What I’d like to see is an Elena that doesn’t run and hide from her pain.
I mean, she asked to have her humanity turned off after Jeremy died, and she BURNED DOWN HER OWN HOUSE. But what puzzles me as a viewer is that even when she comes through all these hardships (her parents dying, her aunt dying, her teacher/pseudo-father dying, her biological parents dying, her brother dying, etc), when she faces a new struggle she reacts in the same way-run and hide-which has been proven over and over again as the WORST strategy. If there was ever any fictional character I DIDN’T want to be (even if it got me a sexy vampire boyfriend named Damon Salvatore), it would be Elena Gilbert because she’s pretty much the unluckiest girl on the planet with a side of Fate out to get her. I like to see people overcome their odds, and trust me, Elena has had the odds stacked against her. I like character growth (especially female character growth). Sometimes I wonder if Julie Plec’s and Ian Somerhalder’s intention for Damon Salvatore is to create a character that is so perfectly imperfect and loveable that even the characters on the show don’t deserve him and that it’s some kind of sick torture for the viewers to pine after him, convinced that you could treat him better than Elena. One of the highlights of “The Vampire Diaries” is the growth Damon’s character has undergone through the last five seasons, and I consider it an insult that she would rather just forget him. If she loves him so deeply, doesn’t he deserve to be grieved and not forgotten? Because she didn’t just wipe her memory of him, she reverted her memory back to what she initially thought of him as-a monster with no remorse. She’s had two great loves and had pretty much everyone she’s cared about die at one point or another, and yet when her boyfriend (her “greatest love,” if you will) dies (although we know he’s not exactly “gone”), she resorts to erasing him from her memory because that’s the only way she can think of coping with this particular loss. Even if we did have memory-erasing scientific equipment or vampire compulsion, would you really want to wipe away years of your life? Isn’t every life experience important? Especially the ones that cause us so much pain when they no longer work out? Didn’t we learn something from them?Įssentially, I’m pretty disappointed in the character of Elena.
While the prospect of erasing our hurtful memories after we have experienced loss does seem intriguing because no one wants to have to deal with the emotional baggage all that sorrow brings, it just isn’t realistic to exist that way.
Wouldn’t that make our lives so much better? If only we could all just erase our hurts from our memories with the help of an Original Vampire WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER than to erase an immature 19 year olds’ memories because they asked them nicely and seem distressed.
In Episode 602 of “The Vampire Diaries” titled “Yellow Ledbetter,” having finally admitted to herself that her boyfriend, Damon Salvatore, is dead (but mostly not wanting to be a witch drug-addict anymore), Elena Gilbert decides to reenact “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and erase her relationship with Damon from her memory because she’s come to the conclusion that this is her best option for moving on.
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