The Vampire Diaries could have been a very different show

It’s ten years since The Vampire Diaries came out. It lasted eight series, spawned two spin-offs and is still one of the most-watched series on Netflix, but the show could have been very different if it had faithfully adapted LJ Smith’s original books. Here’s how…

Elena was a popular mean girl

The biggest change was Elena’s personality. She was vain, manipulative and selfish –nothing like the naive, innocent girl at the start of the series. The show’s executive producers Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson hated the negative aspects of her character.

“Elena was… really kind of selfish and that didn’t ever feel like a characteristic that we wanted for our heroine. We kind of abandoned that queen-bee popular complex that in a lot of ways defined early Elena in the books,” Plec told E! News.

Even her appearance was different. She was blonde rather than a brunette. All in all, Elena was more like the self-centred Caroline of season one, only worse. At one point, Elena got her friends to swear a blood oath to help her snare Stefan. Her parents died a few years before the start of the books so her sadness was more muted and her vulnerability less obvious.

Elena gradually developed into a character who didn’t just think about herself: she became focussed on protecting her friends and family and learnt to value them above everything else. Ironically, many fans thought Elena became increasingly selfish as the TV show progressed.

Elena and Caroline were enemies

Smith’s Caroline was as shallow as Elena – they were rivals for boys, status and popularity. So, one of the central friendships in the show didn’t exist. Elena’s best friends were Bonnie and a quiet, serious girl called Meredith, who didn’t appear in the TV series.

Caroline and Elena had been close as kids but Caroline became extremely jealous of Elena’s queen-bee status. She even waged a campaign against her and threatened to read her diaries to the whole town.

They both wanted Stefan. He initially took Caroline to homecoming because he didn’t want to admit his intense attraction to Elena, though that soon changed and Elena and Stefan quickly became a couple.

Damon and Bonnie were in love

The main plot was the love triangle between Elena and the Salvatore brothers but Damon and Bonnie also had a romantic connection from the start. Pretty hard to imagine since they hated each other for most of the early seasons.

LJ Smith was asked about the endgame romances of The Vampire Diaries books and revealed that she was glad that fans shipped Damon and Bonnie.

“You may not believe it but there are many readers who would like to see Elena with Stefan and Bonnie with Damon. And since I wrote scenes showing that they care for each other, that’s logical,” Smith said on her website.

Bonnie was kind-hearted and caring but openly flirtatious and drawn to danger. Damon was overly protective of her and she was known to be his weak spot. She in turn was one of the few people to have a genuine relationship with him and the first to see his buried humanity. They kissed and had intense moments but never openly acknowledged their feelings to each other.

Jeremy never existed

Elena had a 4-year-old sister, Margaret, and Jeremy, Elena’s wayward teen brother and Bonnie’s main love interest, was purely created for the show. Steven R McQueen, the actor who played Jeremy, talked about how he couldn’t use the book for inspiration.

“Originally, I was going to read the books and do some research, but after looking into it, I found out my character was a 4-year-old girl named Margaret,” McQueen told Da Man magazine.

Margaret mainly existed to show Elena’s softer side – she was only a 1-year-old when her parents died so Elena wanted to protect her. They were looked after by Aunt Judith, an older, more authoritarian version of Aunt Jenna.

There were a lot more supernatural elements

While the show’s executive producers focused on vampires, werewolves, witches and ghosts, the mythology of the books set up a universe that had a far wider array of supernatural creatures.

In the books there were also angels called guardians, shape-shifting foxes called Kitsune and demons who fed off human emotions called the phantoms. Angels were part of The Celestial Court, which was akin to heaven, and they also ruled over different dimensions of hell.

Elena was half human, half angel. Her mother was an angel who defected and came to live on Earth. Elena was going to be recruited by the angels and taken to The Celestial Court when she was a teenager, but when she saw the angels, she distracted her father and this was what caused her parents’ accident.

She died in the later books and became an earthly angel guarding the earth from vampires and demons. Temporarily. She was also a ghost and a vampire for a while, as is so often the case for teenagers. But she stayed an angel-human hybrid. Later she gained the ability to manipulate time and read minds and her blood could destroy the most evil creatures of the universe. She ended up being one of the most powerful beings in the books’ universe.

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