Stefan tries to battle Klaus, who he realizes is an Old One and unbeatable. Stefan and Damon team up to take her down.īonnie summons Damon and Stefan when she discovers Klaus tormenting Elena through her visions. It's revealed that the Salvatores' ex-lover Katherine was the culprit behind all the chaos in town and chasing Elena off a bridge. As if things weren't bad enough, a formidable entity arrives, causing everything to spiral. The first book's main focus centers around Elena and Stefan's romance, as well as her friend group's efforts to make sense of the savage assaults that have occurred in Fell's Church.Īs Elena tries to prove that Stefan is not guilty of murdering a teacher and Damon investigates Alaric's involvement, it becomes clear that the town is aware of the vampires' existence. Focusing primarily on season three of The Vampire Diaries, I argue that the series’ emphasis on a Nordic origin for its “Original” vampires, combined with obfuscation of the history and legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, results in a narrative that ultimately, if inadvertently, legitimates white nationalist claims.The Vampire Diaries book series focuses on the lives of Elena Gilbert and the dashing vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore, as they navigate the complexities of love, friendship, and supernatural entities in the town of Fell's Church (changed to Mystic Falls in the show). Further, medievalism more generally permeates both vampire narrative and the mythology of the ‘Old South’ so important to the fictional Mystic Falls where The Vampire Diaries is set. The Vinland story has been used since the nineteenth century to legitimate white nationalism in North America. This mythology draws on the legend of Vinland, a paradise supposedly settled by Vikings in North America and recounted in thirteenth-century saga of the same name. The third season of The Vampire Diaries introduces the story of the “Originals”, a family who came to North America with Vikings in the eleventh century and became vampires as a way to protect themselves against ‘native werewolves’. Through these novels, I’ll show what monsters may mean in today’s culture and what the dangerous loving of them might signify. Here, we can see what the collision of different perspectives can achieve and how it might be appealing. I’ll give a brief account of how paranormal romance emerges out of an uncanny mating of the familiar scary Gothic horror and the oft-despised genre of romantic fiction (and other genres, too). In this talk, I will be giving an overview of the wide range of these stories of loving what is dangerous, alien, and terrifying. Genres-kinds of writing-themselves correspond to different sets of values and different ways of knowing or looking at the world. Their outsider status may be owing to class, ethnicity, or sexuality. Literary monsters nearly always represent some kind of otherness-groups of people or sets of values deemed threatening to some elements of society. Their presence is of more than sociological interest and the rise of new genres-new possibilities for writing and seeing, in other words-is itself of interest to those who value literature. But many of them are daringly creative, often questioning, and can be stylishly crafted with considerable literary care. Such novels appeal to (or seem intended for) a mainly female and often young adult readership, which has led to some belittlement. But werewolves, angels, demons, fairies, trolls, cyborgs, and even the unlikely zombie have become objects of desire in these fictions (in film and TV as well as novels). The best known incarnation of this present-day demon lover is the sympathetic vampire, who was probably the first of these paranormal paramours to emerge from the shadows. But despite a long history of monstrous couplings in literature, myth, and folklore, a distinct contemporary genre has emerged, called variously paranormal romance, dark romance, Gothic romance, or dark fantasy (though the definitions are imprecise and shift in reference). Twilight was not the first of these tales (nor the best) and sparkly vampires are not the only demonic lovers. In these narratives the protagonist, instead of fleeing from it in terror or hunting it down, embraces the monster. The Twilight phenomenon has made us aware of a new kind of story about monsters.
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