Elena Gilbert started as the heart of The Vampire Diaries, a selfless, loving girl caught in a supernatural storm. But over time, her character shifted. This deep-dive explores how Elena’s evolution from a moral compass to a self-absorbed anti-heroine reveals deeper flaws in the show’s writing, especially through her treatment of friends, love interests, and moral choices.

I have a confession to make: I used to like Elena Gilbert.

My gradual dislike of her decisions shifted into full-blown hatred in season four, when her vampire emotions amplified her nasty little habit of making everything about her feelings, all the time.

Elena started out as a selfless and loving person who cared about her friends and their feelings, felt protective of her loved ones, and tried to do what was best for everyone. For example, when Esther wanted to kill all the Originals, Elena argued Elijah did not deserve that fate. She saw in him the same compassion he found in her. Both of them saw the other as “noble” and felt guilty for the decisions they made that negatively affected the other person.

But Elijah maintained his other-focus, where Elena did not. The writers gradually chipped away at many of her redeeming traits while continuing to insist she was a good person, even when she wasn’t.

In retrospect, I realize she’s been selfish from the beginning. Becoming a vampire just amplified her selfishness.

The Original Kill That Broke Everything

My moment of clarity happened when Elena killed off an Original.

When that happens, everyone in that Original’s line of descendants dies. Hundreds or thousands of vampires, good and evil, keel over the instant you destroy their Sire. If someone figured out how to kill Klaus, Katherine, Damon, Stefan, and Elena would all die. Forever. On the spot.

But Elena doesn’t care about random people the way the show tried to claim she did early on; she only cares about her family. Never mind that Buffy is gonna wake up and find Angel dead. Am I right? Who cares about him or Spike! It would be like pressing a button on a dashboard and not knowing which 60 people were going to die out of the 200 walking around outside. The Vampire Diaries excels in having selfish characters, but Elena is supposed to be the moral voice of the series. She is billed as “caring” about people. And she doesn’t.

To save one person, because “I can’t lose anyone else,” and to fulfill Jeremy’s hunter’s mark so she could get the cure, Elena killed an Original and by proxy, thousands of vampires without considering that somewhere out there may have been a girl just like her, in love with a “good” vampire who woke up the next morning to find him dead.

Look, I’m not trying to be a hard-ass.

I understand Elena’s love of her brother. She has every right not to want to lose him. Elena has lost too many people. Her real parents. Her fake parents. Friends.

Kol was being a problem and attacking her family, intending to kill Jeremy, because he had a paranoid belief that Jeremy would raise an adversary who could kill them all. But it’s not like she had no options. Elena invited Kol into her house to kill him. Elena had a relationship with Elijah. He could have kept Kol in line. She did not need to kill Kol to end his harassment; which means she did it to fulfill the Hunter’s Mark on Jeremy’s skin and get a cure for her own vampirism.

Elena feels enormous guilt for sucking people dry of blood (killing them) but not for killing about a thousand strangers in one go. She justifies it and chooses not to think about the humanitarian implications of her actions. I love her doppelgänger, Katherine, because she never pretends to be anything other than selfish, but Elena claims to be a “good” person.

Leading Men On

Elena constantly wavers between Stefan and Damon in the earlier seasons, emotionally cheating with Damon while still being with Stefan. This is another selfish behavior, in that she feels both of them should wait around for her and service her emotional needs, rather than cutting one or both of them loose. She also “flaunted” dating Stefan in front of Matt, even though she knew he still had feelings for her, and tried to help him get over her by asking him out on double dates, instead of leaving him alone. (To be fair, Matt did not have to agree.)

Her Toxic “Friendships”

Then there are her interactions with her friends.

When Caroline got turned in season two, Elena focused on how it made her feel (scared, guilty, afraid, unsure) more than she cared about how Caroline was coping with becoming a “monster.” She made Caroline’s transition about herself.

But that isn’t my beef. It’s how Elena’s defense of Damon goes down.

Imagine you were kidnapped and assaulted for weeks by someone who terrorized and abused you. You woke up with no memory of how you got there, who you slept with, and with bruises and bite marks all over your body. Only later did you realize Damon had done all of that to you and erased your memory so you wouldn’t remember or confront him about it.

At first, your best friend Elena doesn’t know all the details, but once she does, she takes your side. She agrees with you he is a piece of crap and warns him to stay away from you. She tells her boyfriend, Stefan, to keep his brother away from you. And then, she falls in love/lust with him and… suddenly, your abuse, rape, and being used as a human blood bag isn’t important anymore, compared to her feelings. Anytime you bring it up, she becomes uncomfortable and either changes the subject or whines that you don’t get her feelings, and it’s “painful” for her to talk about that stuff.

It’s painful for her?

What about painful for you, the abused?

That is how Elena treats Caroline, who deserves better.

Elena doesn’t want to hear it because she loves Damon, and that means everything he ever did must be all right. Her friends need to accept it, move past it, pretend it never happened, and never bring it up to her again.

Which is completely unreasonable.

Once again, it’s all about her. She aggressively demands everyone forgive and accept him because she loves him, despite him abusing, murdering, terrorizing, and turning many of their family and friends into vampires. Her love is not a blanket of forgiveness for other people; they have every right to their feelings and to share their own experiences with her in an attempt to articulate their concern about how he might treat her.

The incident that really turned me against Elena is when she flipped her humanity switch and tried to kill Caroline, many times. And I can forgive that, but what I can’t forgive is how she treats Caroline after she gets back her humanity:

Elena doesn’t want to talk about it because she can’t deal with it. “It’s too painful.”

Once again, it’s all about her.

Caroline needs to talk about it, to air her feelings, to get things out in the open, and to receive an apology, and Elena “can’t deal with it.” She can’t face her own destructive impulses, own them, and be strong enough to admit that it made her a bad person for a while. She can’t bring herself to face that side of herself, even when it’s a healing conversation her friend needs. Elena sees herself as a good person, and to think she isn’t would break her, so she hides behind an emotional “woe is me, I did a bad thing and I feel so much pain and guilt!” rather than dealing with her best friend’s needs.

The Bonnie Problem

Then there’s Bonnie, who spends one season “dead” all summer. Somehow, despite sending many texts and emails in which Bonnie never physically calls her back, Elena doesn’t concern herself with Bonnie until she needs something from her—for Bonnie to come back and heal Stefan’s amnesia.

Way to be a friend, Elena.

(I won’t even touch on the toxicity of this show about Bonnie, the “magical negro” who solves everyone’s problems, endlessly sacrifices herself for her friends, loses her mother and grandmother and various boyfriends, and then doesn’t even get the happy ending she deserves. Nor the awful wig they forced her to wear, because God forbid we let a gorgeous black woman have a magnificent afro to outshine all her friends!)

Let’s Revisit MY Memories!

Elena tries to help Stefan get his memories back by acting out all of her important shared memories with him, instead of taking him around Mystic Falls and talking about HIS memories of Lexi, Damon, Katherine, his uncle, etc. Even Stefan’s amnesia boils down to her needing him to have his memories, so she knows he remembers her, and their relationship, and how much she meant to him.

I blame the writers because Elena has to have every guy in Mystic Falls be friends with her, even after she crushes their hearts while she figures out her feelings (Matt, Stefan, Damon).

I Wanted the Old Elena Back, and Never Got Her

Somewhere along the way, the show lost its moral compass in Elena. She started out being the selfless friend willing to sacrifice her life for others. A tough big sister who wanted her brother to get off drugs and would be there to “kill his buzz every time.” She used to put other people and their needs first, and saw the good in irredeemable souls. That Elena helped bring Damon out of darkness into the light, because he wanted to be good for her. She helped redeem Stefan and get his humanity back on. Early season Elena didn’t need the world to revolve around her, but looked for ways to support her friends.

I enjoyed Delena while it lasted, since they had undeniable chemistry, but either intentionally or otherwise, being with him “ruined” Elena. It turned her inward, made her shut out the voices of her friends, and made her become incapable of handling anyone’s feelings other than her own.

I liked that Elena.

The woman Elijah looked into and saw her inner goodness.

Elena should have been the female Elijah.

But she wasn’t.

She lost her humanity in more ways than one, and I find that sad.