Past Seasons Discussion : Tales From The Crypt

[KatWay]

Eww, I had forgotten about Damon screwing Elena's bio mother too. I agree that Damon always read as older than Stefan, when he wasn't throwing tantrums he always seemed like a cool uncle to the gang. He played well off the adult cast.

The Caroline relationship and how it was treated by the show was always gross and tainted the otherwise great Liz/Damon friendship.

[Aeryn13]

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but the show-runners chose the route that would sexually connect a middle-aged man with the friend of his foster daughter.

I`m not sure how old Alaric was supposed to be in canon but I wouldn`t describe him as "middle-aged". In that case I`m ancient. I use middle-aged for 50ish and up. Granted, as a teenager I found twenty old (though all my crushed were on older guys I deemed too hot to care about age) but that has changed.   

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Not to mention, it begs the question of why a 25-year-old man isn't dating women his own age but preying on younger impressionable girls.

For the show that doesn`t matter to me because Damon wasn`t 25 but 160+ and Stefan wasn`t 17 but equally a 160+. I don`t care if he looks like (well, supposed to look like) or "plays" the teenager, that is smokescreen. But that reasoning, neither one should have started anything with a highschool girl. They had seniority on all the human teens.  

Edited March 29, 2017 by Aeryn13

[Chaos Theory]

A part of me is glad that I didn't watch this show until it was already over.  I tried watching it being a HUGE Buffy fan. However there was a lot about the show especially season one that annoyed me.  Then again if I kept with it I probably would have enjoyed the show strictly for the Forbes women and bitched non stop about the lack of Liz.  Who I maintain should have gotten a butt load more screen time. I think her character arc alone from start to finish showed what the show was actually capable of when it decided to write something other then a love triangle.  

[dreamcatcher]

Well I think that arguing about ages on a show about vampires is silly. Of course they never mentioned on the actual show that hanging around younger people is weird, because if they did that, there would be no story. I think Ezria on Pretty Little Liars is definitely creepy because we are supposed to picture a high school student with her teacher. But no, I don't find Delena any creepier than Stelena. We don't oppose minor/adults relationships just because one of them happened to be on this earth for longer, but because of the power dynamics. Which is why Stefan is just as creepy for going after high school students. And yes he was 18 (or 17?) at the time of his death, but back then he was considered to be an adult and would actually look more mature than most teenagers today. And given that he also went to college and was able to pass as a college student, I don't think we are supposed to think that he looks like a normal 17 year old either. Plus, he decided to pursue a human knowing damn well that he would expose her to supernatural elements that no normal 17 y.o deserves to face. They are both just as "bad". But they are vampires. They are supposed to be inappropriate. And well, there is a reason why people make fun of Twillight. If we are going to make vampires cute and nice, we might as well just write stories with humans involved. 

I do understand that tv storylines could be problematic, but I think that we are focusing on the wrong thing. The way they treat female characters and even more so, queer characters and POC is definitely important and should be called out. Whether a vampire is supposed to hang out with younger people (aka pretty much everyone else on this planet) is the least of our problems.

[closeyoureyes]

I still love this show. Objectively I think aspects of it are mediocre (especially if by "mediocre" you mean downright terrible!), but it still has my heart. My attachment to my TV shows goes beyond loyalty and can be considered masochism at this point. I'm aware I have a problem :-) 

 Along that same vein, I still love Stelena. I'm a grown woman who still ships them with all the ardor of a pre-teen - and all the stubborn denial of someone who's blocked out about 80% of the show's canon.  

I enjoy Damon, but not as a love interest for Elena or Bonnie. 

I still like Elena, which I'll admit is probably because she was just generic enough for me to project shamelessly onto her character. Someone who likes to write, is capable of great sadness and intense joy, passionate and impulsive and follows her heart and current instincts even when she really shouldn't. I relate to Elena, or at least the version of Elena in my head, though I will admit that she can be very frustrating to watch. 

A lot of people think it was inevitable that Elena had to at some point become a vampire, but I really wish she had remained human. 

Caroline and Stefan should have been a great relationship, but I thought the reality of it was so awkward to watch and the chemistry was nonexistent. Neither seemed really in love or even happy. 

For all my many complaints about this show, Stefan Salvatore is one of my favorite male TV characters ever. 

I agree totally with people who said that the first few seasons of this show were really underrated as genuinely good TV, and the plotting and pacing were superb. What happened?! 

I should have grown to hate the endlessly dysfunctional dynamic between Damon and Stefan, but their scenes are still always among my favorite aspects of the show. 

[Terrafamilia]

I wonder is someone could help me out. What year of high school were the kids in when the show started? I had thought they were seniors but in looking over some of the dates on the VD wiki I see that the series' date within the first episode was Sept 2009 while the high school graduation date was given as May/June of 2011. This made me wonder whether they had all been held back a year due to missing so much class time due to extracurricular vampire related activity or Stefan was a real glutton for punishment by deciding to enter school as a junior.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

12 hours ago, Terrafamilia said:

I wonder is someone could help me out. What year of high school were the kids in when the show started? I had thought they were seniors but in looking over some of the dates on the VD wiki I see that the series' date within the first episode was Sept 2009 while the high school graduation date was given as May/June of 2011. This made me wonder whether they had all been held back a year due to missing so much class time due to extracurricular vampire related activity or Stefan was a real glutton for punishment by deciding to enter school as a junior.

Elena, Bonnie, and Caroline began their junior year in S1. During the first four seasons, each season covered one semester of high school. After that, they did one school year per season while they were in college. S7 had time jumps to finally catch the show up to real time and then some (from S3-S6, the show's timeline was two years behind the actual airdates). It usually wasn't as noticeable as it was on Pretty Little Liars where they always had phones from the future and were seeing movies from the future.

S1 - fall semester (2009), junior year (aired 2009-2010)
S2 - spring semester (2010), junior year (aired 2010-2011)
S3 - fall semester (2010), senior year (aired 2011-2012)
S4 - spring semester (2011), senior year (aired 2012-2013)
S5 - fall semester (2011) & spring semester (2012), freshman year of college (aired 2013-2014)
S6 - fall semester (2012) & spring semester (2013), sophomore year of college (aired 2014-2015)
S7 - summer 2013 through summer 2017 (aired 2015-2016)
S8 - fall 2017 through March 2018 (aired 2016-2017)

Edited July 18, 2017 by ElectricBoogaloo

[Terrafamilia]

Thanks!

[AsYouWish]

I'm in my 40s, and sometime during this show's second season I was out to dinner with a bunch of women around my age when the subject of TV shows came up. I was a little embarrassed to confess how much I loved this show that was supposedly geared towards people decades younger than I am, but defensively insisted that it was a surprisingly good show, with a few really compelling characters, better storytelling and pacing than the majority of shows that were thought to be of far superior quality, and a really interesting overall tone and atmosphere. A few of the women there gave it a try, and they all emailed me with various versions of "wow, I had no idea I'd like this show as much as I do, but I'm completely hooked!" Fast forward to somewhere around the fourth season, where the same women emailed me again --- this time to blame me for getting them addicted to a show that had already started to spiral down the proverbial drain.   

That was an unnecessarily long way way of saying that I love seeing how many other people here thought the first two or three seasons were truly good television - and that most of the remaining ones weren't. These days I can still love the beginning of the show without letting the knowledge of what's to come ruin it for me, but for a while I was in the camp who was just disillusioned with the entire series.

I agree with people who thought Elena became a mess of a character, poorly drawn and brought down by annoying flaws that the writers didn't seem to know their protagonist even had, but I still cling to my affection for early Elena.  I really loved Elena a lot during the first season and didn't like Caroline much at all. It's amazing how things changed!

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For all my many complaints about this show, Stefan Salvatore is one of my favorite male TV characters ever.

Mine too. I have a friend who calls him Discount Angel, but I actually love Stefan even more than Angel.

I saved the most embarrassing confession for last: like a few other people here, I still always loved Stelena and held out hope for them until the very end no matter how annoyed I grew with Elena or the show overall. Now I'm a middle-aged woman who wants to write fanfiction about a formerly human female reuniting with her vampire boyfriend despite sleeping with said vampire's brother. Where did my life go wrong? ;) 

[Carrie Ann]

5 hours ago, AsYouWish said:

That was an unnecessarily long way way of saying that I love seeing how many other people here thought the first two or three seasons were truly good television - and that most of the remaining ones weren't. These days I can still love the beginning of the show without letting the knowledge of what's to come ruin it for me, but for a while I was in the camp who was just disillusioned with the entire series.

I agree with just about everything you posted, but this sums it up for me. I haven't gone back to rewatch since I became too embittered and sad about what had become of my once-favorite show. But Season 2 is Desert Island TV for me and I'd throw S1 and S3 in there too, if I could pack a really big bag. :) I'd defend those early seasons against all comers, and in this age of Peak TV, I think they hold up quite well in terms of plotting and sheer enjoyment per minute to just about anything that's aired since. In fact, I feel like some more-lauded cable and streaming series could take a lesson from TVD in those areas. And w/r/t Stelena, I did stop rooting for the pairing when I saw the writing on the wall (and really when I started hating Elena), but I will always root for Nina and Paul (and Daniel Gillies over on TO, among others) to find new roles that fully use their talents, because they are capable of so much and I hope more people get to see it.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

On 8/29/2017 at 4:24 PM, AsYouWish said:

I have a friend who calls him Discount Angel, but I actually love Stefan even more than Angel.

Stefan looks just like Puppet Angel. It took me about five seasons to stop seeing him as Puppet Angel.

[AsYouWish]

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Stefan looks just like Puppet Angel. It took me about five seasons to stop seeing him as Puppet Angel.

Oh no. I never saw the resemblance before, and now I will never not see it from this point forward. 

[ElectricBoogaloo]

21 hours ago, AsYouWish said:

Oh no. I never saw the resemblance before, and now I will never not see it from this point forward. 

Ha, sorry for putting that mental image in your head. Let's see if you can beat my record and erase it from your brain in less than five years!

[DigitalCount]

I know that almost no one is around any longer, but if anyone is, I thought I'd contribute my thoughts regarding the downturn in quality that many people have observed. All in all, I think it comes down to not being genuine and cohesive with their story.

One thing that I felt was a good indicator of cohesiveness was the villain story. I know a lot of people disliked Season 4, but for me the point where stuff started to feel unmoored was somewhere in the Traveler storyline. Part of this was because they felt very out of nowhere, and by that point most of the ties to earlier seasons had evaporated.

I think that was a strong indicator that they were losing their grip on the story. There's a direct line of events between Damon coming to Mystic Falls in Season 1 and Qetsiyah's death in Season 5. The villains from Damon to Tessa are all--in their ways--part of an overarching mythos that established the nature of the supernatural as presented to Elena during that time period. Markos represents a stark departure from that line that's never really found afterward.

A villain's goals and what that villain is willing to do to obtain them tend to drive a story, so if the villains are super lame or ill-defined, it's hard to care about the heroes. It doesn't help that we'd only just gotten a solid resolution to the triangle after Season 4 ended, which almost ate the show along with the Originals--again, as villains driving the plot they worked until they just started...hanging around, and they were too powerful to write around.

(And I still maintain that Season 5 should have pitted the Mystic Falls crew against a similar group who demonstrated the same tribal mentality just to make them confront that sort of thing. Kol's death wiped out countless vampires, considering it finished Jeremy's tattoo while Connor the career vampire hunter hadn't even finished his yet. Any of them who traveled around could have had friends from a different bloodline who felt like our main group needed to be taken off the board.)

I have more to say, but I'm on my phone. :/

[2Old2BAFangirl]

I’m still here, missing TVD!

I agree that the Travelers storyline was lame and boring.  I liked some of the fallout from it, like the Other Side crumbling, but the rest was tough to get through.

I’ve done a couple rewatches and I like season 4.  It wasn’t until the last couple seasons that I started to feel really dissatisfied with the stories. The heretics, Rayna, and the sirens were pretty awful to me.  Each season has some good in it, but nothing like the first 3.

I’m nowhere near as eloquent with my thoughts or analysis but I’m always up for talking TVD!  It was fun to see the alert about this topic this morning!

[TigerLynx]

In Seasons 1 and 2, from Damon's efforts to open the tomb, to Katherine coming to Mystic Falls, to Elijah, and then Klaus showing up, it seemed there was a plan for the characters and the stories.  However, with each successive season, it seemed like the writers were struggling with, or simply didn't care enough, to have the mythology be consistent and make sense.  Also having villains be all powerful, knowing and indestructible, does not guarantee the villain will be interesting.  Season 1 Damon, Katherine and Elijah were far more entertaining than the villains of the later seasons.  I did enjoy Kai's snarkiness, but most of the others were boring.

I never hated Elena, but I did dislike the fact that after we got Katherine's backstory, it seemed the writers didn't think they needed to give Elena anymore development.  The mantra became Katherine is evil, Elena is nothing like Katherine, so Elena is good.  Whereas, in Season 1, the writers actually showed Elena worrying and caring about Jeremy, Bonnie, Matt, Caroline, etc.