The Vampire Diaries: Brooding bad boys and the girls who love them

What makes vampires so attractive? Maybe because they're such deliciously bad boys.

What's the seemingly endless appeal about vampires? Julie Ples, executive producer of The Vampire Diaries, has an idea -- and it has a lot to do with TV bad boys like Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life and Dylan McKay from the original 90210.

"There's something about the naughty bad boy -- you want to believe that there's so much going on behind those eyes, you want to believe there's epic amounts of soul and wisdom there," Julie said. "With real boys, you're usually out of luck, but with a vampire, you're getting that."

And we're certainly going to see that with Stefan, the love-struck bloodsucker at the center of The Vampire Diaries. His backstory is what drew actor Paul Wesley to the part:

"He's a vampire born in the 1800s, and then has to mask himself as a high schooler," Paul said. "Me and Nina [Dobrov] and Kat [Katerina Graham], we're all about the same age, we're all friends, but when I'm on set I have to get into this place where I think I'm like their grandfather."

But that just makes him the world's oldest adolescent: "He may be 50 years old, but he's a teenager, and he still can't get it right," joked executive producer Kevin Williamson.

Paul agreed. "It's a rebirth for him -- he can have that teenage, young adult experience, the first love he's been lacking 150 years. It's not like he's a conman, it's not some pervy thing -- he's genuinely experiencing this with the naiveté of a 18-year-old kid."

But it's not all hormones and first loves. Let's not forget that Stefan just happens to be a bloodsucking fiend -- and in this universe, that means Stefan decided to do some very bad things. See, in order to become a vampire, you can't just passively get bit and maybe sip a little blood. You also have to make a conscious choice to feed on a human in order to complete the transformation. And no matter how sweet and romantic Stefan seems now, that means he once chose to snack on people.

Julie promised us an early episode will "explore the moment when Stefan and Damon woke and discovered they had become vamps -- what was Stefan like in that moment he fed for the first time."

Because, yes, Stefan is one of those bad boys that the good girls love -- and this bad boy has done some bad, bad things. Tell us in the comments what your favorite bad boys do.