Fadzai and Sandile make magic and mayhem with the wonderful witch of the southeast, Bonnie Bennett.

One of the main characters of The Vampire Diaries, Bonnie is the best friend of lead character, Elena Gilbert, and a budding witch with ties leading back to Salem and the founding of Mystic Falls. As she discovers more about her powers, and the existence of vampires and the greater supernatural lurking in her town and out in the world, Bonnie is at first hesitant to get involved, given the historical fate of witches in and beyond her family. By the end of the first season, though, she reaches a point of certainty that she wishes to be the town's protector from vampires and the harm they cause to its innocent people.

Beyond this point, however, Bonnie finds herself constantly having to compromise her principles given her friends' association with vampires - and some of her friends becoming vampires. From a narrative standpoint, this is largely a result of Bonnie's relegation as a character in the story, with focus placed on her usefulness as a witch in solving supernatural problems for the group. With several deaths, depowerings, and damn-near farcical tragedies under her belt, Bonnie's time in the show is mired by trauma and neglect - especially as the one black main character - and she is in retrospect someone in the show, and in the genre, who deserved so much better.

(This episode focuses on Bonnie in seasons 1 and 2.)

Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of familial abandonment, familial neglect, gratuitous violence, mental coercion and manipulation, racism, sexual abuse, assault and related victim blaming, slavery, and suicide and suicidal ideation.

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