This week we had a chance to chat to Samia a.k.a jackharleen, about her why she ships Klaroline, her interesting array of ships and what inspires her to make Klaroline edits. Read what she had to say here:
KM: For all of the readers who don’t know you, why don’t you tell us about yourself?
Samia: My name is Samia. I live in France. I’m 22. My favorite hobbies are reading, listening to music and creating fanworks in my spare time.
KM: Klaroline is not the easiest ship to ship; what was it about this pairing that stood out to you?
Samia: I’m typically interested in any ship having the potential to challenge and develop the characters, even more so when it includes elements of Horror Fiction and Gothic Romance, which was the case with Klaroline. I started to (crack)shipping Klaroline during the second season when Klaus’ character was first mentioned by Rose.
Being already a fan of the book version of Klaus I wanted to see how he would fit into the show. Throughout Season 2, and especially after Katherine has revealed her backstory, it became obvious that his character had to be enormously changed to be able to be incorporated in the show. The nature of his relationship with Elijah (that had back then only been hinted) didn’t make me want to ship them and I wasn’t especially fond of a possible romantic relationship between him and Katherine, though their relationship did interest me.
Caroline was one of my favorite characters in Season 2 and one whose romantic relationships didn’t appeal at all to me which made me inclined to ship her with Klaus. Ï started imagining what their dynamic would be like and how it would affect them as individual characters.
I could see Caroline being forced by Klaus to face her darkest desires and especially her bloodlust in the same way as Stefan had been but to manage, unlike him, but to overcome her impulses with the humanity that she had refused to give up and the control she had gained after becoming a vampire.
I didn’t see their relationship as romantic at all, but I could imagine that while Klaus would not change his ways, he could definitely develop romantic feelings for Caroline and have respect for her self-control and refusal to submit to his will.
Season 3 has solidified this ship for me because while the approach the writers had adopted when they developed Klaus and Caroline’s relationship was very different from the one I had hoped for, their potential relationship was interesting to me first and foremost because it offered the opportunity to examine their characters through their different experiences and values and that’s exactly what their scenes accomplished. Their scenes also benefited from the chemistry between the actors whose performances have perfectly succeeded in conveying the connection between Klaus and Caroline.
KM: What is your first fandom?
Samia: Klaroline is the first fandom I joined on Tumblr.
KM: Is there anything you would change about Klaus or Caroline?
Samia: If I could, I would change Caroline’s characterization from the fifth up to the eighth season and Klaus’ from 4×14 up to the last episode of The Originals.
The way that I see it, Klaus was never supposed to be a hero/anti-hero but it’s definitely what the writers in charge of his character decided to do with him, which was a great disservice to his character.
The way the writers approached and developed that storyline in the few episodes of TO I’ve watched was mediocre and unconvincing, especially when I compare those scenes with Klaus’ first appearance in TVD. That redemption arc might have worked if the writers had decided to use for this purpose a plausible cataclysm instead of introducing a miraculous baby who by her mere existence managed to encourage Klaus to change when he had refused to do so for his siblings for centuries. That a person who has never been useful to him and has never demonstrated loyalty to him or even just questioned his moral compass could make him make such drastic decisions as to his life and habits is incomprehensible to me.
Regarding Caroline’s character, any interesting storyline that could have contributed to her character development or simply to the consistency of her characterization had been too quickly discarded or wasted in poor attempts to instead serve certain romantic relationships and to the detriment of the maturity she had gained over the seasons, ultimately making her regress to something that ended up not even resembling the person she was in the first season. In the end, she became more a convenient plot tool than a solid character with agency or, at least, whose writing was intriguing enough to make me forget what her character was lacking.
KM: Now that we know that Candice King will be in The Originals season 5 premiere at the very least, how do you think the Klaroline will go down?
Samia: I have no idea since I stopped watching the shows and know next to nothing about the current events save for what I learned thanks to some spoilers I occasionally see.
KM: What are your favourite ships other than Klaroline?
Samia: Right now my favorite ships are Tom/Hermione (Harry Potter), Dracula/Mina (Dracula), Jessica/Killgrave (Jessica Jones), Anna/Vronsky (Anna Karenina), Rhaegar/Lyanna (GOT/ASOIAF), Catherine/Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), Hanniba/Will (Hannibal – TV show), Joker/Harley (DC), Charlie/India (Stoker), Ares/Aphrodite (Mythology).
KM: You have made some of my favorite Klaroline edits. What is it about this pair that drew you to them and inspired you to make edits of them?
Samia: I particularly like how easy it is to adapt their characters without feeling like the setting in which I integrated them is incongruous for them since their character are very adaptable and we have watched Klaus and Caroline at different moments of their lives and have seen how their personality could be greatly altered due to events that shaped them into the people they ended up becoming.
KM: Do you still watch TO? If yes, what do you enjoy about the show? If no, why not?
Samia: No, I don’t watch the show anymore. The main appeal of the show for me was to see the Klaus’ character reach his full potential without being held back by the inability to kill certain main characters like he was in TVD. The constraints imposed by the writers led to an illogical writing with Klaus leaving not only attempts on his life unpunished but also the murder of his two brothers, one of whom he seemed to genuinely love. That kind of sloppy writing made him and the other Originals look like much less threatening characters and certainly less likely to be taken seriously, especially when they failed to carry out their threats of retaliation.
I wanted to see the Originals act as they had been described when they were introduced. I wanted to see what they were capable of without the restriction necessary for storylines they were not the focus of and in which they shouldn’t have been since they were supposed to be killed in the first place and had been spared only because of their popularity.
I wanted to watch the legendary vampires Rose had talked about, the ones that even vampires much older than Damon and Stefan were scared of and powerful witches were forced to work for.
Their portrayal in TO didn’t at all live up to my expectation. The show was too focused on relationships that the writers had tried to form too rapidly between too many characters, as well as on Hayley and her miraculous pregnancy and the pseudo-war between Klaus and Marcel.
Every flashback centered around the original family I was impatiently waiting for either disappointed me or left me indifferent, nevertheless not as much as the interactions between Klaus and his siblings. Their dynamic in TO turned out to be much more different from the one they had in TVD and in the end frankly predictable and boring.
Nothing interested me enough to make me keep watching.
KM: If you had the chance to remove any character from TVD or TO who would you pick and why?
Samia: I would remove Enzo from TVD and Hayley from TO because I am completely disinterested in their characters, to put it mildly.
KM: And lastly, what’s your one piece of advice that you would like to give the fandom?
Samia: I suggest that we stay positive and also focus on the fanon aspect of Klaroline. No matter what the writers have planned for them in TO, we are lucky to have a very talented, creative and active fandom where it’s always possible to find any kind of fanworks we could wish for. If the scenes between Klaus and Caroline are unsatisfactory we can simply correct them with fanworks or ignore their context entirely and focus on the chemistry between Joseph and Candice.