White Vamps, Black Witches: Race Politics and Vampire Pop Culture

By On February 21, 2011 · 27 Comments

By Guest Contributor Dr. Sayantani DasGupta, cross-posted from Stories Are Good Medicine

Ok, so I’m watching a Vampire Diaries marathon on the CW and…

Stop laughing. No, I mean it…stop.

I am a YA WRITER I was doing RESEARCH on, er, stuff that teens like. Like vampires, and high school drama, and, er, kissing, and stuff. RESEARCH, I tell you.
As I was SAYING (before I was so rudely interrupted), I’m watching the Vampire Diaries this week and the race politics finally hit me in the face. As a facebook group and several online discussion boards have actually noted, pretty much all the vampires in this show are white, while almost all the African American folks are witches/warlocks.

What’s this about?

Now, I’m a bit bored of the ‘skinny mainstream white heroine and her black/lesbian/fat/different/witchy BFF’ trope. But clearly, there is something of a theme here with this on vampire tv shows. For vampire lover/doppleganger Elena from Vampire Diaries is her witchy Black BFF Bonnie (pictured above, hazy). For vampire slayer/lover Buffy is her witchy lesbian BFF Willow (think Wicka, Womyn-ly energy, etc.). And then there’s vampire lover/waitress Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood and her Black BFF Tara, who’s not a witch but gets possessed by one. And Sookie’s other BFF/Tara’s cousin Lafayette who’s not just Black but also the most flamboyantly gay and fabulous thing to hit the tiny town of Bon Temps in, like, ever.  But regardless, the trope remains.

So what’s the deal?

The ‘different’-BFF-as-foil thing isn’t new. It provides some nod to multiculturalism or inclusion while not challenging the notion that the main character(s) in most YA fiction/television must be, well, white, able bodied and heterosexual. Even a show like Glee, which makes such gestures to inclusivity in its cast in fact still reinforces white able bodied heteronormativity (check out this great article called “The Trans-Continental Disability Choir: Glee-Ful Appropriation”).

Similarly, in Vampire Diaries, the central pouty-lipped triumverate of Stephan (good cop), Elena (oh no! which brother shall I choose?), and Damon (bad cop. bad, bad, so bad he’s…mmm… good cop) are all white. But then there’s the added twist of the supernatural stuff. Pretty much all the folks who are vamps on the show – old vamps, kinda old vamps, brand new vamps – are white. Any exceptions to the ‘vamps are white and toothsome’ motif (more on this later) get dispatched rather quickly.

For example, there was a cute mother-daughter Asian pair of vamps, Pearl and Anna, but they died unnecessarily the tail end of Season 1 (what, they couldn’t keep them on just to keep some Asian American actors working? For shame…). Then there was ONE Black vamp awakened from the tomb (long, unnecessarily complex story), but the show creators were clearly so uncomfortable with having a vamp of color that they insisted on making him weirdly NICE – not just nice, but a little too bow-y and scrap-y for my taste. They obviously didn’t know what to do with someone who was (probably) a slave being awakened in the modern age (someone who used the term “Miss Pearl” to refer to above Asian lady vamp)… so he got killed off too, right alongside her. (Great, take out all the people, er, vampires of color in one fell swoop, why don’t you.)

And then there’s the Bennett family of witches, who are all (relatively light skinned) African Americans. Ok, I get it, they’re a family – genetically related – and therefore it makes sense they are all similar ethnically. But there are no other Black people around this town? (Except random walk ons who then get eaten?) And more importantly, WHY is this family of witches Black? We are told the Bennetts are supposedly descended from some ‘powerful Salem witches.’ Are the makers of the show hinting that they are descended from the slave woman named Tituba who supposedly ‘read the fortune’ of all those young white Salem girls and got their vicious imaginations spinning?

But no, Tituba is never mentioned by name. Nor ever, ever, ever the word slavery. Which is weird, no?

Because here is a show about a small Virginia town (Mystic Falls) that is, yes, overrun by hot vampires, but also obsessed with its past. Its’ Civil War past, to be precise. And not just the mythic/mystical town, but the show itself is obsessed with Scarlett O’Hara et al. There are frequent flashbacks to times of crinolin and Confederate soldier-y. In fact, back when he wasn’t, er, un-dead, hottie Damon was a Confederate Soldier. Yet, we are pointedly told that Damon quit the army because he “did not agree with their ways” (huh? because he was against slavery? spit it out, writers!)

There are also references to a Black woman/witch named Emily (pictured above in bonnet, foremother of hazy witch Bonnie) being the ‘servant’ of the super-baddie and super-skinnie white vampire chickie Katherine. Yet, despite both the show and the town’s historical obsessions, not once do I think the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ is ever used. (Nor do we ever get close to finding out how, in Civil War era Virginia, an Asian woman and her daughter could own a store, and said Asian woman could romance a white ‘founding father’ of the town. REALLY, writers? You think us Asian folks could just sweep into town in our hoopskirts and set up shop in the 1800′s? Gimme a break.)

Instead, we see the creators attempting to approach the issue of race but in strangely obtuse ways. (Yes, this is the maker of Dawson’s Creek I’m analyzing here for his racial politics, forgive me academic colleagues). As Lisa Nakamura and her colleagues comment in this great article, in HBO’s Southern Gothic Vampire melodrama True Blood, vampirism becomes a (only somewhat successful) metaphor for racial politics and oppression. In this show, vampires fight to make vampire marriage and other vampire rights legal. Anti-vampire sentiments become ways to explore homophobia and racism.

And yet, as Janani Subramanian notes in this other great article also from Flow TV, Vampire Diaries is Gothic-lite. One could even say, with all intentions of being ironic, that it’s race-lite (yes, I did just bold the word race, read into it what you will). It uses race as an organizing principle in its Southern narrative, without ever really talking about it beyond such ridiculous sentences, as this one uttered by a Black warlock to Bonnie: “it’s hard being different.” (REALLY, writers, REALLY? That’s the best you could do?)

Much has been written about the sparkly, white ‘good’ vampires of the Twilight books being some sort of a metaphor for the ideal Mormon family who are, per their scriptures, “white and delightsome.” Then, of course there is the fact that these white and delightsome (yet, oops, bloodsucking) folks are fighting brown skinned Native American werewolves. Yea, too much to even get into here.

I’m not going to speculate here if Stephanie Meyers was putting forth these ideas about Mormonism and whiteness to critique them or not, but what I do see is a perhaps unintentional mirroring of these patterns in the Vampire Diaries. In Mystic Falls, the African American witches don’t want to get dragged into white vampires’ problems, Bonnie in fact hates the vampires at some level, and hates their hold on her friend Elena. She can barely face it when their other friend Caroline (who is being called “Vampire Barbie” on Forever Young Adult - hah!) is turned into a vamp. So, yet again, we have a white supernatural world facing off with a supernatural world of color. Yet, and here is perhaps where the show is working off of some silly ‘post-racial’ imagining, each group really needs the other to survive. (cue audience applause and Oprah-style hugging).  Awwww.

So several questions remain: Is magical power a TV metaphor for the subversive strength that any oppressed community must develop to survive and thrive? Is it anger for past (and, ahem, current — hello?) oppressions? Why are there no Black vampires in Mystic Falls? No white witches? And how can you not say the word ‘slavery’ in a flashback about the Civil War? And will Elena see the good in Damon, and give him a chance already, he loves her so much??? (Err, sorry, off topic…)

In the end, if vampirism is becoming a way for pop culture to interrogate race, let’s get to it already. Television shows, even ones like Vampire Diaries, wield a sort of cultural magic – and that magic can be used for good or evil. By creating tensions around race and then refusing to deal with them, by bringing up Southern history and then refusing to name slavery, the show is only making more bad cultural ju-ju.  Not talking about race, or wimping out after bringing up race, doesn’t make the world ‘post-racial.’ In fact, it’s kind of racist.

I think it’s time TV vampires sunk their fangs into their own racial politics.

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  • http://www.rishonan.net/home Rishona Campbell

    Oh wow; I never have seen (or had the urge to see) “Vampire Diaries”. But I feel that these wishy-washy plot holes would really frustrate me. Oh well…thanks for saving me my precious minutes! :-D

  • Steve

    Hmm. There is a reference in Season 2 to old “slave quarters”,” on, I believe, the Lockwood Family estate, and a suggestion that the current head of the family does not enjoy referring to them as such. A suggestion that the characters in-story are whitewashing issues just as much as the writers are?

  • blakdiamon

    Ugh! I watch this show because I think it’s good fun in between True Blood hiatus (The Twilight movie series is dead to me already because that 4th book is a disaster) but it’s race politics are ridiculous. I believe they reference Emily Bennett as Katherine’s “chamber maiden” or something. No, that is a politically correct word for SLAVE!

    Poor Bonnie. They don’t even take into account that she has every right to feel resentment towards vampires because they are the reason her grandmother is dead. So I don’t expect them to even acknowledge the fact that she may have some feelings (ANY FEELINGS) about the fact that her ancestor was her best friend ancestor’s slave. She’s a gorgeous girl with a nice personality, but the best she can do is her bff’s younger brother? Yet Elana and Caroline both have to men fighting over them.

    Then take into account that Elana is Sookie/Bella and Bonnie is a less bad ass Tara and I get annoyed. Willow at least had stuff going for her. She was smart, witty, powerful and had Oz (a boyfriend that didn’t lust over any of the other female characters first) and Willow (which was one of the best love stories in the series). She also had her own agency (Tara too) which is more than we can say for Bonnie. She pretty much is only on TV to perform so Hocus Pocus for the vampires and be indignant.

    I don’t understand how witches can be the most powerful supernaturals in this series and still fall victim to Vamps. Vamps even refer to them as “my witch” which, let’s be honest is a modern day “my slave”

  • Hazel

    I think the 1864 massacre is supposed to stand in for slavery. WTF, I know. It’s explicitly aligned with Confederate guilt in the third episode–but what’s more important are the revenge plots later. Emily Bennett’s words in 2009 seem to indicate that she had at one point intended to let all the tomb vamps out–why else would she do that–but it’s her “things are different now” “they don’t deserve this” comments that really beg for an alternate interpretation.

    Then there’s the *other* vampires of color from the tomb–the two Latino/a vampires from the tomb: Frederick (the guy who wanted revenge) and his girlfriend Lucia (who, seriously, could stand to have a personality?). …The conflict between Frederick (revenge for what they did to us! We’re finally free after 150 years!) and Harper (Patience! Obey Miss Pearl! Baby steps!) is blatantly symbolic and SUPER uncomfortable to watch (especially since we’re supposed to side with Harper).

    So, I think the slavery isn’t completely absent from the show, and I also think that the white characters’ not-wanting-to-talk-about-it-and-in-particular-not-wanting-to-say-the-word (per Steve’s comment) is realistic–white Southerners generally either dissasociate themselves from Southern culture or try to shove slavery under the rug–but that doesn’t let the show as a whole off the hook. I am pretty stumped on the Asians-in-1864 thing–it’s possible Pearl used mind control to make people think she was white, in some way that later vervain consumption wouldn’t undo, but if so they should say something about it coz it’s really distracting.

    I doubt we’ll get an explanation on the witches-are-black thing beyond Stefan’s “archetype of heroic individualism” comment–in part because in the books (which predate Twilight), Bonnie is white with red hair.

    And, actually, you find out in season 2 that Pearl & Anna’s deaths were in no way unnecessary.

  • Erin

    I’ve always felt that TVD does a fairly decent job with gender politics (not perfect, but so much better than you might expect coming from a teen paranormal romance show on The CW), but drops the ball regularly on race issues. Let’s not get started on how often people of color show up for thirty seconds and then are killed to highlight (yet again) how dangerous Damon really is, or how difficult Caroline’s transition from human to vampire will be, or any number of other realizations about our largely white main cast. I imagine they are proud of themselves for casting quite a few POC in comparison to a lot of tv shows, but very, very few of them survive for long.

  • Facebook User

    Oh, right! I remember him, Tyler, saying something like “this where they kept the slaves”. He was very uncomfortable about it.

  • Facebook User

    All of this has really come to my attention around the beginning of this new season. Throughout the season Bonnie has been totally absent unless Elana/The Salvotore Brothers had a needed something from her. I also notice, they never pay her back in any sort of way. I am very glad, however, that Bonnie is given romantic interests and is seen by desirable by more than one guy.

    It’s also worth mentioning that there seems to be a “Oh, not a witch, but a POC? DEAD!” meme going on with this show. I remember being so excited having Pearl, Anna, Bonnie, & Bonnie’s grandma (WHITLEY! WHY?!?!?!) on the show. All powerful WOC. It does appear they’re trying keep their POC up with Luca & his dad, but again, they’re not there as much as Pearl & Anna were.

  • Anonymous

    To add to what Steve said, they’ve mentioned “slaves” before. That guy Elijah did in the most recent episode. I did bring up this topic about all witches being black and all vampires being white on YouTube. Hell, even most werewolves have been uniformly white . . . non-white ones don’t survive long. I feel like it is a very generalized view of things but I’ve yet to see them really break the mold in bringing in long-term characters that do not uphold this theme. As for the Asian vampires living in the 1800′s . . . it could work. Asians have been on the American continent since the 1500′s, at least from my perspective. I guess I would find it hard to believe that any woman of color would be treated so cordially by a bunch of white men back in those days. No, they were mistreating blacks, natives, essentially anyone who could be otherized. Hell, sometimes you can still get away with this shit to this day. So, it made me think that perhaps they were passing for white? I mean, was their Asianness ever addressed?

    Damon, I know he’s supposed to be a bad guy but I literally hate his guts. We might as well just label him a rapist cause the things he’s been doing to women on the show are just downright nasty. I was Bamon shipping b/c I felt like Damon would need someone to keep him in check. He can’t just do whatever the hell he wants. He needs someone who’s willing to kill him should he starting committing even more crimes against humans. Elena just aint it. At least Bonnie tried to kill him . . .

    And it’s funny how they’re using Bonnie to keep Elena’s brother relevant in the show. I just have a really hard time believing their relationship. He was just kind of thrust upon her so that he could have something to do. But she really doesn’t need him. I mean, I appreciate how he was allowing the audience to see how overworked and pressured Bonnie is, being the only witch on the side of “good”. But she’s got friends to lean on and support her . . . outside of that, what else is he good for?

  • caleb

    I really hope someone in Hollywood recognizes this as the perfect cultural moment to adapt Octavia Butler’s wonderful “Fledgling” for the screen. Vampirism is just so hot right now (smirk) and it’s the only vampire narrative I’ve ever seen dealing openly with racism, let alone even really having “multiracial/multiethnic vampires.” Plus in the final act, it becomes a vampire legal drama! Certainly someone can make this pitch……

  • http://twitter.com/mezz98 gillian rosheuvel

    “And how can you not say the word ‘slavery’ in a flashback about the Civil War?”

    For the love of Pete…THIS! I have asked myself this constantly when watching the show, especially during the flashbacks. And I had the same questions about why all the witches in Mystic Falls are black. Bonnie – and all witches on this show – are basically the help. They show up to enchant or explain something for the white characters and then they’re gone.

    I recall that the way they “got around” referring to Bonnie’s ancestor Emily as a slave was to call her Katherine’s handmaiden. *headdesk*

    Also, I always found it curious that the writers of The Vampire Diaries chose to move the setting of the story – or at least its origination point – to Virginia (in the books on which the series is based, the main vampires – Stefan & Damon – come from Renaissance-era Italy). Not that Renaissance-Italy would have been free of racial politics, but I thought it was an interesting choice; except that they never mention slavery which always takes me out of the fiction, especially when the flashbacks come up.

  • Westsider

    It seems to me that possibly the reason the witches are Black is to suggest some sort of Earthiness or connection to nature… The witches are portrayed as being called to a higher purpose (though some are serving their own, selfish desires) that is more aligned to a greater universal good. It all ties in to tropes about Black folks being more connected to nature, tapped into elemental engeries… the whole “mystical Negro” thing. While it’s all based on stereotypes, it’s an interesting way to go…

  • KC

    Bonnie has literally become the magical negro. She has magical powers and we only see her when Elena or any of the other main characters need her to perform a spell. I find the comparison to Willow from Buffy interesting. Willow would always come in and help with a spell when Buffy needed it but the difference is at the end of the day Willow is a fully written character.

    I’m pretty sure Emily Bennett was suppose to be Katherine’s slave but they called her “Katherine’s hand madien.”

    I love Damon but he is basically Spike lite. He has even said things that have reminded me of the things Spike use to say.

    All the witches have been black. Bonnie(Katerina Graham), her Grandma(Jasmine Guy), her Great Grandmother Emily(Bianca Lawson), her cousin Lucy(Natasha Williams), Damon’s ex(Gina Torres), Luka(Bryton James), and his father Jonas(Randy J. Goodwin).

  • Anonymous

    Could not agree more. Caroline is only a character of interest because she became a vampire. And she seemed more like a third wheel alongside Elena and Bonnie yet she seems to get more screen-time in a single episode compared to Bonnie. And it’s almost always concerning her romantic interests.

    I think that Bonnie is pretty bad-ass. As I mentioned before she almost killed Damon, if not for Elena reminding her about “who she is”. Whatever. They just manipulate her character, try to tone her down so that she’s more palatable for use by the two vamp hotties. Blegh. And you know, she has every right to be upset over her Gran’s death. I know I would hold a grudge for at least a full season.

    It’d be nice if Bonnie could do more for herself. Who knows how powerful she could become if she wasn’t the errand girl for Elena and her love triangle. It would seem witches, who are well-trained or at least know how to channel energy well, could really only be bested by originals. Bonnie doesn’t seem to get enough me time or time with other witches to really become all that powerful. I had high hopes for her and Luka in the beginning, despite his betrayal. Out of all the guys in the series I find Luka to be a compelling companion whether he be eventual friend or lover. He’s not bad on the eyes.

  • Facebook User

    He’s an extra pair of hands & she trusts him. He’s shown he’s tough enough to deal with this supernatural stuff. His character has had a real turn this season.

  • http://www.examiner.com/family-in-new-york/rahela-choudhury RCHOUDH

    This is a really interesting analysis of the non-discussion of race matters in these latest crop of shows; I admit to never having watched any of them so I can’t really comment on what’s written here specifically about these shows. But it sounds to me like these shows are similar to Marvel’s X-men in their treatment of race; X-men uses the theme of mutants as a metaphor standing in for race but they hardly get into real-life racial politics because that would distract viewers from the fantasy element of their story. Which brings me to ask whether any fantasy/sci-fi/horror-related shows/movies will ever inject discussions about real-life issues (like race, sex, class, etc) into their shows or sidestep them completely out of the fear that they’ll start losing viewers because they’ve become too “real” and not “escapist” enough…

  • Charlotte

    You know what I want to see? A show that deals with racial politics through vampires by revealing that a network of vampires designed and controlled the world in order to live in the way to which they were accustomed and now it’s everyone else’s job to try to take down the structure so they don’t end up getting shuffled through partial-drainage blood farms or forced to work in goblet/lace/leatherware/sunshade factories while the vampires give interviews about not hating humans, but the economy just being unsustainable without a certain kind of labor, someone has to be at the bottom of the stack, and anyway, it was some other vampire who set the whole deal up, why blame these guys?

    Vampires are so often used as symbols for oppressed groups, but the fact that they have all this unholy power always complicates the metaphor… don’t they make a much better stand-in for the privileged white middle/upper class?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=641126119 June Scudeler

    I know! I love Octavia Butler.
    Drew Hayden Taylor (Anishinaabe; more commonly known as Ojibway) has writen a YA novel called The Night Wanderer about an Anishinaabe vampire who goes home to his community. Taylor indigenises the vampire, which is awesome!

    http://www.drewhaydentaylor.com/otherpubs.html

  • A.

    I really wish that they would hurry up and get the House of Night series going…provided that they stay faithful to the source material.

  • A.

    Read ‘House of Night’ series by P.C. and Kristin Cast. The lead character is Cherokee (I believe), and several vampires in it are PoC. (Shaunee, one of the vampires, is of Jamaican descent and another one is biracial.) They also have another character that is gay, and he has a very happy relationship with his boyfriend, and it is treated with respect.

    It also has elements of paganism as well.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=732249392 Mandisa Washington

    I think a lot of folks are missing some of the not-so-subtleties about race & class that color the show.

    Emily Bennett, named a couple times as one of the most powerful witches period, and progenitor of 95% of the show’s witches, might *not* have been Kate’s slave, since they had been traveling the world together for years/maybe decades (I’m pretty sure Emily was much older than she looked…) and regarded each other more like wary partners, at least in private. The current “break the curse” plotline relationships pretty much point to witches as the powerful, but vulnerable willing allies/unwilling tools of vampires from time immemorial (long before the 1600′s).

    At a writer’s level it might well be the magical negro archetype, but in-universe it could be that the witch-gene (they’ve clearly stated it’s genes+training) is more likely among African-descended people (we’d need some non-American witches to confirm). I think it’s a good way to keep a stream of black actors in the recurring cast, and raises some interesting issues about mixed-race/culture relationships (Bonnie & Elena have had some major fights over their families’ very different past/current relationships with vampires).

    Mystic Falls the 1800s town was essentially founded by not-quite-white vampires – Pearl & Anna are mixed-Chinese (without family names, we can only go by the actresses & British colonial history), the leaders of the vengeful tomb vamps were light-skinned Latino (hadn’t paid attention, but yeah), and Katherine/Katerina herself is really eastern-European (the actress & character are Bulgarian).

    The humans in town were essentially brought there as perennial food sources, and to fill out the village ranks, but they were mostly white Virginians & black slaves and presumably were whammied into forgetting whatever racism they might’ve had re: the not-quite-white vamps. There’s a lot of talk from the 1800s vamps about “this is our town, we built a paradise for ourselves”, and some of the non-Mystic Falls vamps alive during the era kind of talk like Kate et al. had it coming (i.e. they rose above their station – like a lot of the Freedmen’s towns…).

    Once the 1800s humans overthrew the vamps, they basically rewrote history and claimed that *they* founded the town, and that the folks who burned in the church were like Northern sympathizers or traitors or some BS. Because there’s no monument or anything at the tomb, and this is a town that’s all about their “grand history”, that’s obviously a big whitewashing.

    There are actually quite a lot of character-plotlines related to family secrets, and who’s related/allied to whom, and folks looking down on other folks (stones & glass houses galore). The town’s/characters’ entire history (way-old & recent) is literally steeped in lies and violence about race & class that have serious right-now consequences, which is playing it pretty close to our current racial/class discourse (certainly closer than a YA romance-drama might normally be expected to).

    Add to all that the fact that from ep1 on, parallel to the supernatural plots, there’s this major current of class politics in town. All the Founding Families are still *really* rich from their seizure of former vampire lands/wealth, and spend time/money on ridiculous ceremonies and pageantry while most townies are just scrubbing by. That tends to supercede, but not completely obliterate the racial politics.

    As for the hapless dead person of the week trope (not always used, but more dominant in earlier eps), it actually is well-mixed among races & genders, it’s just that the only ones we get to know and like a little bit tend to be PoC.

  • Anonymous

    Was just about to mention that. Technically it’s already been done, but it could be done much better than Daybreakers. Daybreakers was a terrible movie. It could have been good but it wasn’t.

  • blakdiamon

    I hope it’s made independently because I’m afraid Hollywood will tear it apart.

  • Legxleg

    I agree with a lot in this post, and thought it was really interesting. One of the things that simultaneously intrigues and frustrates me about Vampire Diaries is how they often come so close to addressing race issues in a really interesting way, and then back away. For instance, back in the heyday of Pearl and Anna, I was really excited about the show, especially when Pearl explains that the only reason the white, extraordinarily wealthy Founding Families have all their money and land is because they *stole* it from POC-Pearl back in the 1800s. Between Pearl-and-Anna and the Bennets, I think all the POC on the show were supernatural in some way or another, and I thought the parallels between covering up the supernatural origins of the town and the white founding families whitewashing the POC-filled history of their town could be really interesting (of course, that all went out the window with the death of Pearl-and-Anna and the Lockwood family secret). Also interesting is that one of the other black witches who was brought in by an antagonistic white vampire to take down Bonnie changed her mind at the last minute to ally herself with Bonnie, explaining that witches (who so far do seem to all be black for whatever unexplained reason) need to stick together and stop allowing vampires to control them and play them against each other. Add to that the explanation of the motivations of Luka and his father – that the Original vampires have been basically enslaving witches, most notably Luka’s sister, and they are trying to get her free – has me (unrealistically?) hoping that Bonnie and the other witches will team up to put an end to this modern pseudo-slavery. And recently (spoiler alert!) there have been some more mentions of how the celebrated ‘Founding Families’ of Mystic Falls didn’t actually found anything; the town was founded by freed slaves (yes, they *finally* said the world ‘slaves’ instead of ‘handmaiden’ or ‘the old days’, count me as shocked) and descendants of Salem witches (which I assume is meant to be understood as Bonnie’s family?), who were, again, pushed out/ horrifically murdered by the white Founding Families. I’m perfectly prepared to be frustrated yet again by the show backing away from the potentially interesting racial issues they touch on, but at least it gives me something to think about in the meantime. And also makes me wish for some truly excellent fanfic to go where the show doesn’t seem quite prepared to.

  • Anonymous

    ***Spoiler/Rant Alert****

    Oh my god! This show is getting on my fucking nerves! Okay, so both black witches die in the same damn episode. And like nobody actually cares. It’s all about fucking Elena . . .

    And then Bonnie, with her out-of-character ass doesn’t even care about the fact that Jonas died when he wasn’t even trying to kill her. He was just managing to give her back her powers so that she has a way of killing Klaus. It was very strange. I mean, I know in FF8 when a witch is going to die he/she passes on their powers to the next vessel, so I could view the scene in that light. But when Jonas grabbed her I was under the impression that she was in immediate danger. But now I know he essentially died for nothing. Or maybe Jonas wanted to die? Agh!

    Bonnie didn’t seem all that upset that cutie Luka and his father are dead. And although Luka betrayed her I feel that abducting him and forcing him to give up potentially life-threatening information isn’t a good thing either. And I guess if Luka’s sister ever becomes free she’ll be without a brother and a father. I really don’t think the main group is going to care enough to rescue this woman and respect Luka and Jonas’ desire for her freedom.

    But it’s possible that when the group encounters Klaus the sister will be with him.

  • MJM

    I LOVE YOU!! THANK YOU, MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY!

  • Anonymous

    It’d be nice if we did another post about this show. It keeps pissing me off with Damon and his whole “I will always choose you” and “I will let Bonnie die in order to save you” and then Elena thanking him. SMH. I am almost done with this show. Had they actually killed off Bonnie I would have been boycotting or something.

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