a kai parker character analysis/defense
lets actually talk about why i think kai parker deserved a redemption arc. this is gonna be a long one. (and i apologize if i’m not articulate enough in my explanation or if it doesn’t make any sense, i also want it to be known that if anything i’ve said regarding aspd is incorrect, i would love to be more informed).
to preface, everyone is completely entitled to their own opinions and i don’t aim to argue with anyone or be negative for this opinion, rather open the floor to civil discussion and seeing other perspectives. if you disagree with anything i say that’s completely okay and well within your right. i just find kai very interesting and wanted to give a (hopefully) comprehensive breakdown of my thoughts! please feel free to DNI if you disagree, that is okay!
i want to say off the bat, i clearly don’t condone the character’s behavior/actions and i don’t want to come across as though i’m justifying it, i simply want to break it down and understand it, one of the things i want to make clear with this entire post is the opinion that if we’re going to blame kai, his family/coven are just as equally at fault, if not more.
furthermore, my overall belief is that you can’t judge his behavior when you like characters like stefan, damon, and even klaus who have dropped more bodies than he has and have arguably done worse. no character in this show is really of any moral superiority than the next, and to pick and choose which characters get the hero and villain roles negates the argument when they’ve all done bad things.
but i wanted to get into more of the reason i think kai should’ve been redeemed, or at the very least, understood. i dove pretty far into childhood development and the history of sociopathy (medically referred to as antisocial personality disorder or aspd) for this one, but it proved to be a really interesting topic outside of that, even though i’ll be using it for the sake of argument.
for this breakdown i’m operating under the assumption that kai started siphoning around the same age that we see josie and lizzie start to, which was around age three. and it’s made pretty clear that from the moment his family found out kai was a siphoner they isolated him, treated him like an abomination, and made it obvious they saw him as defective. going as far as to avoid even touching him. depriving a child of physical comfort and affection and then being shocked he turns out sociopathic is another example of why i don’t like his family/coven very much.
you can never convince me the parker’s cared about familial bonds, kai and jo were born out of necessity to continue a legacy, and when they realized kai was different and couldn’t practice magic the way that they could, they scrapped him and kept trying for children until the next set of twins. even liv and luke make it clear the coven comes first.
getting into the childhood development part, key skills in development are: self-awareness, social-awareness, emotional regulation, responsible decision making, and relationship building. i was reading an article from the national library of medicine that stated “antisocial behaviours typically have their onset before age 8 years. nearly 80% of people with ASPD developed their first symptom by age 11 years. boys develop symptoms earlier than girls, who may not develop symptoms until puberty.”
and a lot of other things i’ve read seem to share a sentiment that while genetics can play a role in sociopathy, that one’s environment can be a major influence as well, rather than of being born with traits of aspd, sociopathic behaviors can be learned early on to cope with unstable, chaotic, or neglectful living situations/environments.
it’s obviously important to be emotionally present and there for your child, especially in those integral developmental stages. and it’s very clear that kai didn’t have anyone to fall back on for necessary comfort as a child, his family may not have been physically abusive, but in every way they could, they kept kai isolated. during those fundamental periods in development, the active negligence kai was receiving kept him from being able to properly form the previous key points mentioned.
from the early ages of life he didn’t get to know what it felt like to hug his mother, or get a proud pat on the back from his father, and as his other siblings were brought into the picture, they were raised adopting the same attitude that kai was defective and not to be near him. being put on the outskirts, all while presumably seeing them get to be more of a family than he could be involved in.
he never learned how to love or what it felt like to be loved, it’s not out of left field for kai to not have any feelings for his family, it makes more sense that if he had any they’d be extremely negative. and having missed the mark on many phases of development, he likely didn’t learn how to process those emotions, let alone put a name to them.
he grew up with a deeply ingrained belief that he was broken or fundamentally wrong for being born a siphoner, and held tight to the idea that the merge would give him his own magic, and in turn he’d be accepted and loved by his family if he was the one to survive it. i could only imagine how it felt not only to be on the outside of your own family looking in, but to then have the idea of being “fixed” taken from you when your parents start trying for a new generation of gemini leader specifically to replace you, all while making it pretty evident that was their intention.
i see so many people make kai out to be purely a monster who just chooses to be one because he wants to, but when an emotionally detached way of living is all you’ve ever known since childhood, it doesn’t make sense in my opinion to solely blame him. a lot of people say that kai is not misunderstood in any way, and i firmly disagree. i believe in order to understand why kai is the way he is, we have to recognize and understand what made him that way.
this is why i also believe they should’ve kept the deleted scene with kai and jo in the hospital. kai did not ask to be a siphoner, and he didn’t ask to be neglected and torn away from any sense of normalcy he could’ve had. that scene highlighted how easy it was for his family to have discarded him and written him off as a villain, while never allowing themselves to be conscious of the role they undoubtedly played in that. and while his actions were terrible, i’ve seen the fanbase forgive far worse in the name of liking a character.
i was talking with my best friend about the idea that some characters are seen as morally superior where others get stuck with the villain role by some of the fans simply because they need a villain. and this is why we really like enzo because even he calls this out within the show.
many characters in the show have done worse, some of them doing terrible things just for the sake of it. and they are forgiven entirely because the fanbase likes them. stefan is usually widely regarded as “the hero” both outside the show and in. kai kills his emotionally abusive family (and later his coven) and the fans hate him. stefan kills his father, pressures his brother to complete the transition and turn, and rips through founding families along with countless other people, but all is forgiven because he wrote names on a wall and was self-loathing after he fucked off with klaus in the 20’s. klaus killed katherine’s entire family, killed jenna, and drowned tyler’s mom purely to spite him, not to mention dropping more bodies than half the characters combined without care, even caroline has killed people, but i see a lot of these points defended or even forgotten.
one point of defense i’ve come across for why other characters can be forgiven and he cannot is that those characters “developed empathy and remorse later down the line” and the thing is, so did kai. whether or not that later development was through the gemini merge or not feels like a non-issue in that argument, because quite honestly, even the characters who developed that form of empathy and caring for their past actions all had some form of motivation from an external source, they didn’t start feeling the remorse and empathy simply for themselves, they didn’t change only for themselves.
stefan had lexi, damon changed for elena, klaus temporarily wanted to change for caroline and then later did for his daughter. most characters who developed the want to be better only did so after someone saw that they could be. kai tried, and yet everyone continued the cycle until he gave up and resigned himself to being evil.
i feel it’s also important to bring up that with almost every other villain, we got to actually see flashbacks that showed they weren’t always villainous. we got to see what happened to katherine, damon, and even klaus. we got backstory that humanized them to the audience, backstory that reminds you of the natural progression they made into being the monsters we got to see. with kai, that didn’t happen. and the only real sliver of that trauma we fully get to see was a deleted scene. it makes it easy to interpret him as always having been a bad guy.
not to mention, my personal belief is less that kai suddenly gained emotions he never had after the merge, but more that one of the traits he got from luke within the merge was the ability to process his emotions the way that luke could. it’s not like he magically gained the ability to feel remorse, but more that he gained the ability to process a stunted emotion that he lost before it was given the chance to develop.
and with the entire point of “gaining empathy and remorse”, it feels so off to me that we’re blaming someone who was literally raised developing traits of aspd because of the way he was treated growing up. i don’t see why it should have been entirely on kai to suddenly reverse a mental illness and gain empathy that he was never taught (and genuinely never shown) with little to no blame on the people who needed to raise him and were just supposed to love their child.
no matter how you feel on this topic, you’re fully allowed to have your own opinion, even if mine does not change yours. but i feel that if we are going to blame kai while giving him zero chance for redemption, we also need to acknowledge, examine, and talk about how terrible his family and his coven were to create their own monster and be shocked when he finally snapped.
overall, i just wanted to break down some reasons why i feel that kai isn’t purely some evil person that’s beyond redemption. he wasn’t born an emotionless and irredeemable person, he was made into one. it feels weird to watch someone die on the hill of defending a character who has done worse but then being looked at sideways cause i think kai had potential for redemption.
