#do it put probably a dead baby in what i'm assuming is the oven

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

Kanaya: What Are You Doing

Aradia: what? im just sn00ping, i w0nt d0 anything nefari0us 0u0

Kanaya: Youre Going To Put A Dead Grub In That Thermal Hull Arent You

Aradia: whaaaaaat? n0000000...

[thehollowprince]

The Mikaelson family 😒. Spoiled Anglo Saxons who have committed countless atrocities but nobody dare hold a grudge or face their self righteous wrath. They literally owned a plantation and treat Marcel (black characters in general) horribly but I'm supposed to? They slaughter and pillage, exploit and manipulate but only their enemies are wrong for the same thing. The Originals aren't even compelling enough to warrant a spinoff, they were unkillable so where's the suspense?

Mikaelson family really was some borderline incestuous, extremely toxic shit. The way Klaus meddled in Rebekah's love life and was especially controlling of her. Throw the whole family away, tbh. They never learn or grow. They act like spoiled brats. Were the Mikaelsons black or brown, they'd have perished much much earlier. Davina was right calling Elijah no better than his siblings. Freya? She was the same. Being shitty runs in the family, I suppose.

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When I first heard back in the day that they were going to do a spinoff show just about the Originals, I remember asking myself, "How?"

By that point in time, the family was whittled down to three remaining memebers. Mikael and Esther were both dead, as was Henrik, Finn and then most recently, Kol. Of course, by that time as well, the eighth sibling that "died of the plague" was assumed dead as well, long before we knew about Freya. A family of nine was now just three and we're supposed to base an entire show around that, especially when those three can't even stand one another?

Of course, then I watched the backdoor pilot and was even more confused. We were really going with the "Twilight" plot of Klaus' one-night-stand getting pregnant with a magical, miracle baby? And to have that baby mama be Hayley after what she had done to Tyler? But I stuck around because I was intrigued by this character Marcel and the politics of the witches in New Orleans. By that point in time we hadn't seen any semblance of a witch community so it was an interesting concept.

But then as the show kept going on and on, retconning everything we learned about them on TVD, I was getting more and more aggravated.

Stefan and Damon hadn't even heard of the Originals but somehow they very publically "founded" and ran New Orleans for over two hundred years?

And Michael never heard of them until the 20th century?

Elijah talks about Klaus burying his family at sea, only to be revealed to be the one who most often helped dagger his siblings?

Plus, how do you maintain a show with three potentially unkillable leads? Aside from the White Oak Stake, which was out of play for over half the season, there is no way to kill these characters, meaning there are no real stakes involved. I was much more invested in Marcel and Davina and the witch community, and the werewolves when they came along.

That was probably the biggest missed opportunity of the show. Plec and Narducci went on and on about how the theme of this show was Family, but what they meant to say was "blood family". If you weren't related to the Mikaelsons by blood, you were worthless. I mean, take Marcel. Here's a guy who came from nothing, was rescued and raised by Klaus (insert white savoir trope here) and became the leader of the entire vampire community of the city. Less than a century after Klaus and his family were run out of town, he managed to rebuild and lead his community, only for Klaus to stomp back in like an overgrown child and demand that Marcel give back the toys he threw away? Klaus ran, tail tucked between his legs, from New Orleans and never looked back but then has the audacity to be pissed off that Marcel did what he couldn't?

And that's not even getting into Elijah's two-faced hypocrisy, acting the nobleman while being more savage than any of his siblings. Remember when he mocked Lucien and Tristan and Aurora for the pain that he put them through? When he killed Marcel on the off chance he might become a threat, thus leading to the actual threat? When he murdered four teenage girls to restart the Harvest because it was beneficial to his family at that time? Good times, right?

And let's just, for a second, rewind to the issue of Marcel. Here was a character that was supposedly "part of the family", which we know was bullshit from the beginning because he wasn't called Marcel Mikaelson, no, he was Marcel Gerard. They treated him more like a pet than a member of their family and I shouldn't have to go into how gross that is, given the racial issues, especially in the South. And then we had the whole prophecy of the Beast. The moment that Elijah thought he might be a potential threat to this "family" that is more often at each other's throats than getting along, he murdered someone who was supposed to be "like a son" to Klaus. Who he, himself, purportedly loved as family. Like I said, if you weren't a blood relative, you were nothing. Even Hayley was only tolerated because she was the oven in which their Bun cooked.

Side Note: as much as I hated what Elijah did to Marcel, that whole scene leading up to it was my favorite in the entire history of the show. Since season three of TVD, so for five years, across two shows, I was waiting for someone to call the Mikaelsons out on their bullshif and I was so glad that it was Marcel. After everything that family put him through, he deserved to yell at them, to call out their "Always and Forever" crap for the all-purpose excuse they used it as.

But it wasn't just Marcel, Hayley was treated horribly, despite the fact that she was the mother to "their salvation". The fandom in particular treated her horribly, which in turn led the narrative to treat her horribly to appease the fandom, and on and on the cycle went. I had my issues with Hayley, no doubt, but her and Jackson worked really well together, and they both cared about the werewolves so it was a nice storyline. But then Klaus had them all cursed because how dare they try to take away his (not their, HIS) daughter from him to keep her safe from Dahlia. How dare she!

The problem with this show was that we had more than just the Mikaelson Family. We had an excellent found family in Marcel and Davina, and then Josh and Cami and even Vincent. It was right there, but never acknowledged and that is infuriating.

Speaking of Davina, let's get into their treatment of her. The Mikaelsons were notorious for how they treated Davina, as a tool to be used and then tossed aside when no longer useful. The number of times that Klaus attacked this poor girl is outrageous. And for her to die the way she did, sacrificed so that the Mikaelsons could use her to stop an enemy that they created was just disgusting. Especially come the next season when they continued to act like what they had done was totally okay but never actually apologized for it. The words "I'm sorry" never left Elijah's or Freya'a lips.

That was the most astounding thing to me, that they Mikaelsons continuously treated people like literal trash and then were the pikachu meme whenever they turned against them. They constantly played the victim card to their own victims and that is increasingly disturbing, especially given how many people ate that shit up.

And we had, as you said, Klaus' continuous interference into Rebekah's love life, which came off way more as jealousy than brotherly concern (combined with his weird abandonment issues). But that's okay, he got to live out that incestuous fantasy with Aurora, who was so thinly veiled to be another version of Rebekah that it's not even funny.

At the end of the day, I think that's why I loved the Trinity so much. Lucien, Aurora and Tristan were the versions of Klaus, Rebekah and Elijah that I never got. They were the versions of those three that got to be unapologetically villains without the sib story.

I gotta say, though, it was THE ORIGINALS, that finally got me to swear off of The CW. None of the shows I've ever watched on that network were good, especially looking back on them and realizing how fucked up they really were.