Fell!) and getting compelled, like, every other episode. But for a woman just shy of thirty trying to deal with a couple of kids, one of whom started off as a nascent drug dealer, she did pretty well. She liked her wine (and wine's badass cousin, tequila); she liked Alaric even more. She coped remarkably well once she found out about the whole vampires/werewolves/witches thing. (It's hard not to like a lady who points a crossbow at her boyfriend because she thinks he might still be possessed by the world's first vampire. It's even harder not to like her when she's known about all this for roughly six hours.)
So, of course, this being Mystic Falls, Klaus used her as part of Plan B and turned her into a vampire only to sacrifice her to break his blood curse. Because if there's one thing you can count on in Mystic Falls, it's that it'll break your heart at the worst possible moment.
Jenna is buried in the Gilbert family crypt, along with her sister Miranda, Miranda's husband Grayson, and John Gilbert.
VICKI DONOVAN
Vicki Donovan--Matt's little sister, Jeremy's sort-of ex-girlfriend, Tyler's definite ex-girlfriend--is, sadly, most often used as a cautionary tale instead of a person. She died at the beginning of season one, having been turned into a vampire by Damon in some sort of drunken fit of pique and killed by Jeremy to keep her from going after Elena.
So, of course, now that Jeremy's seeing dead people, who's the second person he sees? Vicki.
Yeah. This is gonna go great.
Season 3 starts on Thursday, September 15, at 8 PM EST. The first two seasons are currently available on DVD. You can marathon it in a week if you try. You can marathon it in a weekend if you don't sleep and judiciously time your food and pee breaks. GET ON IT.
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DEAR SHOW: PLEASE LET BONNIE TRY TO EXPLODE DAMON'S HEAD AT LEAST ONE MORE TIME THIS SEASON. PLEASE.
(It's also worth noting that IIRC none of the originals, Elijah included, have been perma-killed; Klaus could've bit them all, but hasn't. THEY COULD COME BACK.)
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(Actually, a lot of Bonnie's storyline was dropped when she started with Jeremy, but this year is supposed to feature her pretty heavily. This will undoubtedly piss off people who hate Bonnie. You know. Stupid people.)
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Oh, and yeah, needs MOAR ANNA!
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*RUBS HANDS TOGETHER*
Oh, murderous show of my heart!
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You're basically my favorite recapper for several reasons but the biggest ones are the way you totally support the chicks on the show, especially the awesomeness of Elena (something way too many people forget), know that Bonnie is waaaay better than she's given credit for on the show and call Damon out on his shit. Actually you call everyone out on their shit and I love it.
I did want to ask though, did you end up doing a season finale recap?
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*long pause* *hyperventilating*
Anyway: I did, and it can be found at: http://iphignia939.dreamwidth.org/35275.html?#cutid1
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http://iphignia939.livejournal.com/409667.html#cutid1
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And thanks! Not sure how I missed the finale recap.
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You might have missed it because...I did not post it to DW? I can only assume my brain was too busy freaking out to actually go "crosspost this!" Note to self: work on that next week, dork.
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