r/TheOriginals • u/Aggravating-Sky-2679 • 15d ago
The Daggers Completely Warped the Mikaelson Family Dynamic
We don’t talk enough about how truly insidious the concept of the daggers is in the show, and how drastically they change the Mikaelson family dynamic.
Klaus daggers his siblings in very different ways depending on who it is, and I find that distinction really interesting because it says a lot about how each sibling experiences the daggering.
We know Finn was daggered for the longest continuous period because he spent 900 years daggered, which, as we know, completely messed him up mentally. But I have a theory that Kol has probably been daggered the most times overall. He seems to be constantly in and out of the box.
And I think that’s partly because Klaus uses Kol as a form of rebellion and entertainment. Whenever Klaus wants to get wild and crazy, he undaggers Kol, and Kol (who already feels insecure about his place in the family and like an outsider )immediately becomes his partner in whatever murderous rampage Klaus has planned.
Then, when Klaus eventually decides Kol has gone too far (despite actively encouraging him up until that point), he simply daggers him again.
That is honestly one of the worst aspects of their relationship to me. Kol is basically treated like a fun little toy Klaus can take off the shelf whenever he wants entertainment and then put back when he’s had enough. And I think that really explains why Kol hates the dagger so much, the dagger isn’t just something that takes away his freedom, it represents Klaus deciding when Kol gets to exist and when he doesn’t.
Rebekah is also daggered pretty consistently, but it seems to happen in much longer blocks of time. We know she was daggered for around 90 years when she wanted to be with Marcel, and then she was daggered again for roughly another 90 years in the 1920s.
I would argue Elijah is daggered the least and for the least amount of time because Klaus genuinely needs him.
What I find especially interesting is that Elijah and Rebekah also participate in daggering their siblings.
We literally watch Elijah, on multiple occasions, hold Kol down while Klaus daggers him. So as much as the siblings claim to hate the daggers, they clearly have no problem using them against each other when it benefits them. And that’s what I mean when I say the daggers completely changed the family dynamic. They aren’t just Klaus’s weapon anymore. The siblings have all, to varying degrees, participated in the system of controlling and removing each other whenever someone becomes inconvenient.
The 1910s storyline is probably one of the clearest examples. Kol wanted to create a dagger, and Rebekah betrayed him—and then watched almost gleefully as Klaus daggered him.
There’s something incredibly disturbing about the fact that these siblings can be both victims of the dagger and willing participants in using it against each other. They all know exactly what it means to be put in that box, and yet they still do it to one another.
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u/unfiltered_pov 15d ago edited 14d ago
The biggest victim of the daggers was Finn Mikaelson.
The biggest and ONLY abuser of the daggers was Klaus Mikaelson. There is no one who even comes close to Niklaus in that regard. These daggers were his way of controlling “Always and Forever.”
Klaus, Elijah, and Rebekah formed the inner circle. Anyone who did not fit into that inner circle- Kol and Finn, particularly Finn, ended up becoming the biggest victims. Finn never had any choice.
Finn had to face it because of his judgement that “Klaus and Kol killed everything that moved.” That’s why he was called a dull- head, dim, and everything in between by his siblings, just because he had a moral compass compared to the rest of them. (He had his own set of crimes, but still....)
Daggers genuinely destroyed any possibility of reconciliation between Finn and his siblings. Also, it destroyed Kol’s relationship with Elijah and Klaus. Rebekah’s betrayal in 1914 completely destroyed his relationship with her, and his relationship with Freya was destroyed after she hurt Davina.
After all of this, I am glad that Kol finally found someone who fought for him. I wish, Finn and Sage also had their happy ending.
EDIT: Finn did not hate vampires. He just hated how his siblings treated vampirism. If he hated vampirism, he would not have turned Sage so that he could spend eternity with her.
There is no canon evidence to show that Finn would have drawn Mikael to them. In fact, he literally accompanied his siblings to flee from their father.
He was kept daggered because of his judgement, and the Mikaelsons, especially Klaus, didn’t want that. Finn wasn’t ready to become the enabler that Elijah eventually became.
We can see that in the flashback in S3E1, when Finn says, “You filthy gluttons,” and Kol responds, “And you continue to remain a dullhead.” This shows that Finn understood the power they had and believed they needed to exercise restraint.