10 Most Satisfying Character Arcs in 'The Vampire Diaries,' Ranked

Image via The CW Published Oct 18, 2026, 7:21 PM EDT Isabella Soares is a Senior Writer for Collider, as well as a CherryPicks-approved critic. Born in Brazil, previously based in Canada, and now residing in the UK, she is passionate about stories that revolve around culture, womanhood, and coming-of-age dynamics. In her spare time, she enjoys watching nostalgic shows like ‘One Tree Hill’ and hosts her own podcast called Coming-of-Screen. In it, she interviews actors, directors, and creatives about coming-of-age/multigenerational stories in media. Sign in to your Collider account The Vampire Diaries might've had its storytelling mishaps throughout the seasons (especially when it came to the villains introduced in the series' latter half), but one thing is for certain, the writers knew how to deliver the most satisfying character arcs for its leads. Whether it was making a villain layered or a vampire transformation more thrilling to watch, TVD never seized to amaze fans with how characters like Elena (Nina Dobrev) or Damon (Ian Somerhalder) could evolve with every season. Everyone changed significantly from Season 1 to Season 8, but character arcs like Stefan's (Paul Wesley) Ripper shift or Caroline (Candice King) becoming a better vampire than a human, are simply what gave the series its magical appeal. There were many characters and memorable storylines that were introduced throughout the series' run, but the following list boasts the character developments that stand out. 10 Jeremy Gilbert Image via The CW Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen) is first introduced as Elena's emo brother, who usually relied on drugs and his toxic relationship with Vicki (Kayla Ewell) to cope with the loss of his parents. Although he initially tried to become a vampire after meeting and falling for Anna (Malese Jow) in Season 1, he was destined for more. In Season 4, he joins the Brotherhood of the Five, a group of gifted vampire hunters whose bodies become marked by tattoos every time they successfully complete their missions. Although Jeremy was killed later on in Season 4 after managing to resurrect Silas (Wesley), like most characters in The Vampire Diaries, he returned to life soon after, thanks to Bonnie Bennett (Kat Graham). Fast-forward to Season 6: Jeremy fools his sister and the Salvatore Brothers of his plan to go to art school, when in reality he is back to being the vampire hunter he once was. Encouraged by his former professor Alaric Saltzman (Matt Davis), Jeremy carries on with his goal, later joining the Salvatore Boarding School to pass his knowledge along as a teacher. 9 Tyler Lockwood Image via The CW Tyler Lockwood (Michael Trevino) wasn't very likable in Season 1, especially given the way he treated Vicki Donovan or how bad of a friend he was to Matt (Zach Roerig). Yet, once he uncovers his family's curse and turns into a werewolf, the character changes for the better. With Caroline Forbes as his attentive girlfriend, helping him navigate his full moon transformations, Tyler grows into his own skin. His rage against Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan) might have stalled a bit of his arc and ruined his relationship with Caroline, but his thirst for revenge was also valid considering all that he went through as one of Klaus' hybrids. In Season 6, after getting resurrected from the Other Side, Tyler is no longer a hybrid but rather a human with a werewolf gene. Despite his best efforts not to trigger the curse again, he eventually goes back to being a werewolf after Liv (Penelope Mitchell) begs him to kill her and save himself. Tyler's second transformation was emotional in every sense, given his feelings for Liv, and it felt like a full circle moment before the character was killed by Damon in Season 8. 8 Lorenzo St. John Image via The CW Enzo (Michael Malarkey) has one of the most devastating backstories in The Vampire Diaries, having been abandoned by Lily Salvatore (Annie Wersching) after being turned into a vampire and captured by the Augustines in the 1950s. It was in the latter chapter of his life that he met Damon and the two became cellmates, helping to cope with the horrors they were experiencing at the hands of the Augustines, getting tested on and weakened several times. Still, when a fire erupted and Damon managed to escape his prison cell, he turned his humanity switch off and left Enzo behind. In the latter seasons of TVD, Enzo is trying his best to fit in, first looking for belonging through being part of the Heretics and then as part of the Armory. Yet, it was only when he was in charge of monitoring Bonnie that he grew to like her and the two were their happiest. Although Enzo dies at the hands of Stefan in Season 8, before his demise he did find comfort in a relationship with Bonnie, getting the chance to experience true joy, even if momentarily. 7 Klaus Mikaelson Image via The CW Season 2 introduces one of TVD's best villains: Klaus. The character is an Original, but different from his siblings, he was born from an affair between his mother Esther (Alice Evans) and her lover, who happened to be a werewolf. Although Esther casts a spell to prevent Klaus from triggering his werewolf gene, he does become a hybrid by the end of Season 2. The whole reason why Klaus is hellbent on becoming a hybrid is so that he can create his own family, given how displaced he felt as part of the Originals. This would also enable him to have even more power and control over other supernatural creatures presented in The CW drama. His mission to create an army of hybrids might've been a cruel one, especially given that one of his hybrid minions was Tyler. Still, if he didn't intervene in Caroline and Tyler's relationship by turning the latter into a hybrid, the series wouldn't have had one of its most beloved platonic ships. Caroline is the reason why Klaus sets Tyler free, because she is able to get through to him like no one else can. Caroline's connection to Klaus is what helps audiences see through the character's evil tendencies, and notice that there is more to him than his villainous side. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance. 💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power) 👒Grand Line(One Piece) 🐺The Continent(The Witcher) 🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson) FIND YOUR WORLD → 01 What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic. ASomething ancient and half forgotten that came down through my family. BSomething completely ridiculous that works in a fight and gets a laugh. CNo magic at all, just training, potions and a very sharp sword. DSomething I inherited from a parent I have barely met. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own. AA fellowship drawn from every corner of the world who barely trust each other. BA crew I picked up one at a time, all of whom would die for me. CTwo or three people I would never describe out loud as friends. DTwo mates from school who are exactly as out of their depth as I am. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live. AA high city of white stone with the sea somewhere far below. BA ship under sail, with an island ahead that nobody has mapped. CA rented room over a tavern, in a town I am leaving in the morning. DA cabin at a summer camp with everybody else already awake outside. NEXT QUESTION → 04 How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse. AI am not, because somebody far older than me decided this was my duty. BTreasure, and I am not always careful about whose it used to be. CI take contracts, since people will pay well for what they will not touch. DI am fifteen and this is all technically a school trip. NEXT QUESTION → 05 There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark. ASend word to somebody who has seen this before, then hold the line. BWalk straight in, because it is interesting and possibly edible. CAsk what it has been eating and what the village is willing to pay. DWork out which myth it escaped from, then improvise very badly. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does. AAn ancient evil that has been patient for several thousand years. BA government that has spent a long time calling itself the good guys. CA man who turns out to be far worse than anything I hunt for money. DA god, or possibly my own family, and quite likely both at once. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it. ASome things are worth defending even when the odds are hopeless. BNobody gets to tell me where I can go or what I am allowed to want. CPick the lesser evil, and never pretend afterwards that it was not evil. DMy friends come before anything a prophecy has to say about it. NEXT QUESTION → 08 A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world. AIn a song, in a language hardly anybody still speaks. BAs the one who got there first and proved the whole thing was possible. CBarely, and mostly wrongly, in ballads I would absolutely hate. DOn a plaque at a camp, read by kids about to do the same thing. REVEAL MY WORLD → The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return. Middle-earthYou belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime. This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends. You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line. The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight. You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot. The Grand LineYou want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there. One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together. You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea. The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it. You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it. The ContinentYou would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated. Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept. You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer. The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people. You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong. Camp Half-BloodYou want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you. Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse. You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for. The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way. Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 6 Stefan Salvatore Image via The CW Stefan is presented as a good vampire in Season 1, given that he restrains himself from his blood-sucking urges and holds onto the little humanity he has left while he is dating Elena. Nevertheless, it is later revealed that the reason why Stefan refrains from satiating his thirst with human blood is that he doesn't know when to stop after a bite. Stefan's Ripper identity furthers his character arc significantly, proving that despite him always wanting to be good, his vampire nature makes him act otherwise. Stefan is in constant conflict with himself, because he never wanted to be a vampire, and he often thinks about the possibility of taking the cure to become a human again. Elena's humanity is one of the biggest reasons why he falls for her at the start of the series, because in many ways it reminds him of who he was before his transformation. Whenever Stefan shuts down his humanity switch and embraces his Ripper side, it's interesting to see who the character can become when he doesn't give into his human emotions. 5 Katherine Pierce Image via The CW Every great villain has a motif, and Katherine Pierce (Dobrev) had plenty. From having her baby snatched from her after giving birth to being chased by Klaus for centuries, Katherine becomes ruthless because, at the end of the day, she just wants to survive. She'll do anything to remain standing, even if that means using people as pawns for her calculated schemes. She did make Elena miserable every time she put her life and that of Elena's loved ones at risk, and added to Mystic Falls' body count in her many ventures into the small town, but Katherine also had layers. Although she had feelings for both the Salvatore brothers, Stefan had always been her true love. Every time she let her feelings for him get in the way of her evil side, she was the most vulnerable. Katherine also gets to connect with her daughter Nadia (Olga Fonda) in Season 5, and despite her being far from a nurturing mother to her, Katherine does soften the more she gets to know Nadia. When a villain, even someone as cruel as Katherine, has a deeper motif or shows that she cares about the (few) people she loves, you can't help but enjoy watching their journey onscreen. 4 Elena Gilbert Image via The CW It was always the plan for Elena to become a vampire, but she didn't turn into one until Season 4. The build-up of Elena going from a kind-hearted human to a blood-sucking vampire is particularly satisfying to witness, because audiences can't help but wonder who she will become after the transformation. In the first few seasons of TVD, audiences learn that Elena is just a girl trying to move on from losing her parents in a car crash. She is optimistic even though she's broken and that attracts Stefan from the moment they cross paths. Elena ends up losing even more of her loved ones ever since the vampires' arrival in Mystic Falls, so having her become the creature responsible for a lot of her own suffering is an interesting way to go about her journey. Elena's relationship with Damon only blossoms after she becomes a vampire, and their whirlwind romance was heavily supported by the fans. Although Elena's arc is impacted by Nina Dobrev's decision to leave the series after Season 6, it's interesting to see her become a vampire and then go back to having a normal human life in the series finale. 3 Caroline Forbes Image via The CW It's no surprise Caroline (like Tyler) wasn't really loved by the fans at first. After all, her character felt like the popular mean girl stereotype, always envious of her best friend Elena for being adored by the guys in her school without even trying. But what no one expected was that Caroline turning into a vampire would make her a better person than she was as a human. If there ever were such a thing as the "perfect" vampire, it would be Caroline, because all of her human emotions are amplified after she's immortal. As a vampire, she is more empathetic, charismatic, and over-achieving. She's always taking it upon herself to plan community events (such as proms and Miss Mystic Falls pageants) and become a friend everyone can rely on. Except for that one time that she shut down her humanity after her mother's passing, Caroline remained one of the most consistently good characters on TVD until the very end. 2 Damon Salvatore If Stefan was a good vampire, Damon would be the polar opposite. From the moment he shows up at the Salvatore mansion and mischievously greets his younger sibling, Damon is determined to wreak havoc everywhere he steps foot in Mystic Falls. From using Caroline as his own personal slave and sealing Vicki's fate by transforming her into a vampire, he couldn't care less about doing evil things to those around him despite not even having his humanity switch turned off. Damon's redeeming qualities begin to show when he falls for Elena, because she sees through all of his bad actions. When they become a couple later on, they undergo several challenges, including Damon getting stuck in the prison world and her falling victim of Kai Parker's (Chris Wood) "sleeping beauty" spell. The latter is where Damon's true colors are best displayed, with him agreeing to let Elena sleep in a coffin so that his best friend could get the chance to stay by his side and find a way of breaking the spell. Season 1 Damon would've never agreed to let Bonnie live instead of Elena, which only goes to show how much the character evolved throughout the seasons. 1 Bonnie Bennett Image via The CW Speaking of Bonnie, if there is one person that deserves more recognition for being the most selfless and heroic character on TVD, it has to be her. She was the series' true MVP, always swooping in to cast a spell to bring someone back from the dead or sparing her friends from their demise. Bonnie is from a long lineage of powerful witches, meaning she is the only person most times that can help save someone from the supernatural creatures taking over Mystic Falls. As a witch, it is in her nature to despise vampires and werewolves, but despite the way she feels or how much suffering she's been through because of the above creatures, she never seizes to extend her helping hand. Bonnie's journey to becoming the powerful witch that takes down hell in the series' finale is one of the best character arcs in the series, because she went through so much to get to where she ends up. Bonnie's urge to do what she can to save others led her to play with black magic and suffer the consequences of it. She loses all of her magic in Season 5, only to get access to it again much later in the series. When she takes down hell and breaks Kai's spell, which was preventing Elena from living at the same time that she did, Bonnie fulfills her witch potential to the fullest. The Vampire Diaries Release Date 2009 - 2017-00-00 Network The CW Cast Elena Gilbert / Katherine Pierce The lives, loves, dangers and disasters in the town, Mystic Falls, Virginia. Creatures of unspeakable horror lurk beneath this town as a teenage girl is suddenly torn between two vampire brothers. Showrunner Julie Plec Directors Chris Grismer, Joshua Butler, Marcos Siega, Kellie Cyrus, J. Miller Tobin, John Behring, Jeffrey G. Hunt, Rob Hardy, Leslie Libman, Paul Wesley, Lance Anderson, Darren Genet, John Dahl, Wendey Stanzler, Jesse Warn, Garreth Stover, Geoff Shotz, Ian Somerhalder, Liz Friedlander, David Von Ancken, Kevin Bray, Mike Karasick, Brad Turner, Carol Banker Writers Brian Young, Michael Narducci, Holly Brix, Elisabeth R. Finch, Andrew Chambliss, Alfredo Septién, Bryan Oh, Jose Molina, Turi Meyer, Gabrielle Stanton, Shukree Hassan Tilghman, Bryan M. Holdman, Céline Geiger, Mike Daniels, Charlie Charbonneau, Alan B. McElroy, John Herrera, Andrew Kreisberg, Elizabeth Craft, Michael J. Cinquemani, Sarah Fain, Sean Reycraft, Nina Fiore Seasons 8 Producers Julie Plec, Kevin Williamson, Leslie Morgenstein, Pascal Verschooris, Bob Levy, Caroline Dries, James L. Thompson III, James Patrick Stoteraux, Chad Fiveash, John Shiban, Trish Stanard, Barbie Kligman, Brett Matthews Franchise The Vampire Diaries Story By L.J. Smith Streaming Service(s) Netflix