5 The Vampire Diaries Storylines That Have Aged Horribly

It’s been eight years since The Vampire Diaries ended, but the supernatural drama remains beloved by fans for good reason. Over the series’ eight-season, 171-episode run on The CW, Vampire Diaries offered shocking twists, intriguing love triangles, and some of television’s most unforgettable villains – some of whom went beyond The Vampire Diaries into two spinoff series that themselves have become beloved favorites, too. But while there is still a lot to love about The Vampire Diaries, and many of the series’ stories are just as solid now as they were when they first aired, not everything has stood the test of time. In fact, some of the storylines not only don’t hit the same all these years later, but they are downright problematic.

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They say hindsight is 20/20, and for some pretty major Vampire Diaries storylines, it’s clear that a look back isn’t exactly great. From relationships that aren’t exactly touching when you revisit them to repeated mistreatment of major characters, to even some hard realizations about one of the series’ most epic moments, some storylines from one of the most iconic series of the 2010s simply don’t pass the test of time.

5) Bonnie and the Prison World

If we’re being honest, there’s almost no shortage of stories involving Bonnie Bennett that could make this list. The treatment of Bonnie over the course of the entire series run of The Vampire Diaries is problematic and hasn’t aged well, but the most awful example of it is probably the season six prison world storyline. The storyline saw both Bonnie and Damon stuck in a prison world, a place where they got stuck when the Other Side collapsed.

However, while Bonnie managed to find a way to get Damon out, she was left behind for months on end, where she suffered alone. Things got so bad that Bonnie planned to end her own life at one point just to escape her suffering. She is ultimately saved and returned to the real world, but the storyline just hasn’t aged well, both for how it played out and for how the character never actually got a break with her ending being perhaps the most unsatisfying of them all.

4) Elena and Jeremy Kill Kol

While one can argue that the entire cure for vampirism storyline itself is one that didn’t age particularly well, namely because of how it never really lined up with most of the series’ established lore, there’s one specific aspect of the storyline that really has not held up. Season four of the series saw Jeremy awaken as a hunter and needed to complete his Hunter’s Mark tattoo. However, the completed tattoo would allegedly also lead them to the cure, and that’s where things go off the rails.

Elena, who wants the cure for herself, decided to assist in killing original vampire Kol Mikaelson, an act that not only takes Kol out but kills every vampire in his sire line. The cure storyline ends up being something that never has a very satisfactory end (and only gets more convoluted), and, more than that, Jeremy ends up dead anyway. The whole situation is one where Elena selfishly engaged in an act of vampire genocide, and it just doesn’t land well, looking back.

3) Damon & Elena’s Sire Bond

On the whole, The Vampire Diaries had a huge issue with the idea of consent, but that flaw was most glaring when it came to Elena, Damon, and the sire bond. One of the things that is established in The Vampire Diaries is that the bond between a vampire and their sire is an intense one, so much so that it can impair free will. This takes a problematic turn when Elena, who has become a vampire with Damon as her sire, ends up having magnified feelings for him.

This leads them to have a sexual relationship, and while there are a lot of issues when it comes to most of the relationships in The Vampire Diaries, the question of whether Elena was really able to choose Damon for herself, or if it was all a product of the sire bond, feels pretty icky years later.

2) Alaric & Caroline’s Relationship

There’s a lot about the relationship between Alaric and Caroline that was problematic at the time and hasn’t gotten any better, so where does one even start? Season 7 of The Vampire Diaries saw Caroline, who, in case you had forgotten, was a high school student who became a vampire, end up magically pregnant with Alaric and Jo’s twin daughters.

That was weird enough since it really didn’t make sense (it was done to incorporate the real-life pregnancy of actress Candice Accola), but where things get really problematic was that season seven of the series shows that not only did Caroline have the babies, but she ended up in an actual romantic relationship with Alaric… who had been her high school teacher. While the relationship ultimately does not last, looking back, the idea of a student getting together with her former teacher (and having his magical babies) is just not something that’s aged well at all.

1) Stefan’s Sacrifice

The series finale of The Vampire Diaries was pretty epic at the time. The heroes made one big push to defeat the great evil threatening Mystic Falls, and this time, that saw Stefan make the ultimate sacrifice in order to make sure everyone else could go on. However, while Stefan sacrificing himself was presented like some great heroic and noble act, looking back, it just isn’t.

Stefan may have sacrificed himself to save the others, but he did it less for that reason and more as some sort of weird penance for everything he’d ever done that was bad — and Stefan had a long history of bad. In retrospect, Stefan was just looking for a way ou,t and this happened to be it. That it saved the day just ties it all together in a package that glorifies this very unhealthy coping mechanism, epic or not.

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