Zach Roerig

When The Vampire Diaries comes back for its fourth season, there will be a big change: Elena's a vampire! The shocking cliff-hanger closed out season three, and when showrunners Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec hit the stage at Comic-Con today, they addressed the transition. They also had members of their very good-looking cast on hand to chat, including Ian Somerhalder, Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley, Zach Roerig, Michael Trevino, and Steven R. McQueen. The cast got goofy (I now know what vampire sex sounds like in the mind of Wesley) and gave up some details about season four. Check out the panel's highlights.

• We saw a little bit of footage that was mostly a refresher of old clips, reminding us of when Elena told Stefan she didn't want to become a vampire at the end of season two. Then we saw a new clip of Damon and Stefan arguing, with Stefan angry at Damon over the decision to turn her. Stefan reminds Damon of how Elena said she never wanted to become a vampire, and Damon retorts, "Then you shouldn't have let her die."
• Somerhalder teased that we may be getting bad boy Damon back! Somerhalder said that we saw Damon try the nice guy thing, and it hasn't worked out so well for him, so he may resort to his old ways: "Season two, he tried to be something everyone wanted him to be," but "bottom line, he is not a nice guy. Yes, he has a heart at times, but he's not [nice]." Somerhalder said Damon's attitude in season four will be "this is what I am, and if you don't like it, you can go f*ck yourself."
• We didn't hear much about whether we'd see the other bad boy — Klaus — but he did come up once when Plec was asked if we'd ever see Katherine again. "Katherine won't show her face until Klaus is no longer a threat." That sounds promising, right?
• Now I really can't wait to see Elena as a vampire, because Somerhalder said that "Elena was a badass girl, and now she's a badass vampire girl! She can take care of herself now, finally." It will lead to lots of interaction between her and Damon and Stefan, because Somerhalder said, "She's going to need help from these two." Dobrev played coy, saying that being a vampire "could be fun" and that the season will find her "struggling with the fact that she never really wanted to be a vampire."

Get the rest of the highlights from the panel, including which characters are coming back and Wesley's dirty jokes after the jump.