Jenny Nicholson posted a 2 1/2-hour Vampire Diaries overview on YouTube today and you were the first person I thought of. I watched the entire thing despite only having seen about two episodes five years ago, so you'd probably get a lot more out of it than I would (although spoiler alert she was positive about the series finale, so... proceed with caution??)!
I just finished watching it, actually!
It’s funny, because I’ve been like... deep-diving into the depths of youtube and watching a lot of Jenny Nicholson videos (and also SarahZ and that ‘when posting goes wrong’ dude and hbomberguy, sidenote but i now know much more about the johnlock conspiracy and destielgate and various tumblr controversies and like msscribe shit than i ever needed to lmfao), but I took a break today to do some writing and then a friend of mine was like OH JENNY NICHOLSON’S TVD VIDEO IS UP, and I was like ‘her what???’
Anyway, needless to say I rushed right over to watch it. (I fucking screamed about like, the China Beach shit and also that weird af point-and-click game??? that was so fucking weird lmfao) I will say that while there’s a lot I disagreed with, I do have to give her some latitude because from the sound of things she watched the show almost entirely divorced from the fandom (insert ‘god i wish that were me’ meme here) and had a very surface-level reading that, I think, comes from watching it all at once and not getting embroiled in deeper meta analysis and just not caring that much about getting Deep into the show. Which I can understand, like if I hadn’t been watching tvd since fucking.... 2009 oh god I actually remember this because I started watching around when episode 5 of the first season was airing... I probably would be a lot more casual about how I read the show.
As it is, I’m an Elena stan first, last, and forever, so....yeah I don’t agree with her on everything. But I did agree in a lot of broad strokes, and I think even her ‘Elena’ section had some points to make, she just came to somewhat different conclusions than me, and part of that probably comes from my attachment to Elena and how much of that whole Situation that I saw through that lens. (And also I think she skates right around ‘Elena is a depressed and suicidal teenage girl’ but never quite arrives at that particular point and misses some of the finer points of her overall character arc.)
We did agree on some major things (like season 5 being objectively The Worst), but then she had to say things like ‘Stefan is the guy you would actually date’ (and also ‘it’s better than buffy’ which, like, careful jenny, them’s fightin words), and that was the point where I went ‘hmmmmm someone didn’t actually take time to think through his relationship to Elena and put a lot of the not-so-great points together’, which again I attributed to missing the fandom (and therefore the fandom infighting, so again I have to say I somewhat envy her experience) and not really caring to dive deeply into the source material. Which I can respect! But as someone who spent four years obsessed with the show, and another two angry at it but clinging for the sake of one (1) character, finally freed when she left (and so I do have to admit that Jenny’s actually seen more of the show than me, since I never watched seasons 7 or 8 [except the finale] and don’t intend to ever), I can’t help but be like ‘WELL ACTUALLY -insert list of things she’s wrong about-’.
And then there were things that I couldn’t technically disagree with, like her opinions on Jeremy, but I was also like ‘you don’t have all the facts, I love him’ so I was just that angry ‘I GUESS’ meme for a few sections.
Then again, pointing out that Caroline was metaphorically gay and being tortured by her gay dad who was metaphorically homophobic made me absolutely lose my shit laughing, so she also had some very good points, and watching the video was well worth the time.
I did have to laugh at the very end when she was like ‘I stan Julie Plec’ bc that, more than anything else, made it eminently obvious that she watched the show well after it was over and never engaged with the fandom in any meaningful sense. Which, again, I can respect, bc the fandom was batshit especially in those middle years, but Plec ran the show into the ground and I still haven’t forgiven her for it.
