Elena Gilbert was ostensibly the leading heroine of the long running CW series The Vampire Diaries. But The Vampire Diaries operated in a world that had a lot of moral gray area, and even though Elena was supposed to be the kind and compassionate girl of the series, she lived and breathed in that gray area too. And to be honest, more often than not she seemed to lean more towards the dark side of the moral balance than the light.
Elena really had no problems looking out for herself and the people that she was caring about at the moment above anyone else, which unsurprisingly led to Elena doing a lot of unabashedly awful things. It's hard to say what's the worst of the worst, but these are the 10 most shameless things that Elena ever did.
Being Self Absorbed
When it comes to the insane situations and dangerous encounters that Elena Gilbert has to deal with, earlier on in the series she had a tendency to consider what impact her actions and behaviors would have on the people around her. But as time went on? Not so much.
Elena has a very unfortunate habit of focusing solely on her wants and needs, even when that myopic view gets people around her hurt, or even killed. She seems to only be worried about exactly what she wants when she wants it, and anything that exists outside of that tunnel vision is a non-issue.
Thinking Her Judgment Trumped Everything
Teenagers aren't exactly known for their wisdom, so maybe Elena deserves a bit of a break for being so narcissistic and letting her god complex run amok. However, Elena often times was the one to decide what the entire Mystic Falls gang would be doing, and she seemed to think that her judgment outweighed the judgment capabilities of literally everyone else.
Sometimes she may have had the right idea, but often times she did not. And either way, Elena should have at least asked for the input of others when making these decisions, because sometimes it was their own lives hanging in the balance.
Treating Caroline Horribly
Caroline was allegedly one of Elena's best friends since childhood, but based on how she treated Caroline most of the time, you wouldn't really guess it. Elena got the nastiest towards Caroline when she flipped her humanity switch (a transgression she refused to apologize for afterwards), but pretty much from day one she was incredibly condescending and dismissive towards Caroline.
Caroline may have been as shallow as a kiddie pool, but that doesn't give Elena an excuse to mistreat her. And you'd think Elena would have learned to be a little kinder to Caroline over the years since Caroline was literally murdered solely for being friends with Elena.
Forgetting About Stefan
So once Elena was fully enmeshed in her relationship with Damon she seemed to forget about Stefan, but she also literally forgot about him when he spent months suffering and repeatedly dying alone.
The heart wants what the heart wants, but Elena was madly in love with Stefan at one point, and more importantly, Stefan was still madly in love with Elena when she moved on with Damon. It would have been nice if Elena had showed a little consideration towards Stefan's feelings in that situation, but she outright stated that all she really cared about was being in love with Damon.
Manipulating Her Brother
It's pretty normal for an older sibling to be a kind of controlling mini-parent to their younger sibling, but Elena shamelessly took that standard to an insane degree.
Elena was always under the impression that she knew what was best for Jeremy, and she really didn't care what she had to do in order to make that happen. It's one thing to try to protect someone you love, but to compel them and rob them of their own free will is more than a bridge too far. Jeremy may have forgiven her, but she really didn't deserve it.
Using Bonnie
Although the trio of Elena, Bonnie, and Caroline were supposed to be inseparable BFF's, it always seemed like Elena liked Bonnie more than Caroline. However, just because Bonnie was the favorite doesn't mean that Elena didn't constantly mistreat her.
At the beginning of her story Elena and Bonnie were friends, but as time went on it just seemed like Bonnie became Elena's resident witch on hand any time she needed something. She didn't pay a lot of mind to Bonnie's feelings, consistently ignored her suffering, and didn't even realize that her own best friend had died.
Going Wild Without Her Humanity
The titular vampires of The Vampire Diaries are blessed and cursed with this little thing they like to call their humanity switch, which is something that essentially lets them abandon their emotions. But the thing of it is, it doesn't logically follow that someone who doesn't have emotions would suddenly decide to go on a murderous rampage.
Elena flipped her switch after Jeremy died, but she really went as wild as she could after she did that. She tormented her friends, messed with Stefan and Damon, and even murdered and innocent woman, which is pretty over the top, even for someone with no emotions.
Messing With Stefan And Damon
To be fair, it doesn't seem like Elena was pulling a Katherine Pierce and messing with Stefan and Damon's emotions and relationship just because she wanted to or because it was fun. She clearly had real feelings for the both of them, and her relationship with each brother evolved a lot as time went on.
However, that's really not an excuse for what she did. Most sane people wouldn't want to date two brothers at all, let alone have serious, epic love relationships with them. And most importantly, most decent people wouldn't ever want to come between two siblings who love each other.
Fighting For The Cure
Elena wasn't very good at thinking about anyone else besides herself by the time she became a vampire, but her immediate fervor at the idea of getting her hands on the cure to vampirism was a little selfish and insulting.
Yes, she wasn't handling being a vampire well at all, however the notion that she of all people was the one who deserved the one dose of the cure was incredibly selfish. And even putting that aside, the search for the cure was insanely dangerous, and she made no bones about endangering the lives of everyone she knew for her own benefit.
Killing An Original
Within the world of The Vampire Diaries, it's just the reality of the situation that people are going to die. And most of those people are going to be completely innocent. But the fact that Elena actually thought that committing mass vampire genocide by knowingly killing an Original was nuts.
She was just not patient enough to work on finding the cure through more reasonable means, she didn't care that killing Kol would basically guarantee Jeremy's death at the hands of another Original, and she ultimately wound up being responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of vampires because she wanted a shortcut to finding the cure.