What would you say is Elijah's biggest character flaw?
Elijah has a lot of flaws and some are more glaringly obvious than others but when I read that, the first thing that came to mind is his willful ignorance about the kind of people he interacts with and the things they do and how it affects other people. That is a lot of words just to say he has blinders on. If you're someone he cares about, there is a lot he is willing to tolerate and overlook which is good in some cases and absolutely damaging in others. Look at Niklaus for example. Elijah knew Klaus for (insert correctly calculated age here) years as a human and that's still how he sees him. He still sees him as the young man who was victimized by their father, who is afraid and scared and traumatized. He see's Rebekah very much the same, as the young girl who never wanted any of this and is perpetually chasing her dreams of being happy, even if she's leaving a trail of bodies in the meantime.
Over the last thousand years, the desensitization to violence has affected them all. What would have disgusted and abhorred human Elijah no longer does. The boundaries have moved, the line has moved. They've all committed atrocities and would do so again, for the right reasons. This isn't to say Elijah is stupid. He understands Niklaus has changed, just like Rebekah has changed, just like he himself has changed. It's just that he's very likely to view the things that Niklaus, for example, does through the lens and context of the man he's spent one thousand years with, give or take, and less based on the feedback of someone whose known him for a short while and has not shared that trauma with him as they all have.
And this attitude/filter isn't because Elijah is stupid, he's just loyal. And feels an immense amount of guilt. He has tied his own happiness and freedom to the happiness and freedom of the other people in his immediate circle. He's made himself responsible for the feelings and wellbeing of others in a way that is clearly unhealthy and codependent. And when that is challenged by the opportunity to pursue something of his own, he freezes up and doesn't know how to handle it, occasionally leading to him sabotaging (if Klaus doesn't do it first). Does any of this make sense? It's why he always chooses Klaus. In any universe where he doesn't, changes have to be made, drastic changes, that would allow him to disentangle his own identity from that of "Always and Forever". I do think this is one of his biggest flaws, if not the biggest.
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izzy806
