Epiosde 2- Dear Diary…🎥🧛
Episode 2 — Dear Diary…
Hello! Welcome back to this week’s Watch Club meeting. If the hint from the last blog wasn’t enough, today we will be discussing none other than Vampire Diaries!!!
If you somehow haven’t watched this show yet — first of all, where have you been for the last 17 years? Hopefully by the end of this meeting, somewhere near your laptop, opening it up and getting ready to watch. Because trust me, you’ll understand why you need to drop everything and start watching it immediately.
Now that everyone has taken their seat, we need to discuss a debate that, if you haven’t guessed by now, is pretty integral to this show: Team Stefan or Team Damon?
For the sake of keeping this Watch Club meeting from turning into an eight-season-long therapy session, we’re going to focus mostly on Seasons 2 and 3, with a few important moments from the earlier and later seasons sprinkled in when needed.
And before anyone gets too comfortable, I should probably make my allegiance very clear. I am, and probably always will be, Team Stefan.
Listen, I get it. Damon has everything I usually love in a fictional man. Enemies to lover? Check. Morally questionable? Absolutely. Years of yearning while pretending he doesn’t care? Unfortunately, I eat it up every single time. On paper, Damon Salvatore should have won me over.
But then there’s Stefan and Elena.
Their love felt like warm sunlight. ☀️
I mean come on with that picture, how can I not be Team Stelena!
But lets be clear. It wasn't perfect — and trust me, we are going to talk about Wickery Bridge — but at its best, their relationship has something I never quite felt with Damon and Elena. There was a softness to it. A patience. They could sit together in silence without the world needing to be on fire. They made each other feel safe, and even when everything around them was anything but normal, their love somehow felt secure.
Damon and Elena had electricity. Stefan and Elena had warmth.
And maybe this is where I lost half of the Vampire Diaries fandom, but I don’t think love should have to electrocute you to prove that it’s there.
Moving on, there was a moment between them in Season 2, Episode 9 where Elena finally breaks down under the weight of everything happening around her. She starts blaming herself for everyone getting hurt, and Stefan just listens as he tries to hold her together in his arms.
And bear with me now, but what always gets me isn’t just the look on his face — it’s the way you can almost feel him hurting with her. He knows there’s nothing he can say that will immediately fix everything, and you can see how much that hurts him too. So instead, he just holds her. He lets her cry, reassures her that none of this is her fault, and makes sure that, even if he can’t take the pain away, she doesn’t have to feel it alone.
When they finally fall into each other’s arms, it feels like they’ve found a safe place in the middle of everything going wrong around them. And to me, that was always the heart of Stefan and Elena. They couldn’t always protect each other from the pain, but they could make sure the other person never had to carry it alone.
But of course, loving Stefan and Elena doesn’t mean pretending their relationship was perfect. 😭
Season 3 gave us one of Stefan’s worse moment with Elena: Wickery Bridge. And I don’t even want to watch this scene ever again, but I need you guys to know what I’m talking about…
There really isn’t a defense for it. Stefan knew what that bridge meant for Elena. He knew the trauma attached to it, and in that moment, he unfortunately, used it against her.
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To be kind of fair, Klaus had spent the better part of the season torturing him, controlling him, and testing what little sanity that man had left. Personally, if I were Stefan, I would’ve pushed her into the water just for putting me through something like that. But thank god he’s a better person than I am, or else he would’ve lost friendship privileges as well.
But for sure, he crossed a line. And I think that’s why the scene feels so wrong: the person Elena once associated with safety suddenly became someone she was afraid of. Everything their relationship had been built on disappeared in that moment.
Okay, I know I’ve spent most of this meeting defending Stefan, but we have to talk about the other Salvatore brother.
And trust me, I understand the Damon appeal. The yearning, the tension. the morally questionable man who is secretly capable of loving someone more than himself — I get it. Damon and Elena had chemistry.
But for me, that chemistry never had the same sparkle that Stefan and Elena had. Delena often felt like it was built on intensity. They wanted each other, fought against wanting each other, hurt each other, and somehow found themselves right back in the same place. It made for a great show, but there were moments when their love felt less like something that brought them peace and more like something neither of them knew how to walk away from. [Insert clip to prove my point!!]
And then, right after realizing they’re wrong for each other for what feels like the millionth time, they simply rip each other’s clothes off and forget about all the people who seem to get hurt in the process. Cough, cough… Aaron.
There’s also an enormous elephant in the room: Damon did some truly awful things to Elena before they ever became a couple. This is a man who snapped Jeremy’s neck after Elena rejected him, without even knowing he was wearing the Gilbert ring. Oop — now that I think about it, Katherine had rejected him earlier that night too. Talk about taking two rejections in one night really badly. But it was also giving man child after that scene. Damon also didn’t return to Mystic Falls because he was searching for Elena — he came back still completely obsessed with Katherine.
And that’s just the tip of it. Sure, Damon and Elena had chemistry, but let’s not forget that their actual relationship began while Elena was sired to him. He also physically abused Elena’s friend Caroline and threatened her other best friend, Bonnie, on countless occasions. And I, for one, still can’t get over the fact that Elena wanted to be with someone who killed her brother — even if it was only for a moment.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just the rational part of my brain that apparently got shut off for Elena, but I could never be with someone who repeatedly hurt the people I love, no matter how epic our love was supposed to be. Say what you want about Stefan, but when it came to the women he loved, especially while he was with them, there was a level of care and respect that I just never saw from Damon.
And that’s where I sometimes struggle with Delena’s development. As the show went on, Damon increasingly became the tortured, misunderstood brother we were supposed to sympathize with, rather than simply the villain we met at the beginning. And listen, it worked. I ended up caring about Damon too.
But sometimes I wonder whether Elena and Damon naturally grew toward each other, or whether the storyline itself began changing just for Damon so that they could grow toward each other.
And the later seasons only make me question this more. At times, it almost feels like the show starts creating parallels between the brothers to even out the scales. Damon killed Lexi, Stefan’s best friend, early in the series — and later, Stefan is the one who kills Enzo, someone Damon deeply cared about. Stefan spends months trapped in a safe at the bottom of a quarry, drowning and waking up only to drown again, while Damon is off living happily with Elena, unaware of what his younger brother is going through. Later, we learn about Damon’s own horrific years of captivity and torture with the Augustine society.
But then again, I’m not saying they are identical. But was this the natural progression of two complicated characters, or was the show slowly trying to close the moral gap between the brothers so that Damon becoming Elena’s choice felt easier to accept?
After all of this, though, maybe The Vampire Diaries was never really about who Elena would choose. Maybe it was about the brothers. In the wise words of my girl Rebekah, “The Salvatores may fight like dogs, but in the end they would die for each other.”
The way I see it is, Stefan and Damon could hate each other. They betrayed each other, fought over the same girl (twice), blamed each other for more than a century of pain, and probably needed several lifetime of family therapy. But when it truly mattered they protected each other.
But yes, I am still Team Stefan. I still think Stefan and Elena had the kind of love that felt rare and warm. And might I add, the universe was quite literally working overtime to push those two together with the whole doppelgänger prophecy.
And with that, I think it’s time to officially adjourn this week’s Watch Club meeting.
Although, after spending all this time talking about who Elena should have ended up with, I can’t help but think there’s another relationship in Mystic Falls that deserves its own meeting.
Maybe one day we will have to discuss why our king Klaus Mikaelson was the perfect man for Caroline Forbes and why not letting those two end up together was quite literally a crime against humanity. Yes, I see the hypocrisy after everything I just said about healthy relationships. No, I will not be taking questions at this time!!
As for our next Watch Club meeting, we’ll be leaving Mystic Falls behind and heading somewhere with significantly fewer vampires and significantly more spandex.
All I’ll say is this: he deserved a third movie, and their love deserved a different ending.
See you at the next meeting!! 🕷️
