#I definitely have problems with how Elena and Bonnie treat Caroline in season 1 however Bonnie was justified in her reaction to Caroline

[stargirlfeyre]

It confuses me how people are still confused on why Bonnie had different reactions to Caroline being turned vs Elena being turned.

Caroline was turned at the beginning of S2. A little while after Bonnie’s Grams died as a result of helping vampires and when Bonnie was still new to the supernatural world and disliked vampires. Elena turned in season 4 when Bonnie was more familiar/comfortable with the supernatural and vampires. And don’t get me wrong Care is my girl but when she turned she literally killed someone Bonnie liked and she saw his body. Of course Bonnie is going to hold some resentment for that when she’s already connects vampires to something negative because they hurt people. Seeing your bestfriend turn into something you hate and then reiterate a belief about that species will fuck with you.

[scorpio-karma]

A. Bradley

So since the show ended I’ve been re-watching the early seasons. Right now I’m only on Season 2 Episode 12 and for reason I won’t mention that have nothing to do with this post I will not be going past that episode for a while.  Anyways I noticed that the writers weren’t the most creative when they were coming up with background character names because in season 1 episode 19 there is a character Amber Bradley (left pic) and in season 2 episode 3-5 there is a different character Aimee Bradley (right pic). 

In general one would presume that they’re related, but a) it’s never eluded to not even a little bit and b) they look vastly different (which isn’t to say it’s impossible for them to be related just unlikely). So I would have generally just left it at the writers being un-creative, which is true, but I kept getting the names mixed up in my head which made me take a closer look at how the characters were treated. 

Now I’m well aware that both of these characters are very minor characters, if even, and were meant to only be plot devices, but I couldn’t help but think about what kind of plot devices they served.

Let’s start with Amber since she’s the first Bradley to show up in the series.

Her one and only appearance was in the episode Miss Mystic Falls. She was one of the candidates and according to Caroline she was only there to make it so that no one would think the pageant was only for Founding Families. So to start with she was already a character who was meant to be disregarded and seen as unimportant – there just to make it seem like the world doesn’t actually revolve around the Mystic Falls Gang when in reality it does. 

As the episode goes on you learn that she suffers from stage fright and is in the middle of an anxiety attack when Elena walks in on her. This adds a bit more complexity to a flat character (who’s meant to be flat). She goes outside to get some air and unfortunately runs into Stefan who is having control issues. This sets up what kind of plot device she’s supposed to be – who’s character development she’s there for, Stefan. He takes, her feeds on her, and compels her meanwhile having a crisis of morality on whether or not to kill her. She ends up a literal prop as he compels her not to be scared and she says anything to make him, for lack of a better word, happy. She’s actively trying not to die even when she doesn’t have the ability to make such decisions. When he decides to kill her and nearly drains her Elena and Damon come to her aid, but actually Stefan’s. They’re there to protect Stefan from having to deal with the guilt of killing her, not actually to save her at all since they were both willing to stand there and watch him kill her until Bonnie comes in and saves he day.  It drives me insane how little regard these characters (and a lot of the audience) have for the victims, including Caroline, one of the MFG’s. Bonnie for the majority of the series seemed to be the only one that cared and got called “Judgy” for it.

Anyways, she gets saved which is a rarity on this show for a character of her type – expendable. She was meant to be a throw away character who’s life ultimately didn’t matter, she was just there to further Stefan’s plot and to illustrate Stefan’s control issues with blood because up until then we were only told of them. And then she lives and presumably is still alive and even mentioned in Season 8 to refer back to this episode. But actually an even bigger rarity is the fact that someone came to her aid, usually the expendable ones die and maybe used in guilt trip for other characters – no one actually does anything to prevent these people’s deaths, but she did which in its own way makes her special.

Next, on to Aimee.

She appeared at the beginning of Season 2 for all of three episodes. The first episode she appears in is Bad Moon Rising in which she’s a guest at Tyler’s party in the woods. Tyler shows interest in her, but she has a crush on Mat who is dating Caroline at the time. She serves as the driving force in dividing Matt and Caroline as she openly flirts with him making Caroline jealous and Matt accuses her of being insecure. Newly turned Caroline compels her to flirt with someone who doesn’t have a boyfriend which results in her later going and hooking up with Tyler down in the Lockwood Estate (slave quarters). When she’s down there, even though she’s compelled, she somehow gets her wits about her enough to be able to voice that this is not what she wants – her agency is not completely stripped away. In this scene she she inadvertently shows character development in Tyler because he is not someone who likes to be told no – last time with Vicki it took Jeremy shoving him off of her to get him to stop, all Aimee has to do is tell him she’s not into him and he doesn’t even hesitate. While I don’t condone what he did with Vicki at all I can appreciate his want to change and his ability to do so.

After that she continues to flirt with Matt which is either a plot hole in the continuity of compulsion or says something about young vampires ability to compel, but either way it’s never addressed and instead Caroline uses it as a way to breakup with Matt and thus protect him from her, concluding Aimee’s function as a diving force between then and concluding Aimee’s crush on Matt because she doesn’t even mention or go near him after that. In fact her use as a plot device pretty much ends after that and she’s killed off brutally in a death that literally has no meaning – the only thing you can say about it is that it was memorable.

While that did help in establishing Katherine’s place as a badass, in the grand scheme of the show it meant nothing kind of making her threat to kill more people mean nothing because their deaths as well would mean nothing. No one really cares that she died because there were other deaths and near deaths that held more weight to the plot. The only mention of her is in the next episode in a missing poster in reference to how well Damon his the body.

Beyond that post I don’t think anybody even looked for her which I find a little weird in a small town because a missing 16 year-old is definitely something that would be noticed and a priority. It reminds me of that joke people always make about the police only putting effort in looking for a missing kid if they’re white. After this it’s as though she never existed which again is not surprising since her character only existed to be killed – Kevin Williamson said so himself. However that’s the problem, if you kill characters left and right and their deaths hold no weight (her friend doesn’t count as holding weight since it only mattered in reference to triggering Tyler’s werewolf gene), death has no meaning. People talk about how resurrecting every dead character as the cause of this, but it’s been occurring since the beginning and was a problem well before this character’s death. Death is a plot device that should serve a source of tension, but once they got rid of the weight behind it the tension dissipated as well.

But anyways back to her treatment – this all brings me back to the TVD’s flippant nature to kill off character’s of color and always with deaths that don’t mean anything. It’s not even brought up later like Amber’s near death. But what it makes me realize most is that TVD has always been problematic it just got more blatant over time. 

TLDR; Amber and Aimee Bradley were both expendable minor characters and only one of them lived and kept her relevance as a plot device over time (no matter how bad season 8 was) and given this show’s track record it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which one it is. This is pretty much a minute spec in the list of problems in the series, but it caught my eye in the re-watch.