Elena Gilbert and her marvellously morally dubious moral compass; I ship it

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Title:	Elena Gilbert and her marvellously morally dubious moral compass; I ship it
Creator:	swirlsofblue
Date(s):	2013.03.14
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The Vampire Diaries
Topic:	Elena Gilbert
External Links:	http://swirlsofblue.livejournal.com/14299.html
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Elena Gilbert and her marvellously morally dubious moral compass; I ship it is a meta by swirlsofblue forcusing on Elena Gilbert and her actions as a result of her moral compass.

Excerpts

The first point of contention is that, as much as Elena has changed as a person (and then as a vampire) since the beginning of the series, I don’t think Elena’s moral compass has actually transformed much. It has always been people she cares about first, people of Mystic Falls (including herself) second and everyone else last. It’s just that before season one she hasn’t been in a situation where these distinctions are something she has to prioritise or that have such a drastic effect on lives. I do like the twisted nature of her moral compass but also how realistic it is as most people would put their loved ones above others. There’s also the important point of her being seventeen/eighteen and I think in a way having a different view of the world, she recognises the consequences on the wider world but doesn’t acknowledge them.

As the arc of Elena and her moral compass is pushed to a new level by the increase in danger towards her brother Jeremy, an important comparison can be made. In season three Elena says to Esther; if you kill all these vampires you will be the same as Klaus. This is referring to the vampires she cares about though; it’s before they know who sired their line. It is a terrible crime because it’s happening to her vampires, her people, her loved ones. But when it comes to Kol and the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands, of vampires outside of Mystic Falls, of course there’s no question in her mind that her brother comes first. There’s something to be said for that brutal certainty. But it’s also that those other vampires don’t really exist to Elena. She never hesitates or doubts or seems anyway remorseful as she tells of her plan to kill Kol and so many others as a result, because for Elena the protection of the closest person to her, the only family she has left, is paramount, and thus is above all the right thing.

Elena’s denial and Elena’s moral compass feed on each other and allow each other to exist. Elena’s stance of loved ones above others is an ordinary human one, but taken to extremes, because the situations in her life live in extremes. Her moral compass dictates that something is right or wrong and this allows her to be in denial about the truth of the matter. At the same time her denial helps her to make peace with her moral compass which will with all the compassion she possesses champion the safety of her loved ones and ignore all collateral in the way of doing so. So it’s fitting that her denial breaks and the line for her moral compass breaks at the same time.

I love Elena wondering whether it makes her a bad person that she won’t bring back all the monsters to bring back Jeremy, because that’s the crux of her moral compass; do whatever it takes to save her loved ones, Jeremy is the most cherished of loved ones, and if she’s not willing to do whatever it takes, what sort of person is she. It contrasts with just two episodes earlier she was willing to let countless numbers of vampires die to protect Jeremy without a second thought and in her mind that was right, but this is too much. It’s a glorious end, with this moral line being drawn, happening in the same moment her denial ends; at the realisation that yes, Jeremy is dead, everyone is dead, and she can’t bring back all the supernatural dead creatures, can’t let Bonnie destroy herself by killing twelve people. Her denial is gone and the surety aligned with her moral compass of right is gone. So who is she now but someone left with just her guilt and grief.

Responses

Yes.

Or at least yes to YOU and I so hope that Plec and Co. are on the same page you are on, or at least reading out of the same book, even the same library! I worry, the skeptic in me, about some meta. Here's the thing, and I know it stings, we are discussing a tv series in the same way we discuss, say Gothic Romance novels....and outside the obvious differences, the most important ones are: tv is written by a group of writers not a single artist, and tv is very rarely arced from the first episode to the last episode whereas most novels are plotted from beginning through middling to ending or find their path in the process and the writer gets to return to the beginning for continuity whereas the tv writers don't. You can't undo what's been done, right? And when focus groups are polled and throwaway characters like Caroline and Klaus are found to be HUGELY empathetic...sometimes that causes moral issues which otherwise would not have been a problem in the original storyline....

So, accepting that discussing Catherine Earnshaw is not the same exercise as discussing Elena Gilbert....

I love what you've done here. I love what you're intimating about Elena's breakthrough into stepping up to a new moral ground. This needed to happen.

I wrote an Elijah ficlet about Elena's mindset back in S2....because my take on the character was very much the same as yours here - I felt she was hugely flawed BECAUSE of her parents' death and the fact that she should have died...in that accident but was saved by supernatural forces, however she didn't know that at the time and her moral compass got seriously broken after her parents' death AS WOULD ANY fifteen year old's compass!!!! Nothing unusual in that except for the fact that within a few months of the fatal accident Elena's world takes a serious sidestep in the supernatural and coupling the already immoral life of the supernatural with her broken morality....and we got three amazing seasons out of her psychic breakdown.

I think an interesting aspect of Shane's original exposition is that Silas will bring back the dead...and yet none of the characters is leaping for joy over that. Not all of them know it....but before it became clear that it would only be supernatural dead....it was a conundrum as to what someone like Elena would do if she could resurrect her parents and aunt and mother and father....and townspeople....

I want the show to be strong enough to carry water. I really do. I hope that your theories here hold fast and that we can see Elena slip the mantle of severely psychically wounded teenager and find a new skin....

Your take on Elena is spot on. I've always been a fan of Elena's character, and her moral compass, though questionable, has always been pretty realistic.

What made her character not work for me so well this season is that while she's never cared about people outside her circle, she's always been willing to sacrifice herself for her loved ones, which somehow balances the fact that she (much like Damon) doesn't stop to think much about collateral damage.

In season four, however, self-sacrificing Elena is gone. Everyone is looking for the cure FOR her and yet she doesn't step into the quest until she helps Jeremy kill Kol, twelve episodes into the season. She saw what the hunter's mark did to Connor and yet she agreed to let Damon train her brother to become a killing machine (not before making sure he wouldn't kill her or any of her vampire friends, of course). Seasons 1-3 Elena would've never agreed to that (as Matt rightly pointed out).

And then Stefan manages to stop Elena from killing Rebekah with some whine about all the nameless vampires that would die with her, but mere episodes later she does exactly that with Kol. It didn't bother me that she killed Kol, but that the argument had worked to stop her from killing Rebekah, because it wasn't consistent.

I don't mind her moral compass, since I don't think any of us has a perfect compass, but I like it better when the show actually acknowledges it exists, like when they killed Chris and Tyler made sure they knew that had been wrong.

Some times when I read metas like this that perfectly explain a character's arc so well, I wonder if the writers are that aware of how they're building the arc or if that's what us, the audience, see when we piece together what we're given. I really hope it's the former, but sometimes I wonder.

It certainly would be great to see Elena openly questioning all she's stood for over the past coouple of seasons.

I think somewhere near the end of the season we'll see some of that. Her questioning her actions as a human, as a vampire and as a humanity-free vampire and come to a conclusion of who she is now. Since her parents died she's said plenty of times "the girl who I was (before they died, before I turned, before Jeremy died, five minutes ago) is dead". She's been trying to build a comprehensive image of who she is and hasn't yet succeeded. I really hope the resolution of her humanity-free arc serves as a catalyst for the answer to that question.