Vampire Diaries: The Curious Case of Vampire Elena Gilbert

In last week’s episode of Vampire Diaries everyone was scrambling not only only to keep an unemotional Elena from tearing the town limb from limb, but to save her from herself and a future filled with regret.

They thought it would be easy to stop the mauling, after all, the town was awash in verain – a rather cunning plan, I might add.

To tackle her great desire to a) nibble on some flesh and b) have a good time doing it, Elena rejoined the cheerleading squad with disastrous consequences. After she ate some of the competition and donned her hair ribbon as a trophy, she decided later it might be fun to throw a party at the Salvatore mansion to get everyone else off her back.

All of this started because of a love triangle between Stefan, Elena and Damon. Damon’s blood turned Elena and in odds that cannot even be described, she formed a sire bond with him. During this incredible trip, we learned it was Damon who met Elena first, but compelled her to forget him. She could have easily fallen in love with him first, but his actions prevented it. The triangle was much deeper than we were lead to believe. Even Stefan thought that Damon’s desire for Elena relied heavily on leftover feelings for Katherine, Elena’s doppelganger  than it did for Elena herself.

Interestingly, the same could be said for Stefan, but since he had tossed his badassery aside for emotions and a more humanistic approach to vampirism, it was forgiven. You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Elena saw through the stinging side of Damon over and over again to form a friendship with him that nobody understood. Damon himself had a difficult time believing that a girl as sweet as Elena could see through his armor to the man he had hidden so deeply inside.

So when she fell so deeply in love with him after being turned, at first it was chalked up to her new found freedom of thought as a vampire. She had lost the ties that bind humans to to the more strict moral code and understood Damon more than ever. Elena and Damon reveled in each other. They flourished. Until Stefan decided there was nobody on this earth, human or vampire, who could possibly love his brother so deeply. It had to be a sire bond.

Stefan is the worst brother in the world.

It was Stefan’s great idea that by breaking the bond, Elena would be free to choose between the brothers and find her own way again. Except it backfired. It hurt. Damon remembered how much it hurt the first girl who was under his sire bond to lose him, but he went along with it. For his brother and because he wanted to do what was best for Elena. He also didn’t want Elena’s love under false pretenses. When you’re in love, the last thing you want is someone loving you back because of a spell. You want the real thing.

Just because Damon told Elena to walk away from him, didn’t mean the bond was entirely broken. She was just set adrift. Until Jeremy died. Then Stefan demanded even more from his brother. To tell Elena to turn off her emotion so she could stop hurting. So Elena turned off her emotion, and it turned out emotion was the string holding her to Damon. Without emotion the bond was truly broken.

Thank you, Stefan, for completely tossing Elena to the wind. No love, no emotion, no protection from herself. She’s lost and doing whatever she wants whenever she wants. Damon saw in her a bit of himself and took her to New York under the guise of finding Katherine and the cure. We’ll pick that story up tonight. They’ll party, feed, paint the town red – literally.

The real question lies in just how far gone Elena is. I believe a good portion of her behavior is an act, to teach the brothers Salvatore a lesson that they can’t play with the lives of others without consequences. It wasn’t Stefan’s decision to make whether she was happy due to a sire bond or not. She was happy. He should have let her stay that way. It was selfish of him to question. He was unaware of how close she and Damon had become pre-vampire, so he had no frame of reference for her feelings. Deciding that not feeling instead of feeling too much – also not his call to make. Stefan has been playing her like a puppet on a string, and if she’s in there, she should be pissed.

My call is a lot more of her behavior is an act. She’s torn between her love for Damon and Stefan and has chosen to stuff her humanity as far into her psyche as possible. Can she pull it out? Yes. Whether she chooses to and what she’ll do with it when she brings it out will be the most exciting part of Elena’s journey. Will she be more angry with Stefan for pulling the strings or with Damon for going along with it? With the right skill, this could be the biggest story The Vampire Diaries has ever played out.