This is a fictional character from a T.V show I am a fan of and I then take a closer look at their character and study/anaylze their character.
TRIGGER WARNING: THIS ARTICLE WILL INVOLVE MENTIONS OF RAPE, ABUSE, MENTAL HEALTH STRUGGLES AND MENTIONS OF SUICIDE OR SUICIDAL IDEATIONS.
I’d also like to note before I continue that this is not some kind of attempt to convince you to like Josie if you’ve decided you don’t like her or hate her. That is your opinion and I can’t change that nor would I ever try to force a person to change their feelings on Josie. This is just me doing an in-depth character study, as she is one of my favorite characters to exist. So any feelings you have for her are allowed to still exist. We can both exist in this world and neither one of us is better than the other for liking or disliking Josie as a character 🤗🫡
Josette “Josie” Olivia Saltzman, played by Kaylee Kaneshiro,was born on March 14th 2014, and is one of the two daughters of Alaric Saltzman and Josette Laughlin, as well as the surrogate daughter of Caroline Forbes-Salvatore and was one of the last members of the gemini coven. She is also the fraternal twin sister of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Saltzman. She is a character from The Vampire Diaries universe. Mostly known for her leading role in Legacies (which ran from 2018 to 2022)
Josie is a very interesting character. She has her flaws and inner turmoil. She has her struggles and deals with her own personal issues, which I will talk about later. But something I always wondered about was her ability to handle intense emotions.
From an early age, Josie and her sister Lizzie, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at an early age in their adolescence, and the two, apart from their twin bond, became very co-dependent. While there is nothing entirely wrong with being codependent, it very much could put their relationship in a tricky situation. Josie grew up fast. With her father, who was barely around and her mother, who was always off in Europe. She essentially became Lizzie’s “caretaker,” but in a sense that she was always there for her sister, not an actual caretaker by definition.
Josie is somebody who says she “cares too much,” which in translation to me, says that she cares too much about what other people say or think. Somebody who cares too much about how people perceive her. Which affects her behavior and how she interacts with certain people, and the dynamic with her sister, friends and family. She appears to be somebody who takes care of others before herself. Putting others needs before her own and forcing herself to shove away her own emotions in order to help the people she loves and cares deeply for.
So, with her pushing down her emotions and never putting herself first, she ends up being unable to find a healthy outlet to her emotions and ends up saying and doing things she shouldn’t have said or done. This was a flaw that many fans criticized her on. The things she had said about her sister in regards to her mental illness. Which I, as a fan, under no biased mindset, say that she should have been more held accountable than she was at the time. She had major flaws, such as saying things about her sister, starting a lie about Hope Mikaelson, reading her sister’s journal and gossiping with people about it and making unnecessary remarks about her sister being “queen of self harm,” which in perspective, does make her seem like a fairly bad person. A vile person, as some may call her. And while it is wrong she did all those things, it was also wrong she was expected to take care of Lizzie and take a parental/caretaker role when she had parents to do so, and at such a young age as well. Regardless, people will still say that she’s a vile person. And that’s something I won’t force anybody to change.
However, I have a different perspective of who Josie is as a person and a counter argument to those saying she’s a “vile and terrible person”. She is somebody who, even though she has done things she shouldn’t have done, is with in a universe that itself is filled with murderous vampires and even an instance of rape (Damon Salvatore from “The Vampire Diaries” raping Caroline Forbes — he is a rapist) — and while this is not me excusing the things Josie has done, what she’s done is not close to being as bad as rape. So to say Josie is vile and terrible for doing things she shouldn’t have done as a child who roughly was around eleven years old (and kids do dumb shit), compared to Damon Salvatore, who at the time, was a man of 170 years is just wrong and flawed logic all on it’s own. And this might just be me becoming a little biased. But if you’re supporting a fictitious rapist and serial killer/murderer,then I don’t think you have any grounds whatsoever to try and police/dictate what characters in a universe such as The Vampire Diaries has and decide who and who isn’t a vile character. But that’s for another story.
Moving forward with the flaws Josie has. She is still a very interesting character and complex person who also has a very complex relationship with herself. In the second season of Legacies, she is manipulated by a man named Clarke, into taking dark magic and with the dark magic, she was unable to stop afterwards, going as far as using the dark magic to injure another student at an opposing high school during a football game. Later on the dark magic scares her as it makes her realize that she is a powerful person, despite not wanting to be
Josie, being who she is as a person, has been somebody who puts her feelings away and tries her best to be there for everyone, putting her own feelings on pause constantly will definitely cause her to eventually hit a breaking point. That breaking point is when she goes full on dark Josie and basically terrorizes the entire school. But she went full on “Dark Josie” because of her inability to handle super strong and intense emotions.
There are no ulterior motives behind that. She didn’t go dark Josie because she wanted to be all powerful, she didn’t go dark Josie because she only ever cared about herself. The reason she went into fully Dark Josie was due to her feeling afraid of her own strength. She painted an image in her head that, a story, a fairytale of some sort, as Hope Mikaelson puts it best, “That the good version of you is weak and the powerful version of you is evil,”
That was the entire reason Dark Josie eventually came into full effect. The real reason she did. Because she was afraid of being powerful. She was afraid and had zero idea how to handle her intense emotions that she reached a breaking point. As all humans do.
In conclusion, Josie Saltzman is a very complex character that has so much more to her than what you see on the surface. She is not perfect, the things she’s said and done about Lizzie were wrong and she should have been held more accountable for it. But she is not a God awful terrible vile manipulative monster some people try to paint her as. She is just a complex character with layers that you need to peel through.
This is all for my character study, I suppose.
Have a good day ❤
