Has The Vampire Diaries Eclipsed Twilight's Popularity?

Dec. 4, 2011 - PRLog -- Many fanpires seem to be under the impression that the CW's mega-popular TV show, The Vampire Diaries, copied the Twilight Saga.  Perhaps it is because there are so many similarities between the two stories that people often get confused.  Yet, if one copied the other, it wasn't The Vampire Diaries that did the copying.

Believe it or not, even though The Vampire Diaries TV show premiered in 2009 (four years after the publication of the first Twilight book), its source material is The Vampire Diaries book series by L.J. Smith.  Originally published as a trilogy, L.J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries made its debut in 1991.  That's fourteen years before the Twilight Saga book series came out.

While comparisons are inevitable, the whole concept of a well-behaved, "vegetarian" vampire with lots of self control was conceived long before Stephenie Meyer came up with Edward Cullen.  No wonder Twilight haters call the Twilight Saga "glorified fan fiction."  

Anyone who reads the first two books of The Vampire Diaries series, "The Awakening" and "The Struggle," is bound to discover that Edward Cullen, especially as portrayed in Midnight Sun, is a carbon copy of Stefan Salvatore.

If Stephenie Meyer did not read The Vampire Diaries at some point before she wrote The Twilight Saga, then she must be unquestionably clairvoyant, because the similarities between Edward Cullen and Stefan Salvatore are far too many to be just a harmless coincidence.

And let's not even get into the love triangle, or the contemporary high school setting, or the similarities between the Quileute boy wolves and the Lockwood family werewolf curse.  Oh, but what about the Volturi?  That's a pretty unique creation right?  

Wrong.

The main villains in The Vampire Diaries are called "the original vampires" because of how ancient they are.  Do ancient vampires from Europe bear any resemblance to the Volturi (the main villains in the Twilight Saga)?  Well, that's exactly what the Volturi are.  Ancient vampires from Europe who indulge in drinking human blood without remorse.

But it doesn't stop there.  You may remember that the Volturi are originally from Italy.  Well, guess where the Salvatore brothers are from in L.J. Smith's books?  Renaissance Italy.

The only paranormal element missing from The Twilight Saga that is present in The Vampire Diaries is the coven of witches, but it's reasonable to assume that Stephenie Meyer had to leave something out in order to get away with publishing Twilight as an original work.

If you haven't figured out where this is going yet, then you might want to look back at the Russet Noon scandal in 2009.  For those who aren't familiar with Russet Noon, it is a published novel by Gothic romance author Lady Sybilla.

Back in March 2009, Lady Sybilla announced the upcoming publication of her very own Team Jacob sequel to The Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn.  The title of the book, Russet Noon, was immediately interpreted as a mockery to Twilight, and it wasn't long before both pro and anti Twilight bloggers launched a Salem-style witch hunt against Lady Sybilla.

One of the most prominent crusaders was legendary comic book author Peter David, who set out to write a round-robin satire of Russet Noon called Potato Moon.  His intentions, as he explained on his personal blog, were to unleash a "long, sustained campaign of mockery" upon Lady Sybilla and her as-of-yet unpublished novel.

Yet, while a vast majority of internet users couldn't quite see the irony behind Russet Noon, there were a few independent thinkers who actually commented on it.  Stephenie Meyer copied The Vampire Diaries and, some say, even Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles as well.

Then along came Lady Sybilla who, according to allegations, violated copyright laws by trying to sell her Twilight fan fiction.  Yet, if The Twilight Saga is fan fiction in itself--only with the characters' names and locations changed, but little else--then what was the big fuss about?  

Stephenie Meyer had it coming, and we all know that karma is a bitch.

Still, there was not much Lady Sybilla could do in the face of such a massive crusade.  Even though The Twilight Saga Russet Noon was eventually published as a parody on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the summer of 2010, Stephenie Meyer saw to it that the book got banned.  For good.

Many haters believed that this would be the end of Lady Sybilla and Russet Noon, but Lady Sybilla had different plans.  Instead of succumbing to Stephenie Meyer's bullying tactics, Lady Sybilla stood her ground and launched her own website:

http://www.ladysybilla.com/

After all, just because Stephenie Meyer is a billionaire, that doesn't change the fact that she sought to punish Lady Sybilla for the very thing she herself did.  Stephenie Meyer openly plagiarized L.J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries and got away with it, because not too many people remembered The Vampire Diaries book series at the time when The Twilight Saga craze exploded.

Ultimately, however, Stephenie Meyer's plagiarism was exposed for the whole world to see thanks to the CW's TV adaptation of The Vampire Diaries.

But the wheel of karma had only just begun spinning in 2009 when the news about Russet Noon first broke, and The Vampire Diaries premiered as the most popular TV show ever to air on the CW.

Nowadays, The Vampire Diaries has established itself as such a force to be reckoned with, that it has systematically and irrevocably eclipsed the popularity of The Twilight Saga.  

As for Russet Noon, it lives on, though in relative obscurity, just like Stephenie Meyer wanted, but it has become somewhat of a cult classic for a select few, especially Team Jacob fans.  

According to keyword searches, internet users still scour the web, looking to buy a copy of Russet Noon in book form even though it is available for free at its official site, http://russet-noon.ladysybilla.com/      

In the mean time, Lady Sybilla has sunk her teeth into a new vampire universe by launching a brand new blog to expand her Gothic World: Lady Sybilla's Vampire Diaries Blog.

http://ladysybilla.blogspot.com

Who needs The Twilight Saga when there is The Vampire Diaries?  And who needs Edward Cullen, when there's Damon Salvatore?