Content Warning: This article contains mentions of suicide and death.
Rarely has there been a villain so wily as Katherine Pierce, and definitely not in the whole of The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, or even Legacies. With the entire TVD universe coming to a close after 13 years, Katherine still holds a place of honor for most powerful and cunning antagonists of all time.
The young Bulgarian vampire initially started her life as a human girl, who was extremely sweet and naïve. However, circumstances made her evolve and become clever and cruel. Till the very end of The Vampire Diaries, she stayed crafty and devious, but her life and self did go through many significant transformations along the way.
As a young woman, Katherine had given birth to a daughter who was taken away from her mere seconds after she held her. She thought that the girl had lived a human life and passed on, but Nadia was very much alive. Nadia, a side character with main character energy, had turned into a vampire and been on the lookout for her mother for centuries.
Therefore, Katherine got to take on the role of a mother, rather reluctantly, five centuries after she had given birth to her daughter. The two did turn out to be a good pair, and it brought out a different side of Katherine (one that fans would have liked to have seen more of before she died).
The worst thing that Katherine suffered was Elena force-feeding her the cure as she was the last vampire who wanted to become human again. For a brief period, she aged normally, but when Silas drained her of the cure, she started becoming really old, really fast.
Katherine went through the motions of sickness, exhaustion, and broken bones after a very long time, and she didn't enjoy it at all. It was a big change for her and she didn't adjust to it well.
For a woman whose life's motto was to survive and serve herself, Katherine's U-turn about staying alive was quite alarming. Used to being invincible with supernatural abilities at her disposal, humanity didn't suit her and she wanted to end her own life to save herself from the indignities of death by old age.
This decision was uncharacteristic of Katherine, but Stefan saved her and tried to help her adjust to her newfound life. Still, becoming human dealt a big blow to her self esteem and will to live.
As Katherine neared her death as a human, she became softer and more vulnerable, especially with her true love Stefan. Her relationship with Stefan was a complicated one, but she felt for him the closest thing to love that she could muster in her heart.
She admitted her feelings for him, and even laid her proverbial weapons down around Damon and Elena. However, in true Katherine fashion, her openness around Elena was only to trap her.
Katherine was vain, and no other body would be good enough for her except her own. Luckily for her, as her own crumbled with age, she had an identical twin in the form of Elena who was the perfect vessel for her spirit.
Before turning, Katherine came from a subsect of the Travelers, which meant that she could body hop from one Passenger to another when she felt like. So, she chose to take over Elena's body, and fooled the Mystic gang for quite a while before they realized what she was up to and foiled her plan to ruin Elena's life, yet again.
When Katherine's soul was whisked away from The Other Side, her fate was unclear. Viewers assumed that she had met the ultimate end, but her survival instinct won out over everything else. She was thrown into Hell, but managed to sweet-talk Cade, the ruler of Hell.
Ultimately, she puppeteered him to go after the Salvatores, pulling all the strings, behind-the-scenes. She ended up ruling Hell, and her ultimate aim was to destroy Mystic Falls as revenge on the gang that lived in it.
Running away from the menacing Original Klaus was the basis of Katherine's vampire life. After she cheated him out of human doppelgänger blood, he vowed to rain hell upon her no matter where she was, which was why Katherine was always on the lam for 500 years.
Eventually, as she faced Klaus, she stopped being so scared of him. She tried to make deals with him to earn her freedom and found the ultimate thing to divert his attention completely: the fact that Hayley was pregnant with his child and that there was a growing threat in New Orleans. After this, she was done running from him.
Over the course of her colorful lifetime, Katherine transformed into several different types of supernatural creatures, each wildly different from the other. As a human, she was born into the Traveler witches, which was something that fans learned about her in season 5.
Soon after meeting Klaus, she tricked Rose into turning her into a vampire, which was her favored form. After 500 years of being a vampire, she turned human and Traveled into Elena's body. Finally, she became a Spirit and immortal, ruling Hell and also dying in it. It might have been a lot, but it was, nevertheless, expected, considering that she was a fan-favorite villain.
Considering the nature of the doppelgängers, fans expected that Katherine and Stefan's stories would end up entwined once again - and they did in the final episode. It was time to end her reign of terror, and Stefan wanted Damon to live out the human life he had missed out on by virtue of turning into a vampire.
Therefore, he made sure that he waited in the tunnels with Katerina, and forcefully took her with him into the Hellfire that Bonnie had redirected, straight into Hell, destroying its Queen, alongside the dimension itself. Although she had always managed to escape the clutches of Death, as time went on, her luck did begin to run out and her enemies became wise to her tricks. It just appeared that Stefan and Bonnie got there a lot quicker than everyone else.
Katherine had humble beginnings, but life took her to unimaginable places. She transformed in every way possible on TVD.Fawzia Khan