#my god......

[christiangeistdorfer]

BARBRO PETERSON at the 1974 ITALIAN GRAND PRIX

[tavaresfucker]

someone eat that man's ass

[superhater]

[cursedbcrn]

THE TVDU TIMELINE (AND HOPE’S AGE)

Okay, so I know this is like the most controversial topic of the TVD wiki, but during our rewatch of the show, I’m realizing that the timeline on the show (particularly Legacies) is just... super compacted, so here is my take on how the events of the show play out over time and how that might affect the ages of various roles. If anyone hasn’t watched Legacies or actually cares about spoilers... beware.

If you pay attention to the words and the dialogue in the show, they actually drop a fair number of hints as to the passage of time on the show. In the past, I always assumed that it followed the same timeline as most shows, where each season is equivalent to one year with episode air dates matching with what’s happening canonically on the show, but it’s actually not the case in Legacies, where, between the pandemic and general wonky primetime airing schedules, the timeline is a little more difficult to follow. 

Examples of the above include early S1 where the first few episodes are literally happening over the course of several days, maybe two weeks. There’s a few times the characters say things like “yesterday” or “a few days ago” or “last week” in their dialogue. Obviously, this might change as I keep rewatching (like a fool because this is a damn hyperfixation), but here’s what the timeline is like in my head.

Starting from the top, S5 tells us that Hope is 15 at the time that all of that plays out, and there’s an unknown time jump between the end of TO and the beginning of Legacies. We’ll come back to this later. 

Like I mentioned above, the first few episodes of S1 happen very quickly (going to find Raf and Landon, Landon stealing the knife, the dragon, the football game, the discovery of the monsters, the twins’ birthday). These all happen in a matter of days, maybe two weeks at the most. When the Honor Council stuff is happening, Lizzie asks Raf to the twins’ birthday “on Friday”, so we know it’s coming up quick. And the twins’ birthday is the first real date that we have confirmed on the show. So 1x06 is occurring on March 15. The next real “date” we have is in 1x12, where we know the school is on spring break. Now idk about y’all but in the states and when I was in school, the latest spring break ever seemed to be was like early/mid-April? So it sounds like the gap between 1x06 and 1x12 is a handful of weeks at most, which makes sense. During this time is the whole part where Hope goes and gets Landon back, the djinni episode, and the slug debacle. As far as the passage of time goes, there isn’t a lot of it during these plot points. 

Then we hit the end of the season and summer break. So S1 has happened over the course of like... three months, and S2 picks back up at the beginning of the next school year. Unfortunately, events like the Miss Mystic Falls Pageant and Founders Day don’t actually have set dates in canon so it’s difficult to tell what the passage of time is supposed to be like. However, we do know that 2x08 (the Santa episode) occurs in October. So the first half of S2 takes place over the course of a month or so? After that, the next hint of time that we get is the culmination of the season, where Dark Josie intends to push up the Merge timeline and do it on the twins’ birthday of that year. So we’re back to March 15 of the next year, and two seasons have passed in the span of one in-canon year. 

Now this is where the timeline gets even MORE messed up because of the pandemic and the weird airing schedules. But 3x01-3x04 were always supposed to be part of S2, so that’s where I’m putting it. Given the reactions by Alyssa and the rest of the witches in 3x01, not that much time has passed since Dark Josie was banished, there is again urgency with Raf’s problem, the musical, and then the confrontation with the Necromancer. 

It feels like there is another time jump after 3x04, because Kaleb references Sheriff Mac moving to Savannah with Maya, and Josie is working on her transfer over to MFHS. I’m guessing that most public schools aren’t going to handle transfer requests at the end of the school year, so it sounds like we’re back to the end of the summer again by the time 3x05 happens. This also makes sense in context of what’s happening in the A plot, where Hope is losing herself in her search for Landon, which probably would actually take months. However, once she finds the Monkey’s Paw and Cleo enters the picture, things begin to pick up again. 

Now I’ll be perfectly frank, I only sat through S3 once (and I’m not looking forward to doing it again) so I’m not as in tune with that season as much as I am with the others, but again, it does feel like time moves quickly. With the monsters constantly coming and the appearance of golem Landon to push along the narrative, I can believe that this happens over the course of a few months, taking us to maybe November or December of that year, approximately a year and a half since S1 began. And of course, once Mali-Landon leaves, everything kicks up a notch. Like with S2, 4x01-4x04 were meant to be part of S3, and that’s where it makes sense narratively. 

Hope makes the realization that she needs to become the tribrid in the Star Wars episode, and everything from that point on shoehorns her into that point. Again, we don’t have direct dates or events to mark the passage of time, but just going off what happens in canon, from the time they wake up from the vision quest to the end of 4x04, I don’t think there are any days where the Squad is just taking a break and lounging around (with the exception of 4x03, but I wouldn’t call that lounging around). 

Now we know that there is no timeskip between 4x04 and 4x05 because Lizzie directly alludes to the night before in her opener, so everything that’s happened since the beginning of the show has now occurred within something like two years (not the four I was assuming up until now). Again, with the urgency of the plot, Hope is not just sitting around and twiddling her fingers once the threat of Triad comes up, and the Squad is not waiting for Hope to come back. Hope’s actions include learning about Triad, having her misadventures with Clarke, Salvatore Idol at the school, her confrontation with actual Triad and Aurora, and her confrontations with Lizzie. Similarly, there is no time jump between 4x09 and 4x10, as the episode tells us. All of this is happening in a span of weeks, not months. 

All that said, it feels like about two years have passed since S1 began. Hope was 17 at the time (having just turned 15 when S5 of TO happens and taking a little over a year off to grieve, thus setting her back one school year and putting her in the same grade as the twins, and half a school year where she’s just in her room watching Cutthroat Kitchen by herself). She is just about to turn 18 by the time she jumps into Malivore (I’m keeping the May birthday even though I just wrote this entire meta on why air dates ain’t shit), and is a few months shy of her 19th when she has her first death in 4x03. 

[bonkmp3]

– Mahmoud Darwish, from Identity Card (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)

[ispyspookymansion]

not me being 1 away from 2k on my spn blog

[greeds]

got into a lil argument w my mom n my sister was like "cancers and libras dont get along" like can you please shut the fuck up this isnt the time or place literally at all🙄