Doppelgängers and Doubles in The Vampire Diaries

Like many others my age, my first experience learning about doppelgängers and doubles came from television; More specifically, The Vampire Diaries. Though our discussions in class have centered around doppelgängers and doubles being connected to a divided self, television seems to have its own definition of what doppelgängers and doubles entail. To make a much longer story short, The Vampire Diaries explains their doppelgängers (sometimes called shadow selves) as nature’s way of making the balance of life even again. Once two humans took an immortality elixir, nature took it upon itself to make identical look-alikes of these two people in mortal form, who would inevitably die and rebalance life on earth.

Because shows like this are what introduce many of us to the idea of doppelgängers, I think society can get confused as to what doubles and doppelgängers actually are. A question I cannot answer, but is interesting to ponder, is: “Is this problematic?”

Braudy explains a double as a sort of “divided self” being split into an “expressed and unexpressed self.” This is something many people struggle with and makes the idea of doubling more personal. When television shows explain doubles as simply a pawn to balance never-ending life, does this discredit the work of people who genuinely relate to the idea of doubling? Or is a fictitious idea of doppelgängers and doubling simply another valid way of thinking about these ideas?