#except for mikael and jp

[jeypawlik]

Sketchbook Shoutouts - 43

Shoutout requests from my Private Collector folks! I don’t know who some of these characters are but it’s always fun to draw ones I’ve never seen before (except for Mikael and JP at the bottom, I could draw them with my eyes closed). Every month that someone’s pledged to my Private Collector tier on Patreon, they get an inked request that appears in my monthly sketchbook The request acts as mini commissions and folks can ask for their OCs, my OCs, or any kind of fanart.

[hellsbellschime]

okay so this is a meta request,or really just your overall thoughts. klaus not killing elena and jeremy after they killed kol was one of most oocs things that tvd!klaus did imo - i mean ofc they wouldn't kill elena,the mc,but he didn't have that much of a reaction after it happened? do you think it was just lazy writing or deep down it has something to do with the fact that klaus knows caroline would never forgive him if he killed elena or her little brother

Well, I ultimately do think that it was just bad and lazy writing, I think the entire circumstance around Kol’s death was simply for “shock factor” and because JP doesn’t like his character, but obviously that makes for a pretty short and dull answer. And while I don’t think it was something the writers were ever thinking of, I do think that there are ways that you can explain Klaus’ behavior in a way that makes sense for his character and could have excused his bizarre reaction to Jeremy and Elena killing Kol.

Klaus is an extremely impulsive character who immediately gives way to his anger if he has the chance to. And that was pretty clearly his plan the moment he saw that Elena and Jeremy had killed Kol, except Bonnie didn’t give him the opportunity to do that. Obviously Kol dying was devastating and infuriating to him, but after he died Klaus was trapped for days with nothing to think about besides what had just happened, what Jeremy and Elena had done, and most importantly to think about what exactly he wanted to do about that. And I think that when you look at it in that context his apparent lack of reaction makes sense for his character for two significant reasons.

The first reason is to me a pretty integral part of Klaus as a character and why he does everything that he does. At least on TVD, Klaus was a character who genuinely believed that he was always the strongest, smartest, and most manipulative person in the room, and was always looking for an angle to play to his advantage in any situation. And in his mind Jeremy and Elena did something horrible to him, but he still wouldn’t have seen them as a legitimate threat against him, and after having the opportunity to think it over he probably would have thought that they could still potentially be useful to him. And even when he’s feeling angry or vengeful, he rarely kills people unless he knows for certain that they serve no purpose for him anymore. I mean look at his reaction to discovering that Elena was still alive early in season 3, obviously Stefan’s betrayal would have hurt him and he was under the impression that Elena had to be dead in order for him to make his hybrids, but he still didn’t kill her until he knew for certain what course of action would benefit him the most. Given that Elena was doppelganger and Jeremy was a hunter (I think the only hunter Klaus was even aware of at the time) it makes sense for Klaus to stop and consider all of his options once the immediate rage had worn off.

And the other reason I think that it kind of makes sense for him to not kill them both immediately is simply because aside from the immediate gratification of knowing they were dead, he wouldn’t have enjoyed killing them. Klaus is someone who reacts harshly and immediately to anything that he perceives as a threat, but I think that Jeremy and Elena were far too weak for him to actually see them as a danger to him. And Klaus’ reaction towards people who have done something that makes him feel like they’ve deeply wronged him has been fairly consistent, and his reaction hasn’t been to kill them, it’s been to torment them. He’s not a legendary villain in the supernatural community because he kills everyone who pisses him off, he’s a legend because he rips the people who betray him to shreds and leaves them with no life worth living. His idea of the greatest revenge has always been to essentially do what Mikael did to him, make the people who wronged him think of nothing but how to escape him or survive him, always leaving them on the edge of death without ever actually ending them. I mean look at his main antagonistic relationship in the series with Katherine, she “betrayed” him by basically not allowing her to kill him and he spent half of his life and her entire life torturing the shit out of her for fun. It actually makes a lot of sense that he’d let the people who killed his brother live, because living would be their punishment.

Of course this is just the interpretation that I like to tell myself, and I think it’s clear that what really kept Jeremy and Elena alive after killing Kol was plot armor. However I do think that you can make a reasonable argument for Klaus keeping the two of them alive in a way that really makes sense with his characterization. I don’t really see it being connected to Caroline at all, because when it comes down to the wire Klaus will almost always ultimately do what he wants or what he thinks is in his best interest. I also think that killing a member of his family would be a bridge to far for him, and frankly I don’t think that he would want to be with anyone if they didn’t understand that about him and didn’t accept it, regardless of whether or not they liked it. Kol dying was easily one of my least favorite plot twists in TVD and I thought it was a poorly thought out and poorly executed plot point, but I think TVD!Klaus was a complex enough character that his apparent lack of reaction to Jeremy and Elena killing Kol could be logically explained and could have been developed into something more had the whole nonsense of seaon 4 and beyond/TO not happened.