Why Vampire Relationships Know No Age

Welcome to day two of Vampire Week!   For today’s post, I have decided to take on the concept of vampire relationships that are often judged by human standards in The Vampire Diaries universe.   I have to begin by stating that I do not think we can look at a vampire character and judge their behavior by human standards.   This is something that I know really grates on some people by having vampires romantically paired with people who are technically underage and hundreds of years their junior.

I have to explain that I feel that these characters are attracted to young women who are fully formed, yes they are underage but they are not children, so I just want to make it clear that this is not as inappropriate as it may seem.   The second point I want to make on this count is that the vampires are from another time.   These times that the vampires are from had a different standard of what constituted an appropriate relationship than what we believe today.   It was perfectly normal in centuries past for men aged into their mid-twenties marrying teenagers.   This was actually quite common for several hundreds of years.   Therefore, by the logic of the vampires themselves, it is not strange to be attracted to or to pursue women so much younger than themselves!

Now, I want to further explain that vampires do not have the same morals as humans.   That means that we should not view this character by the standards of modern human society, they are not human and they are not of this time originally!   On this point, I need to mention the main thing I thought of when I heard people complaining that vampires are having age-inappropriate relationships.   Vampires do not have a human concept of age.   They are frozen at the age they were when they were turned.   Although they will age mentally and emotionally, at least they may, they do not age physically.   This leads to a concept of age literally having no meaning.   By the same token, the idea of considering the age of a romantic interest further than this person being past puberty is not something that a vampire would likely think about!

At the end of the day, I mostly wanted to use this short post to remind people not to judge vampire characters by human moral codes.   We watch these shows to have fun watching morally ambiguous supernatural characters in the first place, so trying to have them stick by human morals in some ways makes zero sense!   While in real life these relationships are absolutely inappropriate this is not something these fictional characters would consider.   I hope you have enjoyed this post.   Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Further Watching

• The Vampire Diaries (2009)