How NOT to write a Vampire Diaries Fanfiction (including TO & Legacies)

what no one wants to talk about

so this is the more sensitive side of TVD that should be handled delicately

tw: this chapter will contain mentions of sexual abuse towards men and women

it's about the characters on the show, not the actors to make that very clear

I also won't be as crass or blunt about this or include humorous gifs as this is a very serious topic

specifically we're going to be discussing where the TVD writers went wrong with this topic and also dealing with how to write these characters in fanfictions and teach you how you should approach a character that is made to have gone through such an abuse or experience or a character that tried to do said abuse to another

first of all, reminder that all of these examples come specifically from season 1 as it was 2009 and education and advocacy about sexual abuse still wasn't as serious as it should have been. This led to misguided use, lack of knowledge when it came to how to deal with the abused or assaulted, and when it unfortunately comes to a main character: completely forgetting what they did and proceeded to enact a redemption arc in said character over the seasons.

Let me make it also clear that when it comes to these characters, especially when this type of stuff happens, it usually only happens once or early on. It's because the show needs a villain, for either one episode or a few more. Then, it's never brought up again.

When I give out examples of these characters and how they proceeded to have a story arc where they were redeemed or they just never talk about what happened again, don't directly blame the characters. They're fictional characters. I advise you to blame the writers and creators of said characters, as they're the ones who decided how these characters would act for the purpose of one scene each and have no consequence in store for them.

If you are planning to write a story that features these types of topics you need to decide the fate of the character doing the abusing.

If you have a bad guy or a bully or an antagonist in your story that you want to redeem one day or over the course of your story, do not make them abuse another character. Redemption is out the window for that. The abuser should face consequences for what they've done (or maybe part of the story is how they didn't face any consequences).

So if you have a character who's an anti-hero or a just not a good guy at all and you want them to eventually join said good guys, you can't have them cross such a serious line and still join the protagonists and then expect the readers to be okay with it.

some examples not from TVD include:

Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl

the grand majority of fans from this show still have an unconditional love for this wild, womanizing, selfish man and proceed to just forget that in the pilot episode he tried to force Jenny Humphrey (a fourteen-fifteen? year old girl when he was sixteen) to have sex with him. One of the girls at the party literally said 'another one of your victims'.
And then, they proceeded to just do everything they could to redeem him. (they even had Jenny decide she wanted to lose her virginity to him four seasons later!)
Overall, the Gossip Girl writers could've just made a different one time character to be the villain of the pilot rather than resort to using one of their main characters that they were also planning on redeeming along the way.