Eight mechanics the plot obeys. Every reversal in the franchise is one of these being applied, or exploited.
Becoming a vampire
Die with vampire blood in your system. You wake in transition and have roughly 24 hours to drink human blood or die properly.
What it costs you
- Sunlight
- fatal without a daylight ring
- Invitation
- no entry to a home uninvited
- Vervain
- burns on contact, blocks compulsion
- Wood through the heart
- permanent
- Emotion
- amplified past bearing
- Ageing
- stops at the moment you turn
What you gain
- Compulsion
- eye contact and a command
- Healing
- near-instant, from almost anything
- Strength & speed
- scaling with age
- Your blood heals humans
- and turns them if they die with it in
The escape hatch
- The humanity switch
- off = no guilt, no love, no brakes
Flipping the switch off is reversible; the memories are not. Everyone who does it has to live afterwards with what they did while it was off — which is the engine of at least four major arcs.
Becoming a werewolf
You inherit the gene and it does nothing at all — until you cause a human death. Then it activates permanently and you turn at every full moon.
The consequences
- A werewolf bite
- fatal to a vampire within about a day
- Klaus’s blood
- the only cure for that bite
- Full moon
- involuntary, and agonising
- Silver
- a myth. It does nothing.
Ways around it
- Becoming a hybrid
- turn at will, no pain
- Moonlight rings
- witch-made, same effect
- The unification ritual
- the Crescent pack’s solution
Every werewolf character is introduced with a body already behind them. Tyler causes a car crash; Mason kills a man in a fight; Rafael repeats Tyler’s exactly. The show never lets you forget what the trigger is.
How magic works
Five traditions, five power sources, and none of them are free.
The traditions
- Spirit magic
- nature and the dead witches before you
- Ancestral magic
- New Orleans’ own consecrated dead
- Traveler magic
- the collective will of the Travelers
- Expression
- raw, unsanctioned, corrupting
- Siphoning
- stealing magic from other magical things
- Kemiya
- alchemical object-magic; Davina’s speciality
The price
- Every spell
- has a cost, usually somebody’s life
- The spirits
- can and do revoke your power
- Turning vampire
- destroys a witch’s magic — unless she siphons
A siphoner who becomes a vampire is a Heretic: a magic-using vampire with an infinite internal battery. That is the one combination the Gemini coven built prison worlds to prevent.
How death works
Where you go depends entirely on which century you die in. It changes three times.
The eras of the afterlife
- c. 100 BC – 2014
- the Other Side · supernatural purgatory
- 2014 – 2017
- Cade’s Hell · souls of the guilty
- 2017 onward
- peace · nothing holds the dead any more
Side doors and holding cells
- The Phoenix Stone
- a personalised hell for a trapped soul
- Prison worlds
- one day, repeating, alone
- Malivore
- erasure — not death, deletion
- The Ancestors
- New Orleans’ dead, with opinions
Ways back
- A Bennett witch
- the most reliable route, at a price
- The Gilbert ring
- resurrects humans; breaks their minds
- A phoenix
- Landon, over and over
- The Necromancer
- badly, and for his own amusement
Humans always found peace. The Other Side only ever filed the supernatural — which is why the franchise’s body count was reversible for five seasons and permanent afterwards.
Killing an Original
White oak, and nothing else — with exactly one exception, invented in 2016.
The methods
- A white oak stake
- permanent, and takes the whole sireline
- Silver dagger + white oak ash
- sleep, not death; reversible
- Marcel’s venom
- the one non-white-oak kill
- Everything else
- inconvenient at most
Where the wood came from
- The original tree
- burned c. 1000, but pieces kept
- Mikael’s stake
- carried for nine centuries
- The Wickery Bridge sign
- a 12th-century replanting
- Twelve stakes
- made in 2012, and counted constantly
The dagger trick does not work on Klaus, because he is half werewolf. This is the whole reason his siblings could be stored in boxes and he could not.
Compulsion, and what beats it
Eye contact, a command, and it is done — unless the target is protected.
Immune or protected
- Anyone on vervain
- which is most of the town
- Other vampires
- except from an Original
- Werewolves and witches
- naturally resistant
- Sirens
- override it entirely
What it can do
- Erase or rewrite memory
- the most-used plot device in the show
- Force any action
- including suicide
- Be layered
- compulsions can be stacked and hidden
An Original can compel any vampire. That single asymmetry is where most of the leverage in seasons three and four comes from.
Doppelgängers & the cure
Nature prints a shadow of anyone who cheats death, and provides exactly one way back.
The two lines
- Silas → … → Stefan → Tom Avery
- the male line
- Amara → Tatia → Katherine → Elena
- the Petrova line
What doppelgänger blood does
- Fuels Original-tier spells
- the immortality spell, the hybrid curse
- Breaks the Travelers’ curse
- when both lines are spilled together
- Sustains Klaus’s hybrids
- which is why Elena is a permanent target
The cure
- One dose at a time
- and it travels by blood
- Removes the supernatural
- entirely, and permanently
- Does not undo the years
- Katherine ages five centuries in weeks
Route of the cure: buried with Silas → forced on Katherine → Silas → Amara → a second dose out of the 1994 prison world → Elena → Stefan → Damon.
Sirelines & sire bonds
Two different things with confusingly similar names, and the show mixes them up on purpose.
A sireline
- Who turned whom
- traced back to one Original
- Kill the Original
- and the entire line dies
- Five lines
- Finn, Elijah, Klaus, Kol and Rebekah — Klaus’s is by far the largest
A sire bond
- Only for hybrids and rare vampires
- not a general rule
- Gratitude, not compulsion
- which is worse
- Elena to Damon
- the show’s most uncomfortable idea
- Broken by
- the sire’s death, or doppelgänger blood
Nearly every protagonist is in Klaus’s line, which is the structural reason he survives eight seasons of people wanting him dead.