irresistible-revolution:

bonneibennett:

You know, it’s like clockwork. For years now, every time I post about the Bonnies and make any kind of book meta, I get responses like this that indicate there’s no way Bonnie Bennett is cute enough to be fully inspired by Bonnie McCullough.

Related words to “cute” that people have stated don’t fit Bonnie include: tiny, adorable, sweet, diminutive. 

Like… have y’all seen Kat Graham as Bonnie Bennett?

She’s all of 5 foot nothing. Everyone else on the show, male or female, towers over her. When she’s happy, especially in the first season but in later seasons as well, she’s sweet and bubbly and giggly, devoted to her friends and happily going with their flow.

Contrast that with Elena who you’ve attributed Bonnie McCullough’s cuteness to. Elena who from the start was confident, had a clear sense of her own feelings and desires throughout the series, and acted to have those needs met time and time again. She places herself in the center of plots and struggles every time people try to keep her out of the fray for her own safety: she needs to have her say in directing how things go, needs to be involved in making plan A through Z. She doesn’t have blonde hair or blue eyes, but this very much reads as book!Elena’s queen bee mentality, even if it’s not as openly stated to be selfish of her (in fact, the show takes these same traits and emphasizes their heroism instead, even though both facets remain true). Either way, it’s very different from Bonnie McCullough, who is frightened by her powers and would generally prefer to not be in the spotlight, but instead is drawn into the fray out of loyalty and because of her abilities (and who does that sound like?).

So then ask yourself: what about Nina’s Elena is cuter and more Bonnie McCullough-like in your eyes than Kat’s Bonnie Bennett? And why?

I would posit, as I did in the post you’re responding to, that the reason this argument is so common says more about fandom itself than it does about the characters. Fans’ perceptions of these characters only allow for Bonnie Bennett to be suffering and strong and stoic, not adorable and desirable and cute. 

But she is those things as well. It’s just that the rest of her characterization is a. not given much focus by the narrative, and b. utterly ignored by the fandom at large. And both of those forms of neglect play very directly into the notion that black women in our media landscape (reflecting a world in which many/most societies are touched by antiblackness) are not viewed in the vulnerable, feminine way that is required to be deemed “cute.”

As for Caroline having Bonnie M’s love interests… that’s a curious thing to suggest. I mean, Bonnie only had two major love interests in the books, so Caroline having love interest after love interest every season doesn’t seem to match that… If anyone, it matches book!Caroline herself, who was positioned as a jealous romantic rival to Elena and had interactions with Tyler, Klaus, Stefan (one-sided in the books), etc. I guess you might instead mean that Caroline got Bonnie M.’s share of the romantic desirability. Which… goes back to my earlier point about how black women are usually portrayed and perceived in this media landscape, I think. 

To summarize… the theory is common among book fans that Bonnie McCullough and Bonnie Bennett are extremely dissimilar, and that the cute, desirable characteristics of Bonnie M were distributed to other characters rather than being used to inspire Bonnie Bennett. But that argument reveals (likely unconscious) bias that I once again implore book fans to examine more closely and overcome. Bonnie Bennett is, despite all of the pain and loss and the ways that she has of coping with said pain and loss (ie. snark, bravado), every bit as sweet and loyal and adorable as her book counterpart.

^^^^^^

I agree with all of this except the love interest part to a degree. Every potential love interest Bonnie Bennett has that would make sense for her is usually shoved off to Caroline, like Damon for example.

Now I’m not exactly giving any merit to that relationship since it was all kinds of awful including rape, but he used Caroline to get into the main group, though I only read 1.5 of the series I remember that in the books Damon uses Bonnie–nowhere near the degree he used Caroline in the show, but his semi romantic interest was first Bonnie as she was the first person he kissed.

In the show that role is put on to Caroline in a storyline that forever mars the show in a way that was completely unnecessary because as I once noted in my Damon Has Always Been Random post using Caroline made little to no sense in the context of his goals in the show and even in the context of them using the books.

Then there’s Tyler which is one that doesn’t frustrate me from the book perspective because he is in fact Caroline’s love interest in the books, it’s just that the show went out of their way to include this pairing from the book into the show, when they can’t even attempt to do the same for Bonnie. Hell they even brought on Meredith and Alaric as a ship and Meredith was a character the scrapped and split between Caroline and Bonnie. I would have been perfectly fine if Bonnie got to date at least one werewolf like in the books, but their excuse was they didn’t want to copy BTVS, but had no qualms with this particular road block when it was a white girl.

And then there’s Delena’s first meeting scene they pulled out of their asses or rather LJ Smith’s After Hours which is between Bonnie Mccollough and Damon Salvatore. There were several Delena moments in the book they could have used but they made a conscious decision to use one of Bonnie’s.

I absolutely agree on everything else which is why I love to read fics that take place before the pilot because that’s when you get to see that part of her personality most, but Bonnie Bennett has always been screwed over in the love department especially in comparison to her book counterparts who was seen as desirable and was able to explore those different romances in a way her show counterpart couldn’t because she was black.