The Tragedy of Inevitability: A Kol and Jeremy mini rant
I think one of the things I love and find so tragic about Kol and Jeremy is that (at least to me) they’re mirrors of each other, perhaps funhouse mirrors that warp and distort certain attributes, but mirrors nonetheless.
It’s less that Kol is Jeremy, and more that Jeremy is Kol. Jeremy is who Kol could have been if he wasn’t forced into being a Vampire; if his ties to nature wasn’t severed by a mother who should have known better, being a witch herself and knowing how deeply rooted in her very being such a connection was; if he was not forced to live every day in a tormented hell, growing mad from the hunger and disregard of a family who claimed to love him. If time and terror had not formed him into someone wholly new and alien to himself.
They’re both forgotten younger brothers; trapped in a cycle of abuse and neglect they can’t escape, due to their innate desire to be wanted. They both show explosive and self-damaging tendencies in reaction to abandonment, Kol simply has the power to ensure the repercussions of this are lasting. They both loved someone outside of the family, enough to consider leaving it, who were then killed by said family (Davina and Anna).
Kol and Jeremy are repeatedly killed, abandoned, sacrificed and neglected by the very people who claim to love them. We see them repeat the same cycle over and over again, with the same results. They’re unable to find happiness outside of their toxic and codependent families; because any time they do, their family destroys or kills it.
Who could understand them better than someone who is always the last choice, always the forgotten one, always expendable enough to be useful but never cared for enough to be kept.
The main difference between them being: Jeremy met Kol before he was fully trapped, Kol didn’t have a Jeremy. Jeremy gets away from Mystic Falls and all the nightmarish scenarios he had to deal with there (yes I know he was compelled, but I’ll die on the hill that he knew. Something I’ll likely talk about in a later post); he finds someone not connected to his sister, someone who chose HIM, someone who is solely his, and not merely as a bi-product of their relationship to Elena.
We can see his reaction to Kol hitting Damon, he’s laughing. You cannot convince me that if Kol didn’t say they weren’t really “mates”, that Jeremy wouldn’t have forgiven him. That if Kol actually chose him; Jeremy wouldn't give everything, be everything for him. Jeremy was desperate. He was alone, he was tired, and he needed someone to want him for no reason other than itself. Kol could have been that someone. If Kol hadn't said their friendship was fake, if he admitted Elena was right but that he did actually care about Jeremy, Jeremy would have stuck with him.
Jeremy is so much more resigned after this point. Now believing Elena is the only thing he has, he naturally clings to her, and grows panicked at her pulling away. He needs her to want him; he needs to be obedient, useful, loyal, expendable. All in the hopes that if he can do enough, be enough, she may love him like she used to.
I genuinely believe that, if things were different; if Kol spoke to Jeremy before the ‘Hunters arc’, then he wouldn’t have died. Because Jeremy would have someone outside of Elena, and wouldn’t be so desperate for her to need him like he needs her.
But that would never happen. Because Kol had been doing the dance far longer than Jeremy. He already had his point of no return.
Kol never would have reached out to Jeremy; because when Kol was at that point, when he reached out in the desperate hope that someone, anyone would reach back, he was met with only the lid of his coffin.
Their deaths were inevitable. Dying in pursuit of protecting a family that mourned the moment they were gone and no longer (I remember Elena’s reaction to Jeremy dying. But it means so little in the face of how flippant they were about Jeremy’s deaths, his ring allowing them to feel little guilt when faced with his cooling corpse, knowing he would return in a few minutes). Things may have gone differently; if Jeremy were older or Kol were younger, if they had met before the poison of familial betrayal and longing for acceptance hadn’t yet blinded them to alternative paths.
But they were not. And it had. So there they walk – arm in arm, led by the hand of their older sibling, so trusting and hopeful that this time will be different, down the road to death.