You know I realized the reason why I really don’t like Klaroline us not really due to the pairing itself. I have no moral qualms with the abuse of it because it’s literally impossible with any TVD ship and I really don’t like the idea of quantifying abuse. If I hate one ship due to abuse I have to hate them all including my favorite ship, Bonkai, because abuse is abuse, plain and simple it’s terrible in every form and saying one is worse than the other does nothing more than trivialize serious matters because it wasn’t as bad. It’s unfortunate that certain things have to be overlooked, but I do feel that it works better in Kai and Klaus’ case due to their roles as antagonists however I still don’t consider them excuses.
The reason I don’t like Klaroline is because I now can’t help but think about the role they play in the oppression of Tyler and Bonnie. I used to like Klaroline, hell I even used to like Delena (but that got ruined for a whole slew of other reasons that didn’t even require deeper thought) because I used to be a very casual viewer of TVD, it wasn’t really a show I took that seriously so I pretty much took what ever the spoon fed me until season 5 when as a casual viewer I couldn’t even stomach it and had to stop watching. To this day I still haven’t seen the entirety of that season. But back to my point, now I really don’t like Klaroline because I can’t separate the reason why it’s there to begin with and the characters it screwed over with it’s existence.
I’m so lukewarm about most non-Bonnie ships, I don’t really think about why I don’t care for any of the other ones. But I think you probably encapsulated why I’m neutral towards KC.
The Tyler thing makes me so sad, he changed so much and became so complex only to be discarded and his final death was so 😒 And I can’t even think about Bonnie’s treatment w/o getting mad and I’ve acknowledged before that great literary criticism could be academically written about it.
This was a great meta
Well when the show is intent on not giving your favorite character a romance storyline you kinda have to look at the other romances because that’s all there is. However when it comes to TVD there isn’t a single relationship I’m passionate about that doesnt involve Bonnie so I feel that’s pretty telling on how bad the others are to begin with, and how much better the show would have been if they had explored just one Bonnie ship (and I don’t count Jeremy or Enzo because they aren’t explored there just there with little to no build up and little to no chemistry).
But its weird I’ve never really disliked a ship that had nothing wrong with it fundamentally like I do Klaroline because there really isn’t that much wrong with, it just represents everything wrong with the show and it’s low regard it holds POC’s. It literally kills two birds with one stone and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Plec wouldn’t have risked her other characters the way she did Tyler with pairing Klaus with Caroline, even if so they certainly wouldn’t have been made irrelevant the way Tyler.
Think about the previous triangle with Matt, Caroline, and Tyler. For one, it was a he’ll of a lot more mutual due Caroline not actively being in a relationship (she’d broken up with Matt). Two, Tyler isn’t the reason they break up. And 3, after it ends Matt goes on to have several independent storylines towards his development that aren’t off screen. Matt’s irrelevance is cause by him being irrelevant, and yet still made more important than Tyler. Like I pointed out in another post, Matt maybe missing from a lot of episodes, but we aren’t missing key things about him as they all happen on screen, a luxury Bonnie nor Tyler are given.
Anyways my long tangent point is that had the actor been white, because Tyler for all intents and purposes is white, that none of that would have happened. Their value wouldn’t have only been connected to someone else, it would have been independent and been utilized in the show.
(Sidenote: do you ever find it weird that they really didn’t explore werewolf lore while Tyler was on the show. They brought in Hayley and shipped her off to another show to explore the origins instead using a main character from the show who probably has a rich history as well.)
Lol with TVD/Plecverse I always wanna be that meme where it’s like “just say you hate n*ggers and go” bc that is essentially what it conveys without saying as much and it makes me morbidly angry that one of my all time fave ships came from such racist filth.
Honestly, if you switched Michael and Zach’s roles, I really don’t think Tyler would have been sidelined like that. And the only reason Matt was sidelined is bc TVD sucks at portraying nuance; like the way they showed Matt being angry and railing against the supernatural and struggling with juggling his love for his friends with his obvious dislike of what they are falls flat bc the show is so bad at following through, staying consistent, and delivering consequences. Matt should have NEVER forgiven Damon for Vicki, his sister was turned, killed, and essentially buried in ditch and most ppl in his place would be fucking over the guilty party every chance they got. I certainly would if what happened to Vicki happened to my sister. Even if I had to work with said guilty party for whatever reason, I would’ve turned on them first chance I got and THAT is how Matt/Damon should have been done.
But if Zach played Tyler? How much werewolf mythos would we have gotten on TVD? Would Forwood (which was a pretty decent Caro-ship in and of itself) have been so disrespected to prop Kl*roline? And like from what I can tell, wolves on TO essentially have Native American history and seeing that explored/sympathized with from Tyler’s privileged perspective and how much he changed from a douche to a decent person would have been gorgeous. How much more would the witch story lines be explored if we had an actress who looked like book!Bonnie? Would we have had B*mon or Bonkai like…?
So much of why TVD ended up sucking is bc it never really did world-building right. And a lot of that happened bc you’re totally right, they tossed out the POC characters for the white characters and the white ships, and it made the show so bland. Storylines were limited bc all the focus was on vamps and then in later seasons when they tried to branch out with the monsters, it was obvious they weren’t trying. So not only was it not ethnically diverse, it wasn’t freaking plot diverse enough to stay interesting.
Yes to all of this. Tyler was screwed over in a big way. The one thing that Tyler haters hold over him, and “hate” him for is the one thing that I totally agree with. When Caro gave that ultimatum of “his revenge or us” and he chose to go after Klaus, I stood up an applauded. Why?
Cause how could you live your life knowing that it’s in someone else’s hands? Yeah, it was so nice of Klaus to lift his banishment from Mystic Falls and “let” Tyler stay in his hometown😒 Knowing that at any time that could change depending on Klaus’s mood. That’s no way to live a life. That’s not freedom.
And the fact that the writers (Plec) couldn’t/wouldn’t have the character of Tyler express that, OR have the people there understand it just shows that they really don’t know how to write from a marginalized persons POV. So of course it seems like he just took off randomly, or he was so “focused on his revenge”. They made it seem like it was only about Klaus liking Caro and nothing else. Klaus killed Tyler’s last living parent, out of spite. No getting around that (Even if they were broken up) Yeah she was free to do whatever she wanted, but come on. You can’t honestly expect me to believe that if the situation were reversed , people would side with Tyler? No , they wouldn’t.
And that’s not even getting into the indignity of having him be murdered, and no one does a damn thing about it. Just another casualty.
When Caro gave that ultimatum of “his revenge or us” and he chose to go after Klaus, I stood up an applauded.
I did as well and it always baffles me when people try to compare Klaus giving up on his “revenge” to Tyler not letting go. Neither of those experiences are even in the same league. Tyler was enslaved and forced to do things he didn’t want to. When he finally gets free he’s not content at leaving it at that but helps the other hybrids (slaves) break free. Klaus kills all of them and his mother FOR DOING THE RIGHT THING and then is still enslaved in the end. Klaus only lost his free slaves AKA property because that’s what they were to him. How someone compares one of those to the other is beyond me.
POC of TVD 