L.J. Smith published the first Vampire Diaries novels in 1991, nearly two decades before Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec developed the television version that premiered on The CW in September 2009. The series ran eight seasons and 171 episodes, long enough to burn through most of its own mythology and rebuild it twice. The setting stayed fixed the entire time: Mystic Falls, Virginia, a town with a Founders’ Council, a heritage festival, and a century and a half of covered-up killings underneath the civic pride.
The engine of the show is a piece of backstory. Stefan and Damon Salvatore were both turned in 1864 by the same woman, Katherine Pierce, who let them believe she loved them and then walked away from both. A hundred and forty-five years later they return to a town where a teenage girl named Elena Gilbert happens to have Katherine’s exact face. Everything that follows, the brothers’ rivalry, the doppelganger rules, the Originals, the endless negotiations over who gets a daylight ring, grows out of that one deception. The show’s internal logic is strict about a few things, including the rule that a vampire cannot enter a home without an invitation, which turns hospitality into the most dangerous decision a character can make.
How temptation, guilt, and loyalty get handled, and which version of yourself gets shown to people who have already seen you at your worst, decides where a person lands in that cast.
The options genuinely diverge. Damon Salvatore performs cruelty as a defense mechanism and is at his most dangerous when someone gets close enough to expect better of him. Stefan spends the series in rigid self-control because he knows exactly what happens when he lets go, and his Ripper episodes are the reason the restraint exists rather than a contradiction of it. Caroline Forbes has the most complete transformation in the show, moving from an anxious girl who measured herself against Elena into the most organized and functional vampire in Mystic Falls, still keeping color-coded plans while the world ends. Bonnie Bennett is the witch whose power always costs her something personal, and the series returns to that well often enough that her exhaustion reads as earned. Niklaus Mikaelson, the hybrid whose paranoia is inseparable from a thousand years of family betrayal, was compelling enough to carry his own spin-off in 2013, and his brother Elijah operates on the opposite principle, holding to a personal code in a family that has none.
Katherine Pierce, Alaric Saltzman, Enzo, Silas, Liz Forbes, Jeremy Gilbert, and Hope Mikaelson round out the list, giving the sorting room to separate the survivor from the protector from the person who simply wants the truth on the table.
Answer as yourself rather than as your preferred result. The split between the person who forgives and the person who keeps score runs straight through this cast, and it is the most useful thing the questions can find out about you.
Possible results:
- Damon Salvatore
- Elena Gilbert
- Stefan Salvatore
- Katherine Pierce
- Niklaus Mikaelson
- Caroline Forbes
- Bonnie Bennett
- Enzo
- Jeremy Gilbert
- Elijah Mikaelson
- Silas
- Alaric Saltzman
- Liz Forbes
- Hope Mikaelson
