CWLooking back on how many times Julie Plec has made us cry, you'd think she was like our high school bully or toxic ex or something horrible like that.
But in fact, The Vampire Diaries showrunner is one of our favorite people ever, all because she knows exactly how to make us feel so much in such a little, 42-minute chunk of time once a week!
If you've seen every episode of TVD (and most more than once like us!), you know exactly what we're talking about. How many times have we had to say goodbye to fan-favorite characters when they die on this show?! Too many.
And yet each time is even more genius and heartbreaking than the last!
Since season six of TVD premieres tonight, we decided to round up and rank every single death we've had to endure on the show, from the ones we cheered for (Silas! Professor Shane!) to the ones we still cry about (Lexi! Aunt Jenna!).
But as we quickly realized, picking which death was the most heartbreaking is really hard, so we went straight to Plec and TVD star Nina Dobrev for help!
Plec agreed with us that it was hard to pick the most heartbreaking and important death, so she gave us her top four.
"Vicki Donovan [Kayla Ewell] was a hugely important death because it was six episodes into the show, she was a series regular, and it was our way of saying to the audience, ‘Stand up and pay attention because at any time, anybody can go,'" Plec told us. "Losing a character like that, it made everyone go, ‘Oh, there are real stakes attached to this show and anything could happen.'"
Vicki was the first major death, but she was by no means the last.
"The death of Sara Canning who played Aunt Jenna really was the birth of Klaus and really said, ‘This is a villain who is to be reckoned with,'" Plec said. "He is not the villain with the heart of gold. He's not the guy you want to be soft and cuddly with. He's bad and he could take you out with a blink of his eyelash. It really validated and legitimized this villain who became important for the third season and then ultimately for the entire series and spinoff."
And here's where the tears start falling, TVD fans! "My personal favorite emotional death is Alaric [Matt Davis] because I have never seen anything sadder in my entire life from those two boys, sitting in the tomb sharing a bottle of bourbon and that single man tear that comes down," Plec said. "There is just no more perfect cinematic, emotional moment. And it was the loss of a guardian. It was a character we all loved and nobody wanted to see him go. It was devastating."
No kidding! We still cry anytime we hear The Fray's "Be Still."
Plec's top choice for the most important death of the series, however, was Elena. "Her turning into a vampire took the heroine and ingénue of the show who was the everyday, girl-next-door who was the human, it took her on a spinning wheel roller coaster ride, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse," Plec said. "It allowed us to break free because the girl-next-door can get stale sometimes. When you turn your heroine into a vampire, anything goes and that's when it became thrilling to write for that character. And it allowed us to finally break her up with Stefan—devastating, but because she had changed. She was a different person. That let us put her together with Damon."
When we asked Dobrev to pick her top choice, she picked one of her doppelgangers' demises, but not because it made her cry the most. "I would say Katherine's death was probably the most epic and important because she was such a freakin' nuisance for so long in everyone's life," Dobrev told us. "The way she died, she literally got sucked into hell. I feel like that was the most epic death."
Want to find out which death we ranked as the most heartbreaking? Click through our gallery below, and make sure to have plenty of kleenex on hand...you're going to need it.
The Vampire Diaries season six premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on the CW.