The Vampire Diaries is officially leaving Netflix on September 3, 2022, leaving fans desperate to figure out where they can find it after that. While this information has not been made available yet, the show's arrival on Netflix brought a wave of new fans and its new home is bound to do the same. For any new watchers trying to integrate into the still-strong fandom, there are some inside jokes they will need to be prepared for.
The show itself gave fans great lines, but the fandom also came up with some of their own jokes based on the most common or absurd moments in the series. Only those who have seen the show a few times will be able to understand them all.
Damon's Nicknames
No one has quite the same skill with naming their friends and enemies as Damon. The fandom regularly calls Bonnie "Bon Bon" in his honor, and while other nicknames like "Barbie Klaus" (Rebekah) and "Buzzkill Bob" (Stefan) didn't take off, Damon's best nicknames have become iconic in the fandom at large.
He managed to describe everyone in ways that were simultaneously insulting and accurate, and fans love him for it. New fans looking to connect with the broader community may need to do a little research to understand what's going on when people are discussing whether they ship "Mystic Queen" with "Tween Wolf" or "Prom King."
"What's The Moonstone This Season?"
This joke was introduced by Katherine Pierce, who realized that being the current owner of the Cure for vampirism made her "that thing that everybody wants." This is referencing Klaus's hunt for all the components in the sacrificial ritual to break the Hybrid Curse.
While it's a fairly specific example, it's also extremely accurate across all the TVD shows. Whether the "moonstone" is Bennett Blood, Inadu's bones, or Malivore artifacts, the heroes and villains are usually involved in some variant of hide and seek or keep away, where at least one party is looking to capture every prize in order to gain greater power.
Compel, *Breaks Neck*, Bennett Blood, White Oak
While the biggest threats in The Vampire Diaries had to be dealt with using massive displays of power, episodic threats tended to require one of four solutions. If the threat was human, the vampires simply compelled them and sent them on their way. If the threat was a vampire, they snapped their necks or gave them a magical aneurism to incapacitate them.
For problems on the magical side, Bennett Blood seemed to be able to do anything. Finally, if the threat was an Original, they could use White Oak stakes or ash, which seemed to keep reappearing, no matter how often it was destroyed. This may have gotten repetitive for fans to see, but it was certainly effective.
"Adults Can't Survive In Mystic Falls"
Before The Vampire Diaries even started, Elena and the Salvatore Brothers were orphans (or so they thought), and that condition spread rapidly over the course of the show. Elena lost both her biological and adopted parents, as well as her aunt Jenna. Caroline lost both her parents as well, from a combination of magical and mundane threats. Bonnie lost her Grams and her father, and her mother became a vampire.
Given the poor fate of parents in Mystic Falls, it seems like anyone who wants to keep adult family members should probably find another place to live. This trend also extended to adults in general, with basically every authority figure dying a tragic death and only Alaric surviving the finale. Over time, fans learned not to get attached to the adults on the show, since they never stuck around long.
New Character Trope: The Matt Donovan
Matt Donovan stayed human for the entirety of The Vampire Diaries and through the two spin-offs, as well as managing to finish off that time alive, despite dying five times. He dated Elena, Caroline, Rebekah, and Nadia, and even got engaged.
However, many fans think of him as the most boring character on the show. He didn't have a particularly interesting character arc, and his involvement with the supernatural world tended to be limited to being annoyed by its existence. Given all that, fans have decided that being the "Matt Donovan" of a show means being a character beloved by the writers but not necessarily by the fans, who gets far more attention than they deserve just because they are the 'nice, normal guy.' Examples of Matt Donovans include Alaric Saltzman in Legacies, Ross Gellar in Friends, and Xander Harris in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
"Need Drama, Add A Sire Bond."
When the villains weren't causing trouble, the Mystic Falls Gang found ways to keep themselves in conflict. One of the biggest examples of this was how often sire bonds came up, despite being described as extremely rare early on. The bond always started drama, because it never formed between characters that actually liked each other.
Elena's sire bond to Damon blew up the love triangle, and Tyler's bond with Klaus caused a lot of trouble. This tactic came back in Legacies when Lizzie became a heretic, as she wound up sire-bonded to no-humanity Hope. If there wasn't enough natural drama in play, fans learned to expect a sire bond was coming to mess things up.
H2O
For many 2000s kids, H2O: Just Add Water was one of their first exposures to supernatural TV. The Australian show featured a trio of teenage girls who accidentally got transformed in mermaids. While it was a natural transition to go from H2O, which aired from 2006 to 2010, to The Vampire Diaries, which began in 2009, that's not the only crossover.
Two of H2O's three lead actresses (Phoebe Tonkin and Claire Holt) moved from one show to the next, playing Hayley Marshall and Rebekah Mikaelson, respectively. Although they did a great job in both roles, some fans find it hard to watch one without thinking of the other, so they may reference H2O's Emma and Cleo while talking about their TVD characters.
"Death Is Slacking In Mystic Falls"
Virtually every time a big event is hosted in Mystic Falls, someone dies. If they're adults or random background characters, that death might stick, but otherwise, audiences don't have to worry too much about their favorite characters.
Even characters who stayed dead for a long time found their way back as ghosts, by escaping the collapsing Other Side, or making deals to get out of Hell. Plot armor didn't keep them from dying, but it certainly kept them from disappearing altogether, a Mystic Falls trend that continued in the absurd resurrections seen in Legacies.
The Cure Makes No Sense
On a show about vampirism, the idea that a cure existed that could turn vampires back into humans was a really interesting prospect. However, the rules about how it worked changed regularly. Since Silas is insistent that vampires are distinct from Immortals, it's frankly unclear why the cure would work for both anyway.
Beyond that, when a person takes the cure, their blood becomes the cure for any future seekers. Silas claims that the next person would need to fully drain the blood of the cured to claim it for themselves, but it was later shown to require only a small amount, at which point the person begins to age to the state their body would naturally have come to. It's also unclear what happens to an Original's sireline if they take the Cure, despite that being the plan for Rebekah in the near future. All in all, it's a major plot point that makes absolutely no sense, and fans regularly mock it for being so poorly planned.
Nina Dobrev's Wigs
It's relatively common for actors to use wigs if their characters have different hairstyles than them, but Nina Dobrev's wigs in the TVD finale were on a whole other level. Elena and Katherine both needed to look identical to how they had years before, but that didn't end up working out.
It's unclear why this was so much harder to work with than the many previous wigs used on the show, but apparently, it was, because the wigs looked extremely wrong. It threw viewers out of the show, and is one mistake the fans will not let go of, generating plenty of jokes along the way.