(no subject)

[frelling_tralk]

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)

Comments

[havocthecat]

ALL OF THIS. YES. I have become disillusioned with the show lately.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

It's very confusing to me the lack of self-awareness that the show seems to have when it still frames Katherine as bad to the bone, yet the protagonists are valuing their own survival in the exact same way. What else can you say about Elena willingly coming up with a plan for Jeremy to kill all of Kol's descendants, and pointing out that will kill thousands of vampires and activate the hunters curse?

The only difference seems to be that it's justified more with Elena because and co because they're protecting loved ones at the same time usually, but then it's not exactly Katherine's fault that her entire family were killed and that turned her into a hardened survivor. Elena lost her parents too, but she still had Jeremy to look out for and was surrounded by people who loved her, while Katherine became a vampire with nothing else in her life but trying to prioritise her own life.