The Originals: pre-gaming Elijah
aka omg fuck it, I started writing this post the night after 4x18 aired and fandom made with the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. This is my defense of Elijah's arc on TVD, and where I see the character as picking up in the new series. We'll all be sitting around laughing at me in the next couple of months, I'm sure, but that's part of the fun.
EDIT: I'm hoping to write up a companion piece about Klaus, but in the meantime/case I don't get around to it, this comment thread contains a lot of my thoughts about the character, as well as some of my thoughts about the nature of power and social organization in Mystic Falls, and I highly recommend the commentary by youcallitwinter and
12_12_12 .
The disagreement over Elijah - whether he was OOC in S4 by failing to live up to his "honorable," "good brother" persona - seems quite beside the point to me. Either he was not that and therefore was in character but an unlikeable asshole, or he actually was those things at one point in time and therefore his unsavory behavior and attitudes represent a technical writing failure. I would argue that the projected persona is one put forth by the character, not one that we the audience should ever have taken as truth, and his arc on TVD was the painful, drawn-out crumbling of that persona.
ways I disagree with fandom about Elijah:
I don't mean to imply that Elijah's ideals are solely a self-serving lie, conscious or unconscious. I think Elijah genuinely does value honor and integrity and harmony, and there have been times he's made a sincere effort to live up to those values. That is more than you can say about most folks IRL or especially in the TVD 'verse. However, this "moral" persona is mostly bullshit, and I think it is this way, again, for reasons that make sense once we know the Original family's backstory. Elijah's operating in an effective moral vacuum. The only people who can challenge an Originals are the other Originals. Effectively, the only voices of influence were Mikael, who ceded moral credibility with all the filicide, and Klaus, who is batshit crazy. Elijah believes himself to be the voice of reason, the honorable line between order and chaos, because in every conflict he's had a stake in for the last thousand years, he has been the voice of reason. He's spent literally centuries nurturing the conviction that he is the only existing reasonable authority figure: others are either out to get him and his and therefore must be stopped, or are beneath his notice. Of course he's paternalistic, condescending, and amoral on his best day.
Elijah also gets too much credit for his calm swagger. He could afford to speak softly, because someone else was lugging around the big stick. Klaus, as the 400-pound-gorilla/hybrid/resident bloodthirsty lunatic, could be counted upon to do the "strike terror into the hearts of mortals" PR for the Originals and their progeny, which freed Elijah up to be more of an ideals/idea man. I'm not sure how aware Elijah is of this dynamic - in some ways he strikes me as being the least self-aware of the three surviving Originals - because Klaus' impulsive demonstrations of force can very much be taken for granted.
This is a part of what enables Elijah to fancy himself a power-broker and negotiator, but I'm not sure how right he is about that. ie, Elijah is a terrible negotiator. He generally operates in a context where he has a massive edge over the other players involved. His super-super status means that his actual skills at negotiation are usually irrelevant. As of this point in the canon, the only real contests Elijah has faced have involved his immediate family; as a power player, his only worthy opponent so far has been Elena for a short while in S3, and she was working with Esther (and in any event has some super-skills of her own in this regard).
The largest impediment to his developing negotiation skills, however, is not just lack of practice. Elijah is just not a good judge of character, and the higher the stakes are for him, the worse he gets. After five hundred years of trying to kill Klaus, and a millennium of evidence as to the insanity and treachery of his brother, Elijah still cannot follow through on the fratricide attempt at the end of S2; he only really stands up to Klaus when he has all three of their other siblings by his side. He similarly sees through Esther and knows not to trust her, but rather than heed his instincts, he seeks out Elena in order to be reassured and told what he wants to hear concerning his mother's loyalties. And again, he can only bring himself to act against her with the backing of three of his siblings. When it comes to his family, and therefore his only true competition, Elijah consistently waits to be proven wrong, taken advantage of, and have his position reinforced by the shared outrage of several of his siblings before seeking retribution. He does not act to avert or minimize damage based on threats or warning signs as a true power player would, but maneuvers himself into constant reaction.
Bearing in mind the character as he's shown himself to be, I think his story thus far becomes not less consistent, but a good deal more interesting.
Season 2
In Season 2, Elijah was totally in charge of his image. He was seen entirely through the POV of a bunch of humans and the piddly-ass Salvatores. Our first impression of him was about as reliable as the view from the bottom of Niagara Falls is of someone at the top. We had absolutely no reason to doubt his toughness. Moreover, he was a vmpire who seemed controlled and non-malicious - not only enough to make him come across looking like a rare good guy, but also to make him look even more powerful as someone who could afford to rise above petty conflicts.
But let's look back, knowing what we know now. He frons like he fell out with Klaus 500 years ago over Katherine, but we know now that's not true, as they were all in Nw Orleans together. We know he's strong enough that it didn't matter if Elena was willing to 'negotiate,' because he could've subdued her at any time. Putting those things together, I wonder if he wasn't dawling around and trying to sabotage his assault on Klaus. He didn't want to let Klaus win the Petrova contest, but he also knew he wouldn't go though with stopping Klaus permanently. So he faffed around, wasting time projecting his Katherine issues onto Elena, still trying to out-class Klaus in the eyes of the doppelganger, and eventually not only sides with Klaus but starts to trust him.
This incident establishes a pattern of Elijah being unwilling to acknowledge his own commonalities with his brother: at the end of S2 Klaus did, as promised, reunite Elijah with their family. Doing so by daggering him first is exactly the kind of sadistic legalism Elijah himself engaged with in promising to leave Elena alone "until" the ritual of the night before. But, in contrast to Elena, whose chronically disempowered existence has forced her to become sophisticated enough to catch Elijah's self-made loophole, Elijah is both too arrogant and too desperate for what Klaus offers him to see the obvious trap.
Season 3
Elijah lost his mystique and position of strength hen he let Niklaus et the jump on him in season 2, and then S3 shows us his vulnerabilities. Not mere woobifying emotional vulnerabilities, either, but major cognitive weaknesses that trip him up at every turn.
Here is where S3 picks up from Elijah's perspective:
From Elijah's POV, he's got the upper hand morally and socially when his sainted mother arises from her grave. That must have been his first hopeful moment in centuries. He clearly wants to believe that things will be right, but he also knows not to trust it. He's desperate enough to take this "family business" to an outsider all but begging her to reassure him. Cognitive dissonance is a beast.
And then his mother tries to murder him.
That's some mythic, atavistic horror right there, that the person who made you can also discard you. Permanently. And while Mikael's awfulness may have intensified Klaus' cynicism about people generally, I suspect that Elijah (idealist and serial idolizer that he is) coped by treasuring her memory all the more. Similarly, while I wouldn't be surprised if he also did a lot of distancing himself from Mikael's violence by placing too much weight on the fact that Klaus was Mikael's primary target,* he loses that out here - he's tied in equally with his siblings, which means Esther wants him dead just as badly as the others and that he doesn't even have the cold comfort of being the biggest threat.
*[I don't know how comfortable I am going into this in a public post, but I think there's a fairly clear reason why the Originals in-universe, and presumably at least a critical mass of fans with whom they resonate, buy into the OSG fallacy? Because that formative experience of living in a home with a scapegoat/designated patient/buttmonkey/Klaus makes a person very invested in the OSG-like idea that some people JUST DO get treated worse than others. Accepting that an abuser is an abuser and the roots of their behavior are pretty much arbitrary is a hard enough thing when we're talking about cultural conditioning, but if that kind of victim-blaming is built into a person's formative relationships, it can be nearly impossible to uproot.]
Nobody's coming out of that looking great.
(I'm not skipping over the loss of Finn and the horrible moments when he thought he'd lost Klaus because they're not important, because clearly they are, but I think his POV was foregrounded enough during those episodes that I don't really have anything to add.)
Season 4, and Kat/Elijah
I bought it. I bought it, and I liked it as a continuation of his S3 arc. We're forced to take a look through the persona when Elijah proves himself to be haughty and petulant to Katarina, and frankly, kind of pathetic in just how transparent he was about those Mommy Issues. The curse of the doppelganger is to be all things ot all men. Elijah looks at the Petrovas and sees the innocence of the paradise lost. That innocence never actually existed, as we see through Rebekah's POV flashbacks, but Elijah works all the harder to preserve the idea. Katherine becomes the symbol of What Went Wrong. I think he really believed that if he could save her back in 1492, then it would save his family back in the Middle Ages, and he thinks that if he can cure her in the present day then it will heal all the rifts that have happened since. And just as he gives up on Katherine, a chance to truly rebuild his own family appears, leading us neatly to The Originals.
I want to see a story informed by the past, not one about the past, for all three of the lead characters. I think Elijah's arc, in particular, is posed not to be about redemption, but about self-actualization. Elijah knows what he wants to be, and I think we all know that he's capable of being it - the question is whether he will get there.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/308073.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
EDIT: I'm hoping to write up a companion piece about Klaus, but in the meantime/case I don't get around to it, this comment thread contains a lot of my thoughts about the character, as well as some of my thoughts about the nature of power and social organization in Mystic Falls, and I highly recommend the commentary by youcallitwinter and
12_12_12 .
The disagreement over Elijah - whether he was OOC in S4 by failing to live up to his "honorable," "good brother" persona - seems quite beside the point to me. Either he was not that and therefore was in character but an unlikeable asshole, or he actually was those things at one point in time and therefore his unsavory behavior and attitudes represent a technical writing failure. I would argue that the projected persona is one put forth by the character, not one that we the audience should ever have taken as truth, and his arc on TVD was the painful, drawn-out crumbling of that persona.
ways I disagree with fandom about Elijah:
I don't mean to imply that Elijah's ideals are solely a self-serving lie, conscious or unconscious. I think Elijah genuinely does value honor and integrity and harmony, and there have been times he's made a sincere effort to live up to those values. That is more than you can say about most folks IRL or especially in the TVD 'verse. However, this "moral" persona is mostly bullshit, and I think it is this way, again, for reasons that make sense once we know the Original family's backstory. Elijah's operating in an effective moral vacuum. The only people who can challenge an Originals are the other Originals. Effectively, the only voices of influence were Mikael, who ceded moral credibility with all the filicide, and Klaus, who is batshit crazy. Elijah believes himself to be the voice of reason, the honorable line between order and chaos, because in every conflict he's had a stake in for the last thousand years, he has been the voice of reason. He's spent literally centuries nurturing the conviction that he is the only existing reasonable authority figure: others are either out to get him and his and therefore must be stopped, or are beneath his notice. Of course he's paternalistic, condescending, and amoral on his best day.
Elijah also gets too much credit for his calm swagger. He could afford to speak softly, because someone else was lugging around the big stick. Klaus, as the 400-pound-gorilla/hybrid/resident bloodthirsty lunatic, could be counted upon to do the "strike terror into the hearts of mortals" PR for the Originals and their progeny, which freed Elijah up to be more of an ideals/idea man. I'm not sure how aware Elijah is of this dynamic - in some ways he strikes me as being the least self-aware of the three surviving Originals - because Klaus' impulsive demonstrations of force can very much be taken for granted.
This is a part of what enables Elijah to fancy himself a power-broker and negotiator, but I'm not sure how right he is about that. ie, Elijah is a terrible negotiator. He generally operates in a context where he has a massive edge over the other players involved. His super-super status means that his actual skills at negotiation are usually irrelevant. As of this point in the canon, the only real contests Elijah has faced have involved his immediate family; as a power player, his only worthy opponent so far has been Elena for a short while in S3, and she was working with Esther (and in any event has some super-skills of her own in this regard).
The largest impediment to his developing negotiation skills, however, is not just lack of practice. Elijah is just not a good judge of character, and the higher the stakes are for him, the worse he gets. After five hundred years of trying to kill Klaus, and a millennium of evidence as to the insanity and treachery of his brother, Elijah still cannot follow through on the fratricide attempt at the end of S2; he only really stands up to Klaus when he has all three of their other siblings by his side. He similarly sees through Esther and knows not to trust her, but rather than heed his instincts, he seeks out Elena in order to be reassured and told what he wants to hear concerning his mother's loyalties. And again, he can only bring himself to act against her with the backing of three of his siblings. When it comes to his family, and therefore his only true competition, Elijah consistently waits to be proven wrong, taken advantage of, and have his position reinforced by the shared outrage of several of his siblings before seeking retribution. He does not act to avert or minimize damage based on threats or warning signs as a true power player would, but maneuvers himself into constant reaction.
Bearing in mind the character as he's shown himself to be, I think his story thus far becomes not less consistent, but a good deal more interesting.
Season 2
In Season 2, Elijah was totally in charge of his image. He was seen entirely through the POV of a bunch of humans and the piddly-ass Salvatores. Our first impression of him was about as reliable as the view from the bottom of Niagara Falls is of someone at the top. We had absolutely no reason to doubt his toughness. Moreover, he was a vmpire who seemed controlled and non-malicious - not only enough to make him come across looking like a rare good guy, but also to make him look even more powerful as someone who could afford to rise above petty conflicts.
But let's look back, knowing what we know now. He frons like he fell out with Klaus 500 years ago over Katherine, but we know now that's not true, as they were all in Nw Orleans together. We know he's strong enough that it didn't matter if Elena was willing to 'negotiate,' because he could've subdued her at any time. Putting those things together, I wonder if he wasn't dawling around and trying to sabotage his assault on Klaus. He didn't want to let Klaus win the Petrova contest, but he also knew he wouldn't go though with stopping Klaus permanently. So he faffed around, wasting time projecting his Katherine issues onto Elena, still trying to out-class Klaus in the eyes of the doppelganger, and eventually not only sides with Klaus but starts to trust him.
This incident establishes a pattern of Elijah being unwilling to acknowledge his own commonalities with his brother: at the end of S2 Klaus did, as promised, reunite Elijah with their family. Doing so by daggering him first is exactly the kind of sadistic legalism Elijah himself engaged with in promising to leave Elena alone "until" the ritual of the night before. But, in contrast to Elena, whose chronically disempowered existence has forced her to become sophisticated enough to catch Elijah's self-made loophole, Elijah is both too arrogant and too desperate for what Klaus offers him to see the obvious trap.
Season 3
Elijah lost his mystique and position of strength hen he let Niklaus et the jump on him in season 2, and then S3 shows us his vulnerabilities. Not mere woobifying emotional vulnerabilities, either, but major cognitive weaknesses that trip him up at every turn.
Here is where S3 picks up from Elijah's perspective:
- Elijah comes to after being daggered by Klaus, naturally feeling righteous and indignant over having his loyalty betrayed. When Damon (DAMON) wakes him up, he finds out that the thing that's bound his siblings together through thick and thin, the common threat posed by Mikael, has not only disappeared, but been vanquished by Klaus alone.
- This is a huge power shift in the family - Klaus is now indisputably the strongest brother. Elijah makes the counter-play of rallying all of the other Mikaelsons against Klaus. While this works in the moment, he's got to know that his ability to keep them in line is tenuous at best.
- At that moment, Esther walks in. Remember, Elijah was asleep when the truth about her death came out. He simply didn't have the time to absorb that disillusionment with Klaus the way Rebekah did. That's not to say he didn't care, just that he was thinking about that fact differently than we were at the moment.
From Elijah's POV, he's got the upper hand morally and socially when his sainted mother arises from her grave. That must have been his first hopeful moment in centuries. He clearly wants to believe that things will be right, but he also knows not to trust it. He's desperate enough to take this "family business" to an outsider all but begging her to reassure him. Cognitive dissonance is a beast.
And then his mother tries to murder him.
That's some mythic, atavistic horror right there, that the person who made you can also discard you. Permanently. And while Mikael's awfulness may have intensified Klaus' cynicism about people generally, I suspect that Elijah (idealist and serial idolizer that he is) coped by treasuring her memory all the more. Similarly, while I wouldn't be surprised if he also did a lot of distancing himself from Mikael's violence by placing too much weight on the fact that Klaus was Mikael's primary target,* he loses that out here - he's tied in equally with his siblings, which means Esther wants him dead just as badly as the others and that he doesn't even have the cold comfort of being the biggest threat.
*[I don't know how comfortable I am going into this in a public post, but I think there's a fairly clear reason why the Originals in-universe, and presumably at least a critical mass of fans with whom they resonate, buy into the OSG fallacy? Because that formative experience of living in a home with a scapegoat/designated patient/buttmonkey/Klaus makes a person very invested in the OSG-like idea that some people JUST DO get treated worse than others. Accepting that an abuser is an abuser and the roots of their behavior are pretty much arbitrary is a hard enough thing when we're talking about cultural conditioning, but if that kind of victim-blaming is built into a person's formative relationships, it can be nearly impossible to uproot.]
Nobody's coming out of that looking great.
(I'm not skipping over the loss of Finn and the horrible moments when he thought he'd lost Klaus because they're not important, because clearly they are, but I think his POV was foregrounded enough during those episodes that I don't really have anything to add.)
Season 4, and Kat/Elijah
I bought it. I bought it, and I liked it as a continuation of his S3 arc. We're forced to take a look through the persona when Elijah proves himself to be haughty and petulant to Katarina, and frankly, kind of pathetic in just how transparent he was about those Mommy Issues. The curse of the doppelganger is to be all things ot all men. Elijah looks at the Petrovas and sees the innocence of the paradise lost. That innocence never actually existed, as we see through Rebekah's POV flashbacks, but Elijah works all the harder to preserve the idea. Katherine becomes the symbol of What Went Wrong. I think he really believed that if he could save her back in 1492, then it would save his family back in the Middle Ages, and he thinks that if he can cure her in the present day then it will heal all the rifts that have happened since. And just as he gives up on Katherine, a chance to truly rebuild his own family appears, leading us neatly to The Originals.
I want to see a story informed by the past, not one about the past, for all three of the lead characters. I think Elijah's arc, in particular, is posed not to be about redemption, but about self-actualization. Elijah knows what he wants to be, and I think we all know that he's capable of being it - the question is whether he will get there.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/308073.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.