Ripper's Anonymous

Meta
Title:	Ripper's Anonymous
Creator:	eleai
Date(s):	Feb. 20th, 2012
Medium:	online
Fandom:	The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Topic:	Stefan Salvatore and rehab
External Links:	http://eleai.livejournal.com/1876.html
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Ripper's Anonymous is a meta essay written by eleai about the character of Stefan Salvatore and the vampire part of him. Contains spoilers up to episode 3x15 of TVD

Excerpts

See, I think the main problem I have with this season, is that Stefan had this entire character arc like, completely offscreen. I mean, we haven’t really had a Stefan centric episode in a while, and I feel like there has been some pretty big and important stuff churning around in his noggin that we rather need to see. I mean, Stefan has literally gone from one extreme to the other—from perfectly controlled vampire to full blown ripper. Now, reading some fandom comments, I know that there seems to be a concern that Stefan is othering the “ripper” side of himself, and that the show is going to go the whole, “Stefan is a saint now” route, which I agree, would totally suck.

In the past, we know he has gone on several benders. We don’t know what his past triggers were exactly--save the first (the whole turning into a vampire thing is sort of self-explanatory). But each time he has “fallen off the wagon” so to speak, Lexi has been there to literally shove him, piece by broken piece, back on, kicking and screaming the whole way. I mean, when she came back as a ghost in season three, she out and out says that Stefan always tells her to go away and not to help him. He actively refuses her help, and she has to basically torture him into submission and back into being the person she wants him to be. She essentially beats the vampire out of him. With Lexi, it’s not about accepting that that part of him exists, and learning how to deal with it. I mean, yes, initially she was all, accept the good parts, but from her recovery style, it’s fairly obvious that Stefan just learns to basically shut off the whole vampire side, and focus on being “human.”

Like Lexi, Elena asks him to shut off and shut away the part of him that is a vampire—the predator that wants blood above anything else. Now, it’s not necessarily wrong on their parts—they love Stefan, and understandably so, and they just want him to be the wonderful man they know he is. And the thing is, Stefan is that wonderful person, who is warm and loving and caring and who nurtures and reveres life. He is the man who sat in a bathroom with Caroline and taught her how to breathe through the blood, he is the man who saved Bonnie from Damon and tried to broker peace with a werewolf and saved his brother umpteen times and protected the town and loved Elena. He is that person, but he is also a that person who ripped two people apart in a little house in Tennessee and then put their bodies back together. He is a vampire, and that means that there is a part of him that will always want to kill. And while Elena accepts that, and she trusts him, I think sometimes it’s easy for her to blame his violence on the blood and to pretend like it’s not a part of his essential nature.

But the thing about detox with Stefan, is it’s never his choice. It’s done against his will, forced upon him by people who love him and just want him to be back to the man they love and remember. And because of Stefan’s empathy and how he loves others more than he loves himself, eventually he will inevitably fold, and become for them what they want him to be. But because it’s not a choice, because he has no agency in the matter, because it is not something he does so much as something that is done to him, it doesn’t stick. And he falls, again, only to have to be picked back up and the process begins once more.

See, the thing is, they try to detox him, Elena and Lexi. Elena attempts to do the whole vervain in the back, and then she and Lexi do the lock in basement bit and torture. And it doesn’t work. Even Damon knows it’s not going to work, which is why he springs Stefan. Of course, Damon’s plan to remind Stefan of being “free” doesn’t work either. Because the thing is, they are not detoxing Stefan for Stefan. They are detoxing Stefan for them. Damon wants his brother back, Elena wants her boyfriend back, Lexi wants her friend back. They want the Stefan back that they know and love, the human Stefan without the flaws. And it’s selfish, but it’s totally and completely understandable. They love him, and when you love somebody, all you want is for them to be with you, the way they have always been. But like Stefan tells Elena, it’s never going to be the same. He has made choices that can’t be unmade

And I think this is what is ultimately going to be what makes Stefan whole again. It’s a decision to change, to repair himself, not for anyone but himself. And if he gains back relationships, if he can become a person he can live with, it will be because he did it. He’ll be a whole person, not parts of a person held together with incredible willpower and bubblegum and sticky tack. He won’t be old Stefan, or new Stefan, or vampire Stefan or human Stefan. He’ll be Stefan, who loves his big brother to the point of insanity, and who drinks animal blood because he doesn’t feel comfortable consuming human blood and who loves people too much and just enough at the same time and who is so completely in love with Elena Gilbert that it would almost be ridiculous except it isn’t. He’ll be that man who is a total packrat and is good at darts and hates dancing and chooses to take baby vampires bunny hunting so that they can see what the world can be for them. But all of these decisions will be firmly rooted in himself—he’s building the person he wants to be, rather than a person others want him to be. And even if he seems the same, even if we can’t really tell the difference between old Stefan and now Stefan, it will be there. And it will make all the difference in the world.