‘Legacies’ Season 5: Stefanie Salvatore — Damon & Elena’s Daughter

Legacies fans, here’s a name you probably never expected to think about again: Stefanie Salvatore.

Only briefly mentioned as part of an alternate reality in the show’s first season, Stefanie was — you guessed it — the daughter of The Vampire Diaries‘ Damon (Ian Somerhalder) and Elena Salvatore (Nina Dobrev), named in memory of her hero-haired uncle Stefan (Paul Wesley). Never heard of again, Stefanie eventually faded from memory, disregarded as a non-canonical joke. Until now.

Series creator Julie Plec tells TVLine that Stefanie was “very much at the top of our white board as a character that we were planning on introducing, should the show move forward.”

That said, she wouldn’t be the Stefanie mentioned in that alternate reality. “In my mind, Damon and Elena had kids in our timeline,” Plec says. “The way we alluded to her in the genie episode was as though she was 12 or 13. But in the Legacies timeline, their kids were younger, probably toddlers.”

Plec isn’t sure how exactly Stefanie would enter the picture, “whether we did a time jump or played with time in some way,” she just knows that the idea of Stefanie sharing the screen with “teenage Pedro” was too good to pass up.

Neither Nina Dobrev nor Ian Somerhalder reprised their Vampire Diaries role after the show ended in 2017, but between The Originals and Legacies, we did get a few updates on what they’re up to now: Elena has a medical practice in Mystic Falls, and she and Damon briefly hosted Josie while she was attending public high school.

So you can add that to the list of things we’ll tragically never get to experience, right after Headmistress Forbes. Oh, what could have been.

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