Who's Your Daddy?: Representations of Masculinity and Coming of Age in Television’s The Vampire Diaries

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman, University of Wollongong, Shoalhaven Campus

Abstract

Fantasy narratives often use the metaphor of the werewolf for the adolescent identity-forming process. The Vampire Diaries goes one step further in the character of Tyler Lockwood, a teen wolf/vampire hybrid. An aggressive and abused teen, Tyler loses his father in Season 1 and his replacement father figure, a paternal uncle, in Season 2. In Season 3, he is “sired” by the Original hybrid, Klaus. In the face of these competing influences, Tyler struggles to come to terms with his own identity. The program uses the fictional township of Mystic Falls, populated by witches, werewolves, vampires and ghosts, to examine a range of masculinities available to the teenage subject. This paper will examine how the tropes of the ‘wolfboy’ and ‘the hybrid,’ in particular, are assigned to Tyler Lockwood and how these, in conjunction with the weight of family expectations, are used to examine the difficult transition from teenager to adult.