womenlovefest day 1, meta, TVD: why you shouldn't hate Bonnie because she isn't a Damon fangirl
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Or: hi and welcome to day one of my Bonnie week of appreciation for womenlovefest. Now, I usually don’t tend to focus on one aspect of a character when I do meta, but there’s one thing that I’ve always wanted to rant about regarding Bonnie (or better, why she isn't so well-liked), so I’ll go with it to start with. Hopefully it won’t get indecently long.
Now: Bonnie Bennett happens to be my favorite female character from The Vampire Diaries. She also has the misfortune of getting an amount of hate that is completely disproportional to her actions.
Spoilers for both seasons including the S2 finale.
I don’t exactly do VD fandom except for Damon/Alaric stuff, and I do everything to keep out of bashing situations, but with this fandom wherever I go I stumble into Bonnie hate. In the beginning it wasn’t as bad though and actually Bonnie became my favorite girl in there because she was the only one who had a strong enough storyline on her own, that wasn’t vampire-related and that wasn’t meddled with a love interest. Actually: she only got a love interest after one season and a half, and even better, her character isn’t defined by said love story (which isn’t even following standards since the guy is younger than she is. I appreciate it).
Which brings us to the point in question: the main reason Bonnie gets bashed at in my experience is that she doesn’t like Damon. The amount of time I’ve read that she’s a bitch after 2x02, where she had tried to kill him when realizing that Caroline had become a vampire was… well, it was a fairly good amount, and I’m not talking about all the rest. And here I’d just like to state my feelings about the following: not liking Damon/hating Damon isn’t a good reason to say that Bonnie is a bitch. Or worse. She might not be likeable, but wishing she’d die because she hates Damon is utterly unfair.
So, Bonnie doesn’t like Damon. He doesn’t particularly charm her. At some point she’s pissed enough that she’s this close to killing him, and she only trusts him grudgingly after, and only if she’s convinced of what she’s doing.
Flash news: she’s right.
Premise: Damon is my favorite character, so I’m not hating on him or anything. I started watching this show because of Damon. I usually love fictional charming bastards with a sense of humor and Damon is exactly right up my alley. He’s also a delight to look at, not to mention that I enjoy his struggling with his humanity, whenever he wants to struggle with it or not.
But dammit, Damon is a vampire. And he isn’t like his brother pre-Klaus. He doesn’t get in the woods to eat a bunny or two and he didn’t rob blood banks (or well, he didn’t in the beginning). He kills people and he doesn’t have particular moral problems over doing it. (Or over killing vampires that aren’t horrible persons - see Lexi.) He manipulates other people to his advantage without a quibble and he hasn’t gotten over that (see Andie in S2). He probably was a good person and he might be on his way to become a half-decent one, but he isn’t particularly nice. And I’m not sure that I’d like to have dinner with him in real life. Us viewers, we love him because he’s charming and witty and not so comfortable in his skin as he looks like and because we know what’s going on in his head. And because he’s hot as hell.
But, it doesn’t change that you probably wouldn’t want to meet him in the highway when he’s pissed or in early S1. We like to like the bad guy, but if you’re a character in the show and you trust him without battling an eyelid, you’re an idiot. Even more if you’re a psychic. If Bonnie sensed something wrong with Stefan in the beginning, then she’d have had enough reasons not to trust Damon automatically just by seeing his face. (Which was exactly what happened if I don’t remember wrong.) Distrusting him would be my gut reaction, too; if Bonnie didn’t trust him in the beginning, it wasn’t a small fault in an otherwise good character. It was a proof that she used her brains.
So, let’s go and have a look at what happened to Bonnie since Damon and Stefan showed up in Mystic Falls (also Stefan didn’t go killing people and manipulating others in the beginning, other than being Elena’s boyfriend, so you’d automatically trust a bit more someone for whom your best friend guarantees):
- He compels Caroline, which is a close friend of hers, and wouldn’t have had a problem killing her he had thought it necessary;
- He went messing with Elena and Stefan when it was the first time after her parents’ death in which Elena (who’s Bonnie’s best friend) was actually happy;
- He was indirectly the reason of her grandmother’s death when she died because of the effort she had put in opening/sealing the tomb where Katherine was in theory buried, and Bonnie’s grandmother was the only relative with whom she was close (she said at some point later that her mother had left home for good and her dad was freaked out by her powers and avoided her more than else);
Other than that, vampires in Mystic Falls for us have been a good thing because otherwise there wouldn’t be action anywhere, but for people living in Mystic Falls, it probably was a pretty crappy deal since it was when shit started hitting the fan. And Damon and Stefan weren’t even the worst of it.
Now, if she doesn’t trust vampires generally and Damon most of all, considering that he’s proven enough that he’s not exactly what you’d call a deeply moral person, I think she has all the rights to hate his guts. And she has all the rights to be wary of his face.
Then there was the huge hate amount after said episode 2x02 that I was talking about before, and there was a lot of bashing about her attitude with Caroline. Now, trying to burn Damon when it was pretty much the only time when it wasn’t his fault wasn’t a brilliant idea, and Bonnie isn’t the most far sighted character in that bunch. And I thought she was doing a very stupid thing. But, she was freaking out. She just learned that her other best friend turned into a vampire and that she was turned by someone who wouldn’t be in town if it wasn’t for Damon and Stefan. And as stated, she hates vampires generally, and has a good idea of how it changes you if you let it. Not going into her underestimating Caroline’s force of will/capacity of adapting to vampire life, when she lit Damon on fire or tried to she was freaking the hell out and after Elena stopped her if I remember right she started crying. She wasn’t in her right mind and she was acting out of grief. Was that stupid? Sure. Did Damon deserve that specifically? Nope. But you don’t think rationally when you’re in the mental state Bonnie was.
About Caroline: she didn’t trust her, but she had no idea that Caroline still was the Caroline she knew. And as stated, Bonnie hasn’t had one experience in her life (except for maybe Stefan, and when she touched him at the beginning she didn’t feel anything good either - not to mention that Stefan had his moment of going insane at the end of S1 when she was even less well-disposed towards vampires than usual) suggesting that vampires can be trusted. Saying that she’s a bitch because she doesn’t trust Caroline at once doesn’t work for me in this case either, and that said, she buried the hatchet two episodes later as soon as she decided that she could trust her again. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched to me - if anything it’s realistic. She waited to see if her friend was the same person instead of going berserk and trying to eat her. Seems reasonable to me.
With this I’d like to state that I don’t necessarily agree with Bonnie’s way of thinking all the time. At times she gets too mistrustful and I didn’t approve when she didn’t do what she was asked in the S1 finale and allowed that device of John’s to wreak havoc because she was more mistrustful of vampires in general than trustful of her best friend. And I didn’t exactly cheer when she tried to burn Damon as above.
But what I’d like to point out is that when she was wrong, she did realize it eventually. After not doing that spell on the device, she helped Elena/Damon/Stefan in the finale. She apologized when she knew she had fucked up. She still doesn’t like Damon, but by the end of S2 she was mature enough to trust him and put their differences aside because she wanted to save their friends. And oh, wait, she was also willing to die for them. In S2 she told Jeremy that she wanted to use her powers to do good and that she wasn’t sure about their plan to kill Katherine, and she still went because not doing it would have meant risking her friends’ lives. She would have used up enough energy to kill herself along with Klaus if it came to that. And it’s not as if she liked any of it - it’s clear that she loves Elena, Caroline & co. enough to die for them. She never looked very happy of being the odd one out on the trusting vampires side or to have to disagree with them. She doesn’t enjoy not trusting Damon or being at odds with Elena because of that when she has her good reasons to. And of anything she isn’t heartless. She might be too distrusting, sure, but if I was in Mystic Falls and not necessarily in her place I’d have developed some kind of bad paranoia by now.
In conclusion, someone who’s willing to die for the people she cares for when she isn’t even twenty doesn’t deserve to be called bitch because she isn’t a Damon fangirl. At times she’s too hard, she isn’t the most farsighted person in Mystic Falls and she won’t let grudges go easily, but she’s a human being, and she isn’t someone who knows the entire backstory the way viewers do. And if she reminds us once in a while that Damon isn’t only charm but that he’s also a psychotic bastard when he wants to, thinking that it makes her a bad character or a useless one just because of that is not fair, since Bonnie isn’t there just to be our morality compass. (Even worse, Damon’s.) She has a story of her own that is pretty freaking good and has been since she was introduced, she has had some great character development (in which I might go in depth in the next meta post) and she has also given enough proof that she can learn from her mistakes. The last thing she deserves is hatred mostly because of what from her POV is a perfectly legitimate position.
And I really hope that next season this argument dies, because if she deserves to be disliked, it’s for other reasons. And not being a Damon fangirl shouldn’t be something that eclipses how awesome she is.
In the next meta episode: something less hate-focused and more awesome focused.