Everyone wants to be remembered for something.

No one lives forever and the only way you end up surviving it is for other people to remember you for something you did. Whether it's something you said or created, it's all you can really do to make others know about you when you're gone. Few people manage to achieve it or at least achieve it in a way where those who might have never met you will remember when you existed. So those that do are very unique and deserve to be known.

Legacies is a show in many ways about creating a legacy and grappling with how to be a product of that legacy. Hope Mikaelson is the best embodiment of that and so she's the perfect person to be a main character for a show like that. She's the product of the most powerful and well known family in human history, The Mikaelsons. And they're not exactly a family known for their altruism and charity. The family's reputation is filled with blood and death and so many terrible things.

Being able to live with a legacy like that is no small thing. Yet when you're born into it you really don't have much of a choice in the matter. You have to be able to move forward and live your life according to what you want. Living in the shadow of who your family was or is doesn't really give you that opportunity. Which is exactly what Hope ends up doing.

Despite her family's history and despite the baggage that it brings on her and her life, she learns to move beyond them. She learns to forge her own path, creating her own relationships and working towards her own needs. All the characters to some extent are focused on going beyond who they're expected to be and how they're expected to act. Lizzie and Josie are attempting to live with the history of the Gemini witches and how it will ultimately end up. Namely in regards to the eventual merge they're supposed to participate in.

MG and Kaleb are trying to move beyond the history of vampires and who they're supposed to be. Even Alaric who is a hold over from the original series which launched is looking for a way not to repeat the mistakes of the past and forge a new future. Perhaps where this is most apparent however is in the character of Landon Kirby. A character created for the show and yet despite the fact that he comes into the show believing he doesn't have much of a legacy, learns he does and struggles to comes to terms with what that means for him and the people around him.

He's also the catalyst for the most interesting contrast for the show. The weekly monsters who usually come to the school to wreak havoc, are characters who used to have legacies but were ultimately robbed of them by circumstances beyond their control. Any remnants of the reputation many of them felt they were leaving behind reduced to simple myths and legends. Much of which is inaccurate or contradictory.

This is no doubt why the show is named Legacies instead of the singular Legacy that would no doubt refer to Hope herself. It's about the way in which legacies interact and play out.

You'd be doing yourself a favour by going along with the ride to see where it leads.

Originally Posted on Substack.