Kat can’t so much as breath without getting flack from the TVD fandom. I remember years ago when she was still on the show she did an interview where she said she didn’t identify with Bonnie–it was out of context and she was misquoted–oh dear lord the outcry of the TVD fans all giving the same comments about how she should be grateful and she was rude. That same outcry happened again during her “Twitter-gate” moment where she simply asked people not to tag her in things she’s not in. A simply reasonable request, and even that comment was reasonable because why would someone identify with willingly being the servant of some white girl, but of course because it’s Kat and she’s black she should be nicer and grateful for even being on the show.
Nina only acknowledges fans when she needs to promote something she’s in, Paul has made several scathing comments about the show, Ian noted his dissatisfaction all the time, but none of them get called rude or ungrateful, they actually get praised for how much they seperate themselves from the show. We all know why there’s this difference, but what did we all expect, a racist show can only breed a racist fandom.
Well there was Damon, and that was literally it which explains why they spectacularly terrible at it because he’s easily distracted by Elena.
Although that does bring up another weird note–when Bonnie is dying or dead it’s always up to Damon to save her first in S2, second in S5, then in seasons 6-8. While that would put a point in Bamon’s favor I think the fact that they keep putting the most unreliable character who gets so easily distracted by Elena speaks more about how much the writers value Bonnie.
Pretty much in every situation they have to make it known that she isn’t valued over Elena and the coffin spell pretty much seals that to the point that denial or ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse on Plec’s part. She feels threatened by Bonnie Bennett’s ability to outshine her main (white) character so she has to spend extra time finding ways to devalue her.
The weird thing about this is that Plec did this to herself. If she wanted Esther, Hope, Freya, Dahlia, white witch, etc. to be the most powerful witches in the universe she should have done exactly that. Instead she chose the negation route which isn’t surprising since they’ve been doing that since S1–handmaiden my ass.
Can’t say I’m surprised I always knew they were going to try and erase everything the Bennett’s did. How else would their white witch messiah characters seem impressive?
this would actually only exist in my wildest dreams and my ideal utopian world. ugh
the fact julie had the opportunity to even PARTIALLY do this and didnt astounds the fuck out of me. she put chris in containment on a halfassed character when she could have instead continued kai (and the gemini’s legacy) and finished bonkai like any sane individual would have
a whole fucking spinoff about actual witches instead of the mess of hybrids :^))) ugh
and dont even get me started on the idea of bonkai just completely on netflix without any more cw
See I watched the show for it’s entire 8 year run (with a few gaps in the middle) so it doesn’t surprise me that she missed so many opportunities with Bonkai because by that point she missed so many great possibilities and mostly in favor of Delena, or Elena herself because trust me everything interesting about her character ran it’s course at the end of season 2, after that al she was left with in terms of relevance to her own show was a love triangle.
It reminds me of interview she used to do back in the day where she was essentially begrudge that her show wasn’t on HBO like True Blood. She would talk about how she had to morr creative because she had more limitations than a network like HBO and I would have agreed with her had that actually been what was in the way of quality, and she had been creative because had she been on Netflix, HBO, or Showtime the show would have essentially just been softcore porn with Damon because that’s essentially the show she already wrote with the CW.
So had Plec made a spin-off with Bonnie, Kai, and the Gemini coven I’m not so sure I would have liked it or stuck around for it because nothing would be getting better but there’s plenty of opportunity for it to get worse which is why I haven’t even so much as watched a trailer for Legacies. I’m not interested in any story she has to tell even if it’s with characters I like.
For real though, not only did Esther use a spell from the Bennetts but had to channel their magic to accomplish it. She really didn’t do anything all that great, all she did was create the bastardization of Qetsiyah’s, who was able to create perfect immortality without the hiccups of Esther’s.
I don’t even know enough about Hope or Freya because I stopped watching TO after season 1, but I can guess it’s not as impressive as what any Bennett has already done just without the recognition because that’s essentially the thing that separates them. They do less, suffer through less, but get the high titles simply because they’re white and Plec doesn’t know how to write agency unless they’re white.
And then there’s Daliah, again I don’t know much about her but I remember the debates on which was more powerful, her or Qetsiyah. Qetsiyah was the obvious take but for some reason people wanted to argue her grand of immortality, which was essentially hibernation, was better than the true immortality Qetsiyah created along with an entire dimension she built for herself and her lover and she did that just out of blind rage, imagine if she had focus, she’d be damn near unstoppable. They’re not even in the same league but because she white and actually got a storyline catered to her bu Plec, people think her accomplishments are are even remotely the same power level.
I’m just going to yes it was be because of an ask I just had about the potential power if Bonkai babies and a couple weeks ago I talked about a fic I had in the works that followed in that vein (althoughI kept magic plot hole babies because I liked the contrast between a forced pregnancy and one by choice).
But essentially, yes, Plec wanted Messiah children, and she had two very powerful characters who could produce those messiah children and instead chose Alaric, a human, and Jo, barely had magic, for these children and put them into Caroline, a vampire on a show filled with vampires.
The lengths she went to to make these characters relevant and even then it’s just an extraneous plot would baffle me if it didn’t know she was a) bad at her job, b) writes like a 4 year-old playing with dolls, and c) a racist piece of shit.
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.
It’s funny while I will agree that TO is better in terms if quality compared to TVD, it definitely isn’t in the racism department. That was thrown out the window the moment they decided to set the show in NO, one of the few cities in the US that has a majority black population, and 90% of the main cast is white. Like that had to be a conscious decision just like setting TVD in 1864 (it’s the 1500s Italy in the books), Civil War era in the south no less, and completely ignored slavery even going so far as to call Emily Katherine’s handmaiden. Those weren’t happy accidents caused by ignorance, that’s just having a whitewashed view on the world and trying to hide it with “diversity” (and by that I mean the casting a few characters of color and calling it a day without even thinking about how they’re being represented).
And, oh dear lord, the white savior plot with Klaus and Marcel, one of the most poorly thought out storylines of the show, especially when the Mikaelsons started expecting gratitude for granting him a basic human right.
While I wasn’t a fan of how Marcel ran the city, essentially a dictatorship especially when it came to witches and oh, the werewolves–I always likened werewolves to the Native Americans of the show, but TO went as far as to actually banish them to reservations–but I was always more on his side because the issue I’ve always had with Klaus is his entitlement. Marcel worked hard to get what he had and Klaus feelings of entitlement to that because he “saved” him was just peak Plec–like how can she claim to still be this ignorant.
And don’t get me started on Hayley. Weirdly, I would have been alright if the baby was actually Tyler’s–at least then I know he’d get some focus because the writers don’t care about him unless he’s with a white girl. But overall I would have been more interested in exploring the Lockwood, characters we’re actually familiar with, instead of Hayley, rando girl number 3 there just to cause trouble for Tyler. Much like the Bennetts there’s a lot missing from their origin and will continue to be missing because his entire family line was wiped out.
POC of TVD 