frelling_tralk | (no subject)

I loved Katherine and all of the flashbacks and I was overall very happy with the episode, but it was hard for me to enjoy some scenes because Damon (and Matt!) were making me rage so much.

Okay first of all, Damon was never compelled by Katherine, he told Stefan this himself. He choose to learn from Katherine how to feed and kill innocent people when he was still human. Damon does have the right to dislike Katherine for messing him around when she clearly preferred Stefan, but blaming his entire life on her is just too much. Damon choose to develop a 150 year obsession with opening the tomb, that's why Bonnie's Grams was endangered. If anything Damon's obsessive tendencies were an inconvenience to Katherine when she was trying to fake being dead, she never asked for him to became completely obsessed with her when she'd just been looking for some fun. He has a right to be mad at her for playing him back in the day, but to blame Katherine for his own obsessions and failings, umm no. I couldn't stand the hypocrisy when they were all sat there blaming everything that ever happened ever on Katherine. Matt was doing shots with Damon (who killed Vicky purely for sport when he was bored), and Damon's going to raise a glass to Matt's saying that was all Katherine's fault?!?!?!??!

Both Klaus and Damon planning to torment Katherine on her deathbed was just really gross and sadistic, although at least Klaus never got there in the end. Stefan was the one brother who actually was compelled and mislead as to Katherine's true nature, but you don't see him blaming his entire life choices on Katherine and saying that she was the one who killed his father or whatever, the same way that Damon makes ridiculous analogies about all of his actions should really be owned by Katherine. I just couldn't stand him this episode, urgh when he was deliberately trying to torment Katherine by injecting her again so that he could keep going back to the flashbacks of her dead family, what a creep. And it was for the best that Elijah wasn't there frankly because he also tried to blame his rift with his brother on Katherine, and their arc in season 4 was mostly about whether Elijah can learn to trust Katherine after all of the terrible things that she's done, even though Elijah was the one hunting down human Katherine because of her not doing what she was told and agreeing to be sacrificed in a ritual by two men.

Really the other characters viewpoint of Katherine is so disturbing that I can never tell if we're meant to recognise it or not because in this episode especially they all seemed to see it that way when they were doing shots and tracing all of their problems back to Katherine ~the root of all evil~ Just as season 4 played it totally unironically when Elijah was having doubts about whether he could trust Katherine and how much he missed "my Katerina", and she had to prove herself by handing over the cure, yet there was no acknowledgment of their actual past and that maybe Elijah owed it to Katherine to give her that cure right back so that she could finally protect herself from his sadistic brother

There is just such a ridiculous double standard with Katherine. With both Katherine and Rebekah actually to an extent. Rebekah also constantly had it held over her head that she caused Elena's car accident and is therefore a bad and unforgiveable person, yet Damon's past deeds are almost forgotten and he gets to join in funeral rituals in 402 without the characters even acknowledging that he killed half of the people that they are mourning! (The characters do hold more against Klaus granted, but only for things that he's actually done like kill Jenna, while Katherine gets blamed whether or not she even played a direct role in what happened)

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Honestly I understood Caroline's attitude there because of her very different experiences with Damon and Stefan. Stefan helped her out a lot when she first became a vampire (and she didn't have much exposure to ripper Stefan), so she's always going to think of him as deep down a good guy. Whereas Damon was an extremely abusive boyfriend to her in early season 1, so I can understand her being really turned off at the idea of Elena being attracted to him.

The show doesn't emphasise that enough and have Caroline outright tell Elena the reasons for her repulsion over Damon as her friends romantic choice. But then at the same time I think that a lot changed for Caroline when she became a vampire, and she doesn't like to think of who she was as a human and remind her friends of that time (not that I personally ever had a problem with season 1 Caroline!), so she sticks to making vague comments about Damon being a 'man slut' instead. But I think that the issues must be more deep-rooted for her there as her reactions are generally so extreme whenever the subject of Delena comes up, even though she does work alongside Damon and tolerate him in other ways, so IMO her reactions only make sense if it's just a part of her reacting so strongly to the idea of anyone dating Damon after her own experiences with that

I really wish the show would have the guts to go there, then. But they don't. They barely acknowledge that anything happened to Caroline at all. Yes, she was under compulsion, but the show never gives it the more serious treatment (rape) that it deserved, so they just have Caroline being generally pissy with Damon. The thing is, and I haven't watched the early seasons in a while, she didn't seem to have a real problem working with him anywhere in there? But suddenly S3 hits and she's all "Damon is bad!" I get that her experiences with Stefan were better, but I can't believe that she's ignorant of everything he did. But really, S3 annoyed me with the championing of one brother over the other, as well *every single character's* sudden desperate interest in the triangle.

I keep waiting for the show to go there as I think that it would make for a really interesting scene if Caroline did ever confront Elena over doesn't it bother her how Damon treated her friend in the past, and at one point I did believe that the show was going there eventually as Caroline's reactions to Delena just keep on getting more vocal, so it did seem like the writers were building up to making a point. But then interviews lately have made me wonder if they're just going to sidestep the whole thing, give in to audience response, and have Caroline apologise to Elena and acknowledge that she also slept with a bad guy like Klaus

And I think that Caroline's attitude changed in season 3 after Elena confessed that she kissed Damon in the season 2 finale. I would say that she tolerated Damon before that, and even now she doesn't really say much to Damon himself, it's just when she's around Elena that she's so repulsed by the idea of Elena actually dating Damon or being attracted to him, and I do think that must be a subconscious reaction to thinking of Damon as boyfriend material and how he treats women that he's dating. The writers could tone it down a bit with 'Stefan is your epic love' definitely lol as that only makes it appear that Caroline is all about the love triangle, but I've just always figured that there must be more deep-rooted issues there for Caroline to spend the last three seasons shuddering at the thought of her friend dating Damon and never letting that go, even when the writers know how much that's making some of the audience turn against her and call her a hypocrite for favouring Stefan

At any rate, I'm reminded why I stopped watching the show, lol. I just don't know what the writers are doing half the time.

Heh same