Exercise and The Originals

Now that it’s too dark to walk outside in the evenings, I’ve switched back to the daily grind on the treadmill. I usually read on the treadmill, but today my Kindle was running low on power. I decided to watch Netflix on the XBox.

None of the shows I wanted to watch are on Netflix. (I thought Crunchyroll and Funimation had a deal with them? I was wrong.) Instead of grabbing my Kindle and portable charger, I started watching The Originals again.

I love this show. It’s the pretty men, yes, but within the first two episodes, we have strong black characters (Marcel and his band of merry vampires), the introduction of a gay character who later has his own storyline (Josh), and strong women in Rebekah, Hayley, Sophie, Davina, and Camile. Strong women who aren’t also evil, contrasting Supernatural‘s long-running issue that the women can be strong, but if they want to live, they also have to be evil as fuck (Amara and Rowena, I’m looking at you).

The sibling dynamic has drawn me in from the beginning. I love Elijah’s undying loyalty to Klaus, no matter what. I love how Rebekah’s fear of Klaus rivals her love for him. Family is everything when you’re immortal, it seems.

Above all, though, I love Klaus. He’s the outsider in his own family. He’s not like the others. He’s part werewolf, making him the first hybrid. The one thing that everyone forgets because Klaus is such an asshole: this is not his fault. His mother had an extramarital affair with a werewolf, leading to Klaus’s birth. Mikael treated Klaus differently before he became a vampire, and vows to hunt him down like an animal after Klaus kills his mother. To save their brother, Elijah, Rebekah, and Kol go on the run with Klaus, eventually ending up in New Orleans.

I used to think Rebekah was the most like me. She’s the little sister, after all. She wants to run away from her family so she can find true love with a boy Klaus won’t eventually take from her.

The more I watch the show, though, the more I realize I’m Klaus. I’m the one who can’t “Let it Go,” and my family won’t let me walk away. The more I watch Klaus, the more I realize he really would be better off if his family would just back off for a decade and let him chill.

Unfortunately, my family is not immortal.