Julie Plec talks about the Delena Rain Kiss from the Vampire Diaries

Today, we spent the day on set for The Originals, where Executive Producer Julie Plec gave us some time to talk about the show as well as the series that spawned it, The Vampire Diaries, and within the discussion, the topic of last Thursday’s “Delena Rain Kiss” from TVD came up.

The faux-flashback kiss between Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder) and Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) made certain fans very happy, and Plec talked to us a bit about the reaction – starting with pointing out that it wasn’t necessarily “fan service.”

“For every naysayer that is like ‘oh, fan service, blah blah blah,’ there’s fan service when you tell stories as though the fans think it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure, and that’s not what we do,” Plec assured. “Then there’s the fan service when you have a group of people who, for five years, have been begging for one little thing, and you find the perfect way to give it to them. That’s called honoring your fans, and I believe that so strongly. So, this is born out of when Stefan got kidnapped in Season 1 and Damon and Elena, who heretofore hadn’t worked together much, had to go and rescue Stefan from the vampire house, from Frederick, and it was raining, and they’re standing there, talking to each other about rescuing Stefan. It’s one of those canon moments where people started really connecting with Damon and Elena as a potential couple – they really always called out that moment as ‘one day they’ll be in the rain and they’ll kiss’,” Julie explained, telling us that the “Delena Rain Kiss” is something that started on Twitter and grew over the years.

Thursday night’s episode “Do You Remember The First Time?” gave them a perfect opportunity to finally give the fans the kiss they’d been waiting for. “Here we were in this season when Damon was trying to win Elena back, saying ‘we loved each other,’ and her saying ‘tell me a memory that mattered to you. I want to remember something,’ and we were writing the story, and we were thinking ‘so what could that memory be?’ We’ve always wanted to say ‘what was that summer that we skipped between Season 4 and 5, where they had the summer of their lives? What was that? What did they do? There’s got to be something awesome that they did’,” Plec explained. A meteor shower and a waterfall were both ideas that were pitched in the Vampire Diaries writers’ room, before the notion of ‘what if they kissed in the rain?’ came up.

The TVD team was aware that some fans were not going to be happy, but the people who follow the Damon & Elena romance – “Delena” – would be very happy. “But really, the story was ‘what is this memory they shared’?” Plec described. “It was going to be something beautiful and epic, and so the rain was a way of us saying to this group of fans who have been begging five years for this one thing… basically, there’s something about two people coming together in the rain, that’s like the ultimate expression of love in the minds of most audiences, I guess.”

The Vampire Diaries airs new episodes Thursdays at 8PM on The CW.