Also, the section of lyrics that are used in this scene in 5x04
You loved me ‘cause I’m fragile.
When I thought that I was strong.
But you touch me for a little while and all my fragile strength is gone.
Set me free, leave me be. I don’t want to fall another moment into your gravity.(she says she’s with Damon and pulls away)
You’re on to me and all over
(And neither of you thought that was something I should know?)
Something always brings me back to you.
(We weren’t hiding it from you. It’s not-)
(She turns away and says she’s sorry)
(And just like that the hunger returns)
It’s very interesting how the lyrics go with the dialogue, contrasting it if you take it in one context but if you take it in another, it means she sees douche!Stefan all over again
What’s also interesting is how the scene is framed as much as it annoys people.
Stefan tells Elena that “The distracting, the sublimating, whatever you want to call it, the urge to feed has settled. I’m not hungry anymore. Whatever monster I was capable of being, I can see why I was different around you” and when she pulls away from him saying “I’m with Damon”. He says “You’re with my brother? And you both didn’t think you needed to tell me?” and Elena says “We weren’t hiding it from you. I’m sorry, Stefan…” and she turns around and he says “Suddenly the urge to feed is back again” basically guilt tripping her.
She’s a distraction from the urge, a representative to sublimate the hunger with love as in it’s essentially a projection and if she ceases to return that love, he feels no need to keep up the good guy act.
You know how Bonnie said “I know you think you have to be there for everyone but you don’t” and then in that scene Stefan says that her attempt at distracting him, sublimation is working so when he pulls her in, there’s the feeling responsibility that maybe this is what he needs to bring back his memory or keep the Ripper at bay and if she breaks the moment then it breaks the sublimation and he’s back to square one and can relapse. She has a savior complex in a way.
And there’s the “I never saw you as a monster. When the first time I touched you here, I told you not to hide from me” which shows how much she has glossed him over in her mind where actually, he is hiding from her and deriving his worth from her, where he has lied to her multiple times and she was scared when he almost drove her off the Wickery Bridge. He has been a terrible person to her, victim shamed her and emotionally manipulated and abused her and she’s saying she has never seen him such but “the most compassionate person she ever met”, “the perfect boyfriend”, “it was her who was responsible for the break up” where she shoulders all the blame and idealizes him A LOT partly because she has a guilt complex anyway but mostly because she was happy with Damon while they were unaware he was drowning and she had a pit in her stomach warning her so she thinks she’s the one to blame because she ignored it and because she’s the one who drove him away leading him to that fate. And also because when her subconscious was actually tapped in 4x10, she said “When he looks at me, all he sees is a broken toy” and she knows he’s not always been there for her and he was far from the perfect boyfriend. So the denial isn’t in her not kissing him but in leaning in because she falls into that illusion of Stefan being the glorified version of himself.
And when she says “I’m with Damon” that snaps her out of it. That’s her reality. Because here she was falling into the illusion of where they were back in season 1. And then Stefan says “You both didn’t think it important to tell me that?” and Elena says “We didn’t hide it from you…I’m sorry” and she turns around. Interesting choice of words because she says a little earlier that she told him not to hide from her.
"We met. We talked and it was epic. But the sun came up and reality set in"
With Damon she knows he’s been a terrible person and he can still do terrible things and make bad choices, that he’s both selfish and selfless and she laughs at him saying he’s a reformed serial killer whereas she cannot even associate the term with Stefan. She knows Damon feels guilty for many deeds and she knows he has more good in him than he lets people see but she doesn’t deny that he does terrible things. She has a disillusioned idea of Damon which both her conscious and subconscious are in consonance with while the same isn’t for Stefan.
I liked that she said “I’m with Damon”, not “I’m in love with Damon” because it’d be very much like “It’s always gonna be Stefan” and while “I’m with Damon” seems like she did it only because of commitment, it was the breaking of her illusion, it was her trying to turn Stefan down gentler, even if giving the impression of her betrayal.
The whole scene is about disillusionment for both Stefan and Elena. They work with the illusion of simplicity but the minute that breaks they don’t. He then want to go rip someone’s head off because as he puts it later “my brother stole my girlfriend and my girlfriend let him” which is one gross, misogynistic line reducing Elena actually to property and actually a broken toy(He doesn’t even know Damon and Elena at this point and he’s this mad). Then seeing Caroline vulnerable he emotionally manipulates his importance in her life with “You have me” which was a SE line in 3x20 where again he emotionally manipulated Elena’s abandonment issues because of seeing how Caroline is there for him and cares about him so he projects that the role of the person who keeps him from falling so he projects that love onto her but can’t even show up at her own friend’s funeral to actually be there for her.
Here is a set up for the recreation of the past to trigger his memories to return and the important part is that she doesn’t kiss him, even with the doppelganger destiny’s influence, and it reveals the reality.
And it’s on the Wickery Bridge where he emotionally abuses her yet again. They only had one positive memory here and every other memory is negative.
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