The Strange Connection of Daphne Bridgerton and Damon Salvatore
We're all still working through our crap. That's really my whole point here, and I'll give some personal examples from media I love to illustrate how this is, in one way, playing out in my own life.
Two characters who don't seem to have much in common beyond a common first letter, Daphne Bridgerton and Damon Salvatore, have been on my mind a lot. The former is fairly new to me since I discovered her story when the TV show aired at the end of 2020. The latter has been with me a lot longer, since 2012 or so, when I discovered The Vampire Diaries. However, I recently began rewatching TVD, and it put the juxtaposition of these two characters front and center.
Both rape their intimate partner. That's the big one that connects a vampire and a Regency-era woman on two different shows and networks, at least for me.
When I watched this happen with Damon as a fourteen-year-old, I was a bit uncomfortable, but he was supposed to be the bad guy. The sexy, sarcastic bad guy, but the bad guy nonetheless. The context of it is terrifying. The guy Caroline was flirting with at the bar turns out to be a monster, an analogy for a story many women can personally relay. We're supposed to be scared. Yet within a few episodes, there are longing glances between him and Elena. He gets to play the hero while his brother spirals. He does bad things, but we follow Elena who, despite everything, gives him another chance time and time again.
When I was fourteen, I ate that up. The "romantic" idea that he would be good for her, that she could change him, was rampant in teen media at the time. And it is a way that teaches young girls to excuse abuse. One might say, and I have said, that it's not the same to judge a vampire character and a human character. Maybe so, but the message, especially to young women, is still implicitly there.
So how does this connect to Daphne? Well, when I watched the scene in Bridgerton where she rapes Simon, I was aghast. It upset and angered me in every way imaginable. It has since made me even more furious as I've watched it with subtitles and realized that Simon says "wait" twice. Obviously she knew what she was doing was wrong before (and intention doesn't really matter here), but after that, how can it be anything but the deepest and cutting violation?
Yet it's hardly talked about beyond the results: whether or not she's pregnant. No conversation about the way she used Simon, about her abuse of his trust, and about her breach of consent. It's horrendous. And she is the main character. We are supposed to like her, to continue to root for her, to want her with the very person she raped!
Both of these characters do something very wrong. Both of these characters are supposed to be rooted for as the show goes on. What I'm grappling with is that I do still root for Damon Salvatore. I do not for Daphne Bridgerton.
Is it internalized misogyny? Is it that I met one character as a teenager when my radar for such things was lower? Honestly, I don't know. I'm still questioning myself, if it's OK to still like a character who does something so abhorrent, that I think is not only bad in real life, but that the character doing it and the show excusing it is actively bad for those watching.
People are complex. We hold different things in our mind; contradictory ideas and cognitive dissonance abound. I wish I had a better conclusion, some greater analysis about why these characters are the same or different, some breakthrough of my own psyche of why I feel different ways. But I don't. I only have a contradiction, and a question in the back of my mind that I hope will lead somewhere, someday.
Maybe that's my only lesson, my only plea, that we keep questioning. Question the truths about the world you've been taught, question the lessons being implicitly given to you by media, question your internal biases. If we don't, we stagnate, and nothing changes. So even though I don't have everything figured out yet, least of all myself, all I can do is keep questioning.
