TVD S3 reaction post
Monstrous, monstrous post. Spoiler and content warnings for all things S3.
So I've had time to mull. And I've come to the conclusion that TVD S3 was the most thematically impressive season yet.
S3 is about the slow, gradual loss of innocence in both terms - in the sense of illusions about the world, and in the sense of incurring guilt. It's the perfect thematic background to Elena becoming a vampire. I think the show took a really interesting tack with this. Narrative convention dictates that disillusionment is a one-step process, and usually marks corruption with a point of no return. But TVD is all about trolling story expectations, not fulfilling them. Almost every character with a major arc this season - the Originals, Stefan, Bonnie, Tyler, Ric, and of course Elena - serves as a deliberate deconstruction of this narrative convention.
The show - by and large successfully - treads an extremely delicate line in the approach it takes to showing and explaining abuse, with neither othering by way of total vilification, or excusal via woobification. The cycle of abuse story with the Originals deserves its own post, or several. S3 is the season of the Originals not just because the Mikaelsen family is so important to the plot (though, THE HEAVENS DID OPEN AND LO, THERE WAS REBEKAH) but because the show makes its definitive statement on its own take on the vampire mythos through the vampire origin story. The crisis of Henrick's death tipped Mikael and Esther into destroying their children, but it took the catastrophic direction it did because of the way their family always operated.
The season takes care to show us that the Originals were never too deep in. They could always, always have just stopped. Finn is a really important character for this, because he had the same experience as his siblings who did become monsters, but doesn't seem to have made the destructive choices they did. Then again, he didn't have to hold out for too long, either. We don't know what he and Sage would have become; we do know it wasn't inevitable.
I know mileage varies on Stefan's storyline this season, but it was incredibly powerful for similar reasons. Stefan was primed for a lot of reasons to slide to corruption by Klaus, but that slight change in degree made it feel like a whole new nightmare.
This is particularly evident in the Klaus -> Stefan -> Elena chain of abuse. Those mid-season episodes where Stefan and Klaus are both in Mystic Falls are intense, because we see in real time a situation where Stefan is simultaneously abuser and victim, sometimes within a single scene. The show doesn't have him go balls-out Angelus, either, but merely allows Elena to be appropriately alarmed by a slight Klaus-instigated increase in the same behavior that she accepted as romantic back in S1 - the stalking, the half-truths, the constant undermining of her autonomy and emotional independence - which in both instances are a pale imitation of the same number Klaus did on his head, in the 1920s and the present. The infamous "turn it off" scene felt like too little because it was meant to be, the hair's breadth turn of a dial, not the flip of a switch.
That's an incredibly ambitious sell, and not a storyline that lends itself particularly easily to a morally comfortable resolution. But damn, it is excruciatingly honest.
Magic, unlike vampirism, doesn't necessarily carry connotations of villainy. Because of that, Bonnie's story this season is a strong and relatively easy demonstration of inherently amoral power. She's frighteningly cool about stopping Jeremy's heart, neither overeager nor frightened, even though restarting it was a huge earth-shaking event just a few short months ago. And she did it toward the big scary end of: setting aside her grudge against Klaus to save her friends. Her friends, including Tyler, who was a definite goner if Klaus died and now might be salvageable - but still, Bonnie is enabling the escalation of Tyler's victimization by Klaus.
Tyler - okay, I'm partial, but he's a big player this season because he's been at the center of a lot of these questions since the very beginning. The werewolf metaphor would seem to contradict the season's theme of corruption - it's all about circumstances people don't choose, about events that they may or may not have done of their own free will, and then about loss of control. It's not a walkback, because werewolves and vampires are generally two different species. But, just around the time Uncle Mason found peace, Tyler became a hybrid and had to struggle against the seductive painlessness of that existence.
Tyler's fight does a neat job of deconstructing the idea of redemptive (blech) arc, which is usually presented as grueling but basically linear story. Tyler doesn't have shit to redeem himself for - the werewolf curse isn't his fault, and he doesn't slide into murder and mayhem once he gets vamped. But whether or not he deserves his way out of the hole is as gloriously irrelevant as the progress he fights for tooth and nail. Working through his sire bond was great for his personal growth, but it didn't free him from Klaus.
I stand by my initial evaluation that the Alaric storyline missed the mark in a big way. That said, the setup was great, and the concept had a lot of potential. Every death both hardened him to the idea of violence and made him angrier and angrier at the responsible parties, and at his own powerlessness in being forced to live among and around them, until he became just as dangerous as them.
I was going to say that the only character who doesn't fit in the pattern is Damon, simply because he didn't have much of an arc this season, but 1912 pulled him into the theme as much as anyone. He didn't become his gleefully horrible self right away, though not out of any moral considerations, but because he was too busy sulking about Katherine. He consciously signed up for Serial Killer 101 with Sage and got damned good at it.
Also fitting the pattern with minimal screentime: Jeremy Cleaver Gilbert. Jeremy's story is a pointed statement that innocence isn't the same thing as ignorance, and we get bludgeoned over the head with the fact that neither type of innocence can protect him. Slash, a baseball bat. KOL, NEVER LEAVE US.
And all of these threads pull together to create the most excellent main event. I admit to having almost no handle at all on Elena. But I think the season did a fantastic job ramping up to her turning, particularly this season. She's always done morally questionable things. She's been treating Jeremy's mind as an Etch-a-Sketch since S1. People always have the potential to become awful, it's just that vampires have the power to act on their own bad instincts, and minimal if any checks on using it. As the Salvatores have gotten more and more devoted to Elena, she's become just as reliant on and uninhibited about having their power available to her. Elena's not-vampire status has been a trivial quirk of biology for some time now, and little else.
This season, she's become increasingly more willing to take that for granted, and even more ruthless about using it. Homecoming full-on inverts the Elena/Katherine dichotomy, with Elena able to coldly manipulate and then dagger Rebekah, while Katherine gives up the plot against Klaus and talks Stefan into caring in order to save Damon. The distinction between them is situational, not moral. Her super-normative reaction to the love triangle shifts dramatically this season - she no longer feels the need to distance herself from her attraction to "bad brother" Damon, even after Stefan starts to pull himself together.
The show has turned the tables even on its core assumption of "turning" into a vampire, where death and first feeding are one pivotal existential fall into iniquity. This is Elena's final illusion - that anything, closure or love or even death, can save her from the daily struggle of ambiguity. Transition will last her forever. Because, that's life.
So I've had time to mull. And I've come to the conclusion that TVD S3 was the most thematically impressive season yet.
S3 is about the slow, gradual loss of innocence in both terms - in the sense of illusions about the world, and in the sense of incurring guilt. It's the perfect thematic background to Elena becoming a vampire. I think the show took a really interesting tack with this. Narrative convention dictates that disillusionment is a one-step process, and usually marks corruption with a point of no return. But TVD is all about trolling story expectations, not fulfilling them. Almost every character with a major arc this season - the Originals, Stefan, Bonnie, Tyler, Ric, and of course Elena - serves as a deliberate deconstruction of this narrative convention.
The show - by and large successfully - treads an extremely delicate line in the approach it takes to showing and explaining abuse, with neither othering by way of total vilification, or excusal via woobification. The cycle of abuse story with the Originals deserves its own post, or several. S3 is the season of the Originals not just because the Mikaelsen family is so important to the plot (though, THE HEAVENS DID OPEN AND LO, THERE WAS REBEKAH) but because the show makes its definitive statement on its own take on the vampire mythos through the vampire origin story. The crisis of Henrick's death tipped Mikael and Esther into destroying their children, but it took the catastrophic direction it did because of the way their family always operated.
The season takes care to show us that the Originals were never too deep in. They could always, always have just stopped. Finn is a really important character for this, because he had the same experience as his siblings who did become monsters, but doesn't seem to have made the destructive choices they did. Then again, he didn't have to hold out for too long, either. We don't know what he and Sage would have become; we do know it wasn't inevitable.
I know mileage varies on Stefan's storyline this season, but it was incredibly powerful for similar reasons. Stefan was primed for a lot of reasons to slide to corruption by Klaus, but that slight change in degree made it feel like a whole new nightmare.
This is particularly evident in the Klaus -> Stefan -> Elena chain of abuse. Those mid-season episodes where Stefan and Klaus are both in Mystic Falls are intense, because we see in real time a situation where Stefan is simultaneously abuser and victim, sometimes within a single scene. The show doesn't have him go balls-out Angelus, either, but merely allows Elena to be appropriately alarmed by a slight Klaus-instigated increase in the same behavior that she accepted as romantic back in S1 - the stalking, the half-truths, the constant undermining of her autonomy and emotional independence - which in both instances are a pale imitation of the same number Klaus did on his head, in the 1920s and the present. The infamous "turn it off" scene felt like too little because it was meant to be, the hair's breadth turn of a dial, not the flip of a switch.
That's an incredibly ambitious sell, and not a storyline that lends itself particularly easily to a morally comfortable resolution. But damn, it is excruciatingly honest.
Magic, unlike vampirism, doesn't necessarily carry connotations of villainy. Because of that, Bonnie's story this season is a strong and relatively easy demonstration of inherently amoral power. She's frighteningly cool about stopping Jeremy's heart, neither overeager nor frightened, even though restarting it was a huge earth-shaking event just a few short months ago. And she did it toward the big scary end of: setting aside her grudge against Klaus to save her friends. Her friends, including Tyler, who was a definite goner if Klaus died and now might be salvageable - but still, Bonnie is enabling the escalation of Tyler's victimization by Klaus.
Tyler - okay, I'm partial, but he's a big player this season because he's been at the center of a lot of these questions since the very beginning. The werewolf metaphor would seem to contradict the season's theme of corruption - it's all about circumstances people don't choose, about events that they may or may not have done of their own free will, and then about loss of control. It's not a walkback, because werewolves and vampires are generally two different species. But, just around the time Uncle Mason found peace, Tyler became a hybrid and had to struggle against the seductive painlessness of that existence.
Tyler's fight does a neat job of deconstructing the idea of redemptive (blech) arc, which is usually presented as grueling but basically linear story. Tyler doesn't have shit to redeem himself for - the werewolf curse isn't his fault, and he doesn't slide into murder and mayhem once he gets vamped. But whether or not he deserves his way out of the hole is as gloriously irrelevant as the progress he fights for tooth and nail. Working through his sire bond was great for his personal growth, but it didn't free him from Klaus.
I stand by my initial evaluation that the Alaric storyline missed the mark in a big way. That said, the setup was great, and the concept had a lot of potential. Every death both hardened him to the idea of violence and made him angrier and angrier at the responsible parties, and at his own powerlessness in being forced to live among and around them, until he became just as dangerous as them.
I was going to say that the only character who doesn't fit in the pattern is Damon, simply because he didn't have much of an arc this season, but 1912 pulled him into the theme as much as anyone. He didn't become his gleefully horrible self right away, though not out of any moral considerations, but because he was too busy sulking about Katherine. He consciously signed up for Serial Killer 101 with Sage and got damned good at it.
Also fitting the pattern with minimal screentime: Jeremy Cleaver Gilbert. Jeremy's story is a pointed statement that innocence isn't the same thing as ignorance, and we get bludgeoned over the head with the fact that neither type of innocence can protect him. Slash, a baseball bat. KOL, NEVER LEAVE US.
And all of these threads pull together to create the most excellent main event. I admit to having almost no handle at all on Elena. But I think the season did a fantastic job ramping up to her turning, particularly this season. She's always done morally questionable things. She's been treating Jeremy's mind as an Etch-a-Sketch since S1. People always have the potential to become awful, it's just that vampires have the power to act on their own bad instincts, and minimal if any checks on using it. As the Salvatores have gotten more and more devoted to Elena, she's become just as reliant on and uninhibited about having their power available to her. Elena's not-vampire status has been a trivial quirk of biology for some time now, and little else.
This season, she's become increasingly more willing to take that for granted, and even more ruthless about using it. Homecoming full-on inverts the Elena/Katherine dichotomy, with Elena able to coldly manipulate and then dagger Rebekah, while Katherine gives up the plot against Klaus and talks Stefan into caring in order to save Damon. The distinction between them is situational, not moral. Her super-normative reaction to the love triangle shifts dramatically this season - she no longer feels the need to distance herself from her attraction to "bad brother" Damon, even after Stefan starts to pull himself together.
The show has turned the tables even on its core assumption of "turning" into a vampire, where death and first feeding are one pivotal existential fall into iniquity. This is Elena's final illusion - that anything, closure or love or even death, can save her from the daily struggle of ambiguity. Transition will last her forever. Because, that's life.