Posted by Dianne Sylvan | November 25, 2011, 11:06 (EST) | 45 Comments
Category: TV Series
If you’re anything like us, you live for the frenzy of Vampire Diaries recaps that emerges every Thursday night/Friday after the show airs. We decided it would be fun to ask some of our favorite Vampire Diaries recappers to share their top three moments of Season 3 so far – oh, and we were right! It is fun.
In this installment, Dianne Sylvan brings tears, fierceness, and pillow talk to the fave moments table. You can check out her TVD recaps on her blog here.
Check out previous Top 3 Moments: Thomas C. Galvin.
And don’t forget to vote in the Mid-Season Finale Poll: Your 3 Favorite Episodes of Season 3 (So Far)?

“No, Stefan…it makes me strong.” (EP306 – Smells Like Teen Spirit)
I will be the first to admit that I’ve been lukewarm on Elena up until this season. As I’ve said a hundred times, nobody is that forgiving or accepting – especially not in high school. At some point, everybody breaks, and I’ve been waiting with faintly sadistic hope for the moment when Elena just loses her ever-loving mind and starts binge drinking, snorting coke off the backs of hybrids, or at least raising her voice once in a while.
Instead, TVD is giving us Warrior Princess Elena, and I have to say…I LOVE it. Elena has always had a spark, that “Petrova Fire” as Katherine called it, but it only seems to show up when she’s in mortal peril and there’s a conveniently located broomstick or chair leg to break.
To see her Buffy-Up and take responsibility for her own fate–not out of a sense of martyrdom as she did in Season 2, but with the fierceness of a young woman who finally gets just how screwed up her life has become–is really encouraging. A girl’s life does not begin and end in her boyfriend, and too much of teen fiction these days seems to suggest that it’s a girl’s duty to turn her beast into a prince no matter what. Elena seems to have finally gotten fed up with that nonsense. She hasn’t entirely given up on Stefan – she may be willing to let him go now, but she still believes he can be saved. She just doesn’t let that hope destroy her. In Smells Like Teen Spirit, after having watched Stefan’s transformation into an unrecognizable monster, she doesn’t lay down and mope; she picks up a stake and kicks his ass.

Anna and Pearl (EP307 – Ghost World)
It’s very rare for anything to make me flat out burst into tears, but the scene at the end of Ghost World where Anna wanders the streets of Mystic Falls, resigned to an eternity of loneliness and uncertainty, only to look up and see her mother standing at the end of the street waiting for her made me bawl like a baby.
It was such a perfect moment for Anna’s character; from the first time we met her back in Season 1, she was a girl with one drive: to find her mother. She was willing to do whatever it took to free Pearl from the tomb, and when I realized that she was still looking for Pearl in the afterlife, my shriveled Scorpio heart grew three sizes. Seeing the two of them run into each other’s arms and then disappear into the Great Whatever was one of the few genuinely sweet, unvarnished moments of joy on this show. So much of the emotional ride on TVD is painful, and we all love it, but sometimes…sometimes we need just a hint that endings can be happy.

Damon and Elena’s Pillow Talk (EP308 – Ordinary People)
I’m going to venture an unpopular opinion: I don’t really think Elena should “end up with” either Salvatore. I don’t think they’re capable of having a healthy adult relationship with the girl who looks just like the girl who tore them apart in 1864, and I don’t think Elena is old enough to make the kind of choices life with a vampire would force her into. Luckily Elena realized this herself back in The Last Day.
However, I love the dynamic between Elena and Damon. Elena and Stefan together have always been a little too goopy for me – I’ve never felt they had much sexual chemistry. Elena and Damon meet as equals; she doesn’t take his crap, and he doesn’t treat her like some idealized dream girl. They see the potential in each other. The level of trust that Elena has gained with him over the course of this season is amazing; just seeing the two of them lay face to face on her bed, Elena falling asleep right beside him without a trace of fear, shows how far they’ve come.
I also love that Elena understands that the real heart of the show, the reason all of this is happening and the driving force behind everything that will unfold, isn’t her romance with Stefan; it’s Stefan and Damon’s bond. It’s further evidence of how Elena’s character has grown since the beginning of the story. She knows it’s not all about her.
Of course, the runner-up for my favorite scene is the whole “The Sternum is Connected to the OMG” scene when Damon is “teaching” Elena how to stake a vampire. I had to retire to my Victorian fainting couch with smelling salts after that one.
Dianne Sylvan, who was a Vampire Diaries fangirl in the Ancient Days before the internet, is the author of the Queen of Shadows (Ace, 2010) and Shadowflame (Ace, 2011), novels of the Shadow World. She lives, writes, and drinks copious amounts of coffee in Austin, Texas.
For more information about Sylvan’s work, and her blog, visit: http://www.diannesylvan.com
Thanks to Vampire Diaries Web for the HQ screen captures!
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