15 Things That Make No Sense About Vampire Diaries

If Twilight had a child with Days of Our Lives, then that kid developed incurable super-ADHD, it would be The Vampire Diaries.

The TV series is like a substance-resistant strain of bacteria, only the substance is “making sense.” The more you try to inject some sense into it, the more the series mutates into something even crazier.

That’s part of the fun of The Vampire Diaries, which started on the CW network in 2009. It was based on a series of books of the same name written by L.J. Smith that focused on a young high school student by the name of Elena Gilbert.

She manages to get caught up in a love triangle with two brothers in the town of Mystic Falls, Virginia, who turn out to be vampires.

Like lifting a rock and finding a whole squirming world of life underneath it, she learns that her town is lousy with supernatural beings and monsters, and full of menaces mundane and magical.

Basically, Mystic Falls ends up a grab-bag of every supernatural creature under the sun, mixed with all the interpersonal craziness of a soap opera.

Here are the 15 Things That Make No Sense About Vampire Diaries.

15 Why doesn’t Elena just leave Mystic Falls

In every genre show involving a town or city that mysteriously attracts all sorts of trouble for our heroes to combat, it raises the question every time of why the heck its residents don’t just call it quits and get out of Dodge.

For example, there’s absolutely no reason Gotham City should still have people living in it; from the Joker gas attacks to the regular whole-city freezings, property values there must be at rock-bottom.

It’s the same for Mystic Falls; the city has weathered a supernatural hurricane of vampires, werewolves, psychics, Doppelgängers, Original Vampires, and the list goes on and on.

No matter how into the Salvatore brothers Elena was, she had to have known that as a high school student, it was better to get the hell out of the unnatural maelstrom that is Mystic Falls.

14 Stefan and Damon seem to share lovers a lot

The Vampire Diaries is famous for its central love triangle between vampire brothers Stefan Salvatore and Damon Salvatore and human (later vampire) Elena Gilbert.

It forms the basis of most of the initial conflict between the two brothers, though it’s later resolved when Elena ends up marrying Damon and starting a questionably healthy life with him.

However, it turns out this isn’t the first time the brothers have quarreled over lovers. They also fought over Katherine Pierce, aka. Katerina Petrova, the woman who loved them both and turned both into vampires in the 1800s.

Naturally, their attraction for Elena could be explained by the fact that she’s a fellow Doppelgaenger of Amara, and looks exactly like Katherine Pierce, and that is a rare sentence to write indeed.

13 Stefan and Damon’s past lover Katherine Pierce looks exactly like Elena

There are almost 7.5 billion people on planet Earth. The chance that you look exactly like anyone else is pretty slim, and the chance is even slimmer that you end up in the same country as somebody who looks exactly like you, let alone the same state or county.

The Vampire Diaries likes those odds, because it turns out that a former lover of vampire brothers Stefan and Damon Salvatore happens to look exactly like the protagonist of The Vampire Diaries, Elena Gilbert.

Katherine Pierce, aka Katerina Petrova, is a witch/former vampire/Doppelgaenger and arguably the main antagonist of the entire series.

The series has an explanation for this, though: Elena is actually Katherine Pierce’s Doppelgaenger. Except when that explanation turned out to be not crazy enough, and revealed that they were actually both Doppelgängers of Amara, the world’s first immortal woman.

12 Steve McQueen plays Elena’s younger brother… but not the one you’re thinking of

If you thought it was confusing when people were talking about Steve McQueen winning the Oscar for Best Director on 12 Years a Slave, buckle up.

Everyone knew Steve McQueen as the motorcycle-riding, hard-partying blonde bad boy that starred in films like The Great Escape and Bullitt. Years after his demise, the aforementioned director Steve McQueen (no relation) would accept the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2013.

And there is yet another Steve McQueen, who plays Elena’s younger adoptive brother Jeremy Gilbert on The Vampire Diaries.

Except it turns out that he’s actually her biological cousin, and over the course of his time on the series, Jeremy has been put through the ringer, suffering deceased girlfriends, failed vampire conversions, destruction, and being caught kissing a ghost.

Oh, did you know there are ghosts in The Vampire Diaries too? Well, there are ghosts.

11 Everybody becomes a vampire eventually

It makes sense for a show named The Vampire Diaries that damn near half the cast either tries to become a vampire or actually turns into one over the course of the whole show.

It eventually becomes almost a stock tool for the show to introduce drama or freshness to a character, kind of like how CW superhero shows throw around costumes and superpowers to try to keep characters interesting.

In the first season alone, the main character’s brother Jeremy tries to become a vampire by taking in vampire blood and then attempting to commit suicide so he comes back a vampire (he turns out to also be a medium and a supernatural hunter, but that’s for another entry on this list).

Elena turns in the season three finale, and numerous other side characters eventually take the blood plunge over the course of the series.

10 The Original Vampires have different powers from the vampires they sired

Original Vampires were created when a father around the turn of the 11th century sought to make himself and his children immortal and superior to their werewolf competition through magic.

The witch Ayana refused to cast such a spell, insisting that bringing such an imbalance to the laws of Nature would also cast a plague upon the Earth. So the father Mikael asked his wife Esther, Ayana’s protege, to do it anyway.

Thousand-year-long story short, this reckless use of magic created the Original Vampires, including Mikael’s family, who are indestructible and cannot be destroyed by anything on the planet except for a White Oak Stake.

This stands in sharp contrast to the vampires that they’ve sired over the years, who risk not turning into vampires if they don’t consume enough blood after being bitten.

Normal vampires are also vulnerable to vervain, an herb that grew around the White Oak tree.

9 Elena has gone from human to vampire and back

The Vampire Diaries seems to crib a twist from the Twilight book series when main character Elena Gilbert becomes a vampire at the hands of a lover.

Only instead of being enamored with her newfound supernatural powers and status, Elena is angst-ridden and reluctant, having never wanted to become a vampire.

Eventually she becomes so despondent following the first demise of her brother Jeremy that she attempts to shut off her humanity altogether under orders of Damon, with whom she has formed a Sire Bond.

It’s a kind of mental and emotional link between a turned vampire and the vampire who turned them, which compels the turned to follow the vampire’s orders.

Luckily, Elena is able to overcome this nearly unbreakable link and regain her humanity, but not without a super-screwed-up plan by her sire Damon that involves some snapped necks and a magical ring.

8 The backstory of Doppelgängers

You’ll notice a capital “D” on “Doppelgängers” throughout this list. That’s because the word doesn’t just refer to someone who looks exactly like someone else in the world of The Vampire Diaries. That would have been far too simple and sane for a show of its craziness caliber.

As it turns out, there are Immortals in the world of The Vampire Diaries unrelated to vampires or werewolves.

Silas and Amara became true immortals by drinking an immortality elixir created by the witch Qetsiyah over a thousand years ago.

The act of becoming truly immortal disrupts the careful balance of Nature, and as a result, the Doppelgängers came into existence. They look exactly like their immortal counterparts, and their purpose is to die in the place of them to preserve Nature’s balance.

7 Elena’s parentage

Elena Gilbert’s parentage is where The Vampire Diaries goes full soap opera. The protagonist spent her entire life previous to the series thinking that Miranda and Grayson Gilbert were her biological parents.

However, this is The Vampire Diaries, so naturally it turns out that she’s adopted, and that her uncle John Gilbert is actually her real father, who fell in love with a friend of Elena’s fellow doppelgaenger who later became a vampire.

Even this wasn’t complicated enough for the series, so it turns out that, being a medical doctor, Grayson Gilbert forged Elena’s birth certificate to show him and his wife as her biological parents.

It also turns out that he was part of a society based around the supernatural in college, and experimented on and hunted vampires.

6 Vampires have to transition into becoming vampires

Unlike the Original Vampires that sired them, and unlike pretty much every other vampire in pop culture ever, humans in the Vampire Diaries universe don’t complete their transition into becoming vampires just from one bite from them.

Humans who have consumed vampire blood or been bitten by vampires have to consume at least a sip of other human blood in order for them to complete their transition into becoming full-fledged vampires.

Similarly out of nowhere, once humans have transitioned into being a full vampire, they can then just feed on animal blood, or the blood of other vampires.

Like Twilight, it dissolves a lot of what makes vampires unique if they can just feed on each other, or on animals. It also doesn’t help that in the Vampire Diaries universe, humans/Doppelgängers/etc can change from vampire back to human.

5 There are both Upgraded Original Vampires and Enhanced Original Vampires

It could be a testament to creativity that the writers and creators of The Vampire Diaries have managed to proliferate their fictional world with so many specific permutations of magical creature.

It could also be them playing mad libs with torn-out pages of Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer books in a desperate attempt to come up with new plot twists and antagonists. The world may never know.

However, a clue could be found in the fact that two separate subspecies of Original Vampire exist with different but equally crazy origins and powers.

Alaric Saltzman eventually became what was known as an Enhanced Original Vampire thanks to a recast Immortality Spell that bound his life to the main character Elena, making him different from other Originals whose immortality is tied to the White Oak.

Upgraded Original Vampires used a reverse-engineered Immortality Spell that somehow left them with potent werewolf venom capable of ending other Originals.

4 Hybrids went from being vampire-werewolf crossbreeds to being just any supernatural breed

Like chocolate and peanut butter or Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, werewolves and vampires are two great tastes that taste great together.

On The Vampire Diaries, werewolves that have the blood of Klaus Mikaelson, the original werewolf/vampire hybrid, or Hope Mikaelson, who’s a vampire/witch/werewolf tribrid, can transition into becoming a werewolf/vampire hybrid themselves.

You may have noticed the word “tribrid”. That’s because eventually, the whole hybrid process exploded into Mr. Potato Head levels of mixing and matching. Tribrids added a third species to the mix, but also you had your witch/werewolf hybrids and your witch/vampire hybrids, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Then you still had Klaus, who as an Original Vampire turned into a hybrid had all of THEIR strengths, powers, and weaknesses mixed with a werewolf’s.

3 There are psychics who have nothing to do with any of the supernatural breeds

Though the mythology of The Vampire Diaries is frequently as dense as a neutron star, it at least maintains a certain consistency in that most supernatural creatures have origins that in some way connected, so most supernatural elements of the series have a common lineage.

That’s what makes the psychics that show up on the show such a confusing outlier.

In a show where seemingly everybody and everything turns out to be related in some way, including the various supernatural species like werewolves, vampires, and witches, the psychics just kind of are, out of nowhere.

Though their abilities occasionally appear similar to those of witches, psychics just seem to be a natural phenomenon, capable of telepathy and limited mind control (mostly just the power to subtly influence the actions of others).

2 Psychics can create entire dimensions accidentally

Remember how psychics’ powers include mind control and telepathy? Just having two powers makes way too much sense for The Vampire Diaries.

It turns out that under the right conditions, psychics can create pocket dimensions of their own, normally when they are subjected to extreme emotional duress. To date, it seems that only Bonnie Bennett and Arcadius, the first known psychic, have this ability.

Arcadius’ pocket dimension was an afterlife housing his soul that became known as Hell— that’s right, the Hell— basically altering the human spiritual journey forever by his power.

Bonnie’s dimension formed a smaller kind of afterlife that accidentally drew her lover’s soul into it, having created it in her grief with a psychic shockwave after his demise.

It’s a little unnerving to know that people are walking around the Vampire Diaries universe who can accidentally send you into a personal heaven or hell.

1 The series steals episode titles from movies

A lot of sitcoms like to make puns based on popular movie titles, usually if their plots bear some resemblance. Other times, it’s just a fun reference, like the classic Futurama episode “Jurassic Bark” or The Golden Girls’ “Fiddler on the Ropes”.

The Vampire Diaries takes the slightly lazier step of just straight-up naming some of its episodes after movies.

Cast member Paul Wesley has alone directed three episodes with names blatantly stolen from movies: “Resident Evil”, “Things We Lost In The Fire”, and “Requiem For A Dream”.

However, the series also features episode titles like “The Night of the Comet”, “Ghost World”, and “Postcards From The Edge”, and at that point the line between homage and theft blurs a little.

It would be like if Designated Survivor had episodes named “The American President” or “White House Down”.

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Can you think of any other things that don’t make sense about Vampire Diaries? Sound off in the comments!