We have another guest post at Vampire Diaries Online!  Please welcome María, you can follow her on twitter @CqCv and check out a brief bio at the end of the article. I had the pleasure of meeting her on Twitter, and consider here a very dear friend. She has always been very supportive of this website, so when she sent me this article on her opinion of Damon, I did not hesitate to ask if I could post it on the site.

My Thoughts on Damon

I think there’s so much more to Damon than what we see. Sure, he seems to have no trouble at all with killing whomever gets in his way of achieving what he wants, which, from a human point of view, makes him as evil as the devil. But, let’s go back to where it all began.

When the Salvatore brothers were still human, they fell in love with Katherine, who was a vampire. Well, maybe Stefan didn’t fall in love, maybe he was compelled to think so, I don’t know. But I think that before any compulsion happened, he was infatuated with her. We saw the look he gave her when he saw her for the first time in Lost Girls, and there was definitely immediate attraction there. I even think he was probably in love with her before knowing she was a vampire. Maybe it was from then on that Katherine used her compulsion on him. Or maybe it was when he discovered that she wanted both him and his brother. That seems like something that could have not sat well with Stefan, right? In any case, it seems that Damon didn’t need to be compelled at all. He was so head over heels in love with Katherine that it was very easy for her to manipulate him into her wishes without using her compulsion. When all of this took place, the brothers were still really young and naïve, and maybe even in love for the first time, so when all hell broke loose, I can see Damon, blinded by his love for Katherine, going all sorts of crazy with grief, hurting and betrayal.

Enter the “becoming a vampire” factor. From what I understand, vampires are violent creatures by nature. If they get mad, they get violent. And I think it takes certain amount of self-restraint for them to control that violence. We have seen it lots of times with Damon, he have seen it with Vicky and Logan, and we have even seen it with Stefan in the pilot when Damon was talking to him about Elena and telling him to imagine how her blood tasted like. The reason why Stefan can control himself better than Damon is simply because he wants to. He doesn’t want to embrace that side of his vampire nature, while Damon embraces it and doesn’t want to control himself. And the reason for that, I think, is because at the beginning it helped him cope with his loss in a way. He was vengeful because of what happened to Katherine and I think his vampire nature accentuated that, so he would kill with no scruples at all just to fulfill that wish for revenge.

Remember Vicky and the “vampire with issues” explanation? Everything you feel when you’re human you feel it more intensely when you become a vampire, so imagine how Damon was feeling when he became a vampire. It had to be so easy for him to lose control. And for Stefan too, I mean, in Haunted he told Vicky he hadn’t tasted human blood in a long time, which implies he did taste it and his not going into any more details makes me think he probably killed some people in his day. But he probably didn’t feel right about it, fought his instincts and learn how to control himself. But Damon didn’t get over the betrayal and he didn’t get over his love for Katherine either, so he kept inflicting misery to his brother any chance he had, waiting for the day when he could be reunited with Katherine and doing whatever it took to make sure nothing prevented that day to arrive.

But I do think Damon is capable of developing actual feelings. And I think he feels very passionately. Take Stefan, for instance. He hates him but he also loves him. Actually, I think he hates him because he loves him. Let me explain. They were both best friends, they loved each other and they trusted each other. And then Stefan “broke” that trust (or so Damon sees it), which made Damon feel betrayed. And that betrayal was twice as painful to Damon because it was coming from someone he loved, and we all know everything hurts much more if it comes from someone we love. So, he’s bent on causing Stefan misery for the rest of his existence, because he hates him, but he would never kill him, because he loves him. And that’s why I think he tells him “I hope that Elena dies” in Fool me Once too. Because Stefan and Elena’s betrayal caused him so much pain that he wants to hurt Stefan the same way. But he really doesn’t want Elena dead. And he wouldn’t kill her either. At first she just looked too much like Katherine, but I think he’s become fond of her after the road trip too. And don’t forget he owes her his live, and I think that’s important to Damon.

I do think the future has surprises in store for both us and Damon. And this is pure speculation on my part, but I think that when Katherine is finally released, he’s going to have some sort of wake-up call and he’s going to see who Katherine really is. He was very young and blinded by love when everything happened and he’s been carrying it all with himself for a long time, but he’s changed too. He’s no longer the Damon from 1864. I don’t think Katherine loved neither him nor Stefan, she was just this selfish person that saw two gorgeous guys who would do anything for her and she wanted to have them both at her feet. And when the time comes, I think she’ll do something that will make Damon feel betrayed and realize she never loved him like he loved her, and that’s going to hurt so much more than all the other betrayals he has experienced.

One thing is clear to me. The Damon we all know and love is the way he is because of everything that happened to him. And whatever happens next is going to affect him as well. He has a lot of layers and I think we still haven’t seen all of them yet. He has this shell and he doesn’t let anyone through because he’s been hurt badly in the past. But after the road trip he let his guard down a little with Elena. He wanted to trust her. I think deep down he wants to trust someone again, but he tells himself that he can’t trust anybody. The only person he still trusts I think is Katherine and I get the feeling that his trust is going to be crushed again…

There’s so much more to Damon than what we see…, and I can’t wait to learn more!

María Luisa Crespo is a Spanish 33-year-old freelance translator and an avid TV show watcher. She’s originally from Pontevedra, a small city located in North-West Spain, but moved to Madrid to study her Translation Degree at the age of 18 and has been living there ever since. Some of her current favorite TV shows are Glee, Supernatural, The Big Bang Theory, The Vampire Diaries and White Collar.

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