some scattered thoughts on how doppelgangers operate as a team and antagonists, for
cassie-epstein I am fascinated by how the doppelganger mythology works in universe, but I hadn’t revisited my thoughts on it in the last few months, since the reveal that Silas had a line of doppelgangers too.
It’s really fun to watch the Petrova doppelgangers operate as a team because on some meta cosmic level they’re all molded against the same something - Silas and men like him, who want what they want and know how to get it. Their empathy, the main tool in their arsenal, the way Katherine and Elena have won over every ally they have, is negated in a couple of different ways. Neither of them can get the advantage over the other, because they’re both the best of players; their insight is useless because they already have all the information there is to have on their opponent from within themselves. So when the Petrovas clash, it’s always going to be an unstoppable force versus an immovable object. But when they’re working together, they can work as this seamless team. That scene in 5x8 of the three doppelgangers coming together to make Bonnie the anchor instead of Amara is so great because there’s no competing interests.*
*HOW GREAT is the anchor thing? It's not just that doppelgangers are sociological objects, it's that they're molded in the image of a woman who was literally turned into a statue.
It’s the clash between the meta-Stefans and meta-Elenas that can go to some really interesting places. Silas, at the very least, was not operating from a place of disempowerment or self-protection. He wanted forever and he was going to get it, if he had to charm someone else into bending heaven and earth. He didn’t need to start out with hard power to be dangerous, because he and the world around him believed that he was entitled to get hard power. The female Petrova line doesn’t have that recourse, and so they’ve had to become even wilier. And the antagonism between Amara and Silas ended up being just a chase - Silas trying to latch into Amara for all eternity, and Amara trying to escape that by any means necessary. (I don’t know what to make of the fact that Amara is the only doppelganger whose perspective we haven’t heard. Did she really love Silas? Did she want to be immortal? Was she really in love with Tessa, AND COULD YOU BLAME HER if she was? We have no idea. We just know she hated being the anchor, and anyone would.)
IMO this is why Stefan is so very, very dangerous at this moment in canon. Because he has the potential for Silas-like forward movement, but he doesn’t have the steady footing one needs in order to reach out. Stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea - Katherine and his debilitating flashbacks to his time underwater - with no concrete target for his anger, Stefan is a cornered animal, set to lash out with every weapon he has. I don’t think he knows if Katherine is friend or foe at this moment, and I really hope we’re about to see both of those dynamics play out between them.
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