No shame, I am obsessed with The Vampire Diaries. I’m on season six now, and I’m not going to be happy when I finish what is on Netflix. However, from a WRD major perspective, I think what is really interesting is the role that literacy plays in the plot of this show. Two of the main characters, Stefan and Elena, write in diaries (Hence Vampire DIARIES), and we often hear voice overs from their diaries to move the plot along. The characters also use other forms of written text in order to find information and advance their schemes or plans of defense. For example, they were tracking down the source of a spell that had to do with Elena, and they went to a university to gather research that one of the other characters had done on the origins of this spell and of vampires themselves.
Witches, I guess you can say, are the most literate, or literacy dependent, in the show. They use grimoires, books of spells, in order to record their use of magic and pass it on to the next generation. The spells are often undecipherable to other people, and the witches must be literate in the language and symbols used to write the spells in order to use them.
I don’t know much about vampire diaries, but I do know quite a bit about twilight. I grew up in the same state as where they set the whole story line, so it was fascinating to see how young pre-teens operated within the literacy of the whole twilight universe. Too many tour buses were driving around with huge ‘Twilight’ placards along the sides.