The Vampire Diaries showrunner Julie Plec reveals more information about season 4 in a new interview, specifically about how Elena’s transformation will affect the show. Beware of spoilers.

Speaking to E! Online, Plec expresses her excitement about the big change to the story:

When we start over again, we’re starting over — we’re starting a new story. Same world, same characters, same feelings, same everything but for our ingénue, and our heroine, we are beginning. When we started breaking the fourth season, it makes everything feel so new and so fresh and so, in that way, it takes us back to that great feeling of the beginning of that first season where it’s about a girl with a secret and it’s a becoming, it’s a transition; it makes it all so grounded in character and more interpersonal suspense than big bold epic mythology. We get to start season four with a nice intimate, intelligent, character-driven point of view and then grow from there.

Plec goes on to give quite a bit of information about what kind of vampire Elena is likely to become:

When Elijah says, “Your compassion is your greatest gift,” that was very much said as a reminder that that is who this girl is. Her compassion is her gift and her Achilles heel. She is fiercely loyal, fiercely protective, and very, very compassionate to those around her in that she can see the good and the bad. When all that stuff gets amplified, it’s going to make her, hopefully, kind of a badass, you know? Like, imagine Elena who is willing to stand up and fight the good fight for her brother and for her friends as a human—imagine her now with supernatural abilities. So in a fun way, it’s like the birth of a supernatural heroine and with Buffy being the beautiful foundation of that kind of character and Sydney Bristow in Alias, it’s a whole new world to explore, so we’re kind of excited about that.

She also touches on the ways in which Elena in the series is different from her L.J. Smith novel counterpart:

We kind of abandoned that queen-bee popular complex that in a lot of ways defined early Elena in the books. [But] I think that grief can do a lot to send somebody off their rocker a little bit, so who knows what she could go through as a vampire.

It definitely sounds like Julie Plec has a lot of plans for Elena’s continued development! What do you think about the decision to make her a supernatural heroine?