I always meant to get into this show.  When the premiere episode first aired, I was there in front of my television, in love with it from the moment that the theme song started.  Immediately after the episode I searched the internet for a copy of that song and found an initial version of the opening credits…But my hold on HBO was very tentative, and the show started in what was a very icky year for me.  I kept meaning to go back, but I started hearing many negative comments from people I knew who watched. The show just started to lose its appeal for me and I got a bit too wary of what I would find to begin the watch…so I kept putting it off–even after I purchased the first two seasons at Best Buy over their Christmas half price on HBO series deal…
 
So why did I decide to come back and watch it now? I would be lying if I said that the very talked about ending with Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) in all his magnificent glory didn’t peak my interest enough to want to finally get around to watching the show…because, well, it did…and immediately I decided to reread the first book and get on with the series.

 
 
Now we are about two weeks later and I am reading All Together Dead (book seven). The first book, Dead Until Dark, I didn’t particularly care for.  Bill was a bit too possessive and broody for me.  I got over brooding, dark, possessive vampires with Angel. Really, the biggest fantasy element for me in Dead Until Dark was the way Bill was the perfect “first” to have sex with.  Like when he told Sookie she would get more experienced, but she could never be “better”.  Because sex with Sookie was so perfect.  I think most of us dream that a guy will be that loving and understanding and eager to teach when you’re just out of the gate…but I doubt many of us can say our first really went that well. Sookie was someone I could understand–the inexperienced twenty five year old who had a difficult time with men because she scared them with knowing too much about things.  Okay, maybe I related a little bit too much to her…
 
I remember when I first heard that Alan Ball was creating a vampire show for HBO, I thought it was strange.  I guess that I should have seen the parallel.  I haven’t done a lot of reading on Mr. Ball, but I would say that with one show about a family running a funeral home (Six Feet Under) and another show about vampires, he seems to have a fixation with death.  I can relate.  I have to admit that I was surprised at his choice of book series, though.  I would have thought that Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter would be the first choice for an HBO Vamp Soft Porn show.  Maybe it was too soon after Buffy though, and he didn’t want people to compare… I hadn’t read Charlaine Harris’s books, and I’ve already mentioned how not into Bill I was…
 
 
I guess I do even surprise myself with how long it has taken me to get back to True Blood again. My interests have always leaned toward the supernatural.  I remember when I was a child, one of the scariest buildings for me was one of the old colonial style houses on the road into Northampton.  There was a sign outside the house telling all that it was the headquarters for the DAR.  As a child, I thought that the Daughters of the American Revolution were just that–daughters of the soldiers who fought in the American Revolution. Literally.  The DAUGHTERS.  As in at least two hundred years old…As children, we have no concept of death–or at least I didn’t. As youths, we don’t truly see how death can effect or touch us.  When we start heading toward middle age, for the first time we not only realize we aren’t going to live forever, but we realize with startling clarity that we may just never have enough time. And the stories about vampires?  They seem to become even more complex than we imagined possible.
 
 
Of course on the surface, there is losing your soul, needing to take the very life blood from others to survive in exchange for eternal youth.  What are you willing to do to stay young and beautiful forever? But there are other things wrapped up in that as well.  Sure vampires never age physically, but mentally, we see how old, out dated, they become.  How cynical and dark and how they seem to lose all semblance of humanity or struggle to cling to what humanity they can find.  We see that in tiny pieces in the beginning of the Sookie series, but we see it probably the most in book four when Eric loses his memory and Sookie gets a glympse of possibly the man Eric would be if he wasn’t weighed down with everything that the last millennium has thrown at him. Does time wear us down, age us on the inside in a way that cannot be salvaged? In a way that no magic could ever hide or balance?  Are vampires then all just like Tithonus, getting older and older and not being able to stop it–only that aging, that decrepitness, is in the scariest place it can be?  On the inside where the outside serves as deception?
 
Of course another thing about vampires has always been something I have always loved about them–and maybe why I rebel against the broody vampire image–because we all know about how sexy they are supposed to be…and in that sense representing our very basic desires and needs.  They are all about the blood and wherever it rushes to…impulses, needs, inhibition…
 
 
This all serves as my segue into what has baffled me about the True Blood fandom as I have heard it so far.  I have been trolling–I admit it.  Even though I caught the first few episodes right when it aired back in 2008, I still have to consider myself a newbie.  I’m trying to get my bearings though–and preparing for reviewing the seventh (and final) season of True Blood.  But what has intrigued me is how many fans I have heard complain about the later books, how they went down hill.  There are fans who are very upset about the show ending after the seventh season, but there are even more fans who are happier that the show is going to end of a high note and that they aren’t going to let the show die a slow death like Harris has done with the books…
 
I find myself needing to interject and defend…much as I do when I hear someone say that the book (any book–actually, I think I have heard this about every book) is better than the movie.  Here, I’m arguing why it is harsh to say that the book series or the television show has “changed” and “isn’t the same as it was”.  However, I still don’t think that it is fair to compare the two, since as very different forms of media they do have to find alternative ways of producing similar emotional reactions from their audiences.
 
 
Looking at the spine of one of the Sookie Stackhouse books, I see that ACE considers them in the fantasy/mystery genre.  I disagree.  For me, these books are more about romance.  The mystery always seems to take a back seat to the characters’ relationships.  I feel I need to define romance.  I am not talking about love.  I am not talking about sex.  I am talking about that moment before love and/or sex. That moment when that person is almost within your grasp, but just not quite.  That moment when anything is possible.  There are no limitations.  There is no reality. There is no “where would we live” or “how would we work our careers” or what have you. After that moment, things have to change.  They have to adapt, become real.  It has to become love with sacrifice and relationship issues or it has to end or some variation but you get the picture. 
 
It reminds me of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” where he goes over all the scenes on the urn.  One of those scenes is a man reaching out and almost touching a woman who is running away.  Keats laments the man never actually catching the woman, but also notes that at this moment that is frozen in time, the man would never want her more than he does at that moment right before he has her.
 
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
 
 
It is easy to capture this moment in a poem, or on an urn, in a painting, a photo, maybe even in a movie…but how do you capture such a fleeting moment in a book series or on a television show?  It is a moment and then things have to change–if you want to keep experiencing that particular moment–if the object is not love but romance–how do you continuously experience that moment without it becoming redundant at best, or your female lead seeming cheap at worst?
 
I think this is what makes having a show like True Blood, having a series like the Sookie Stackhouse books, so difficult to keep going…yet interestingly enough, they both did for a considerable amount of time.  My understanding is that the 13th book is officially “it”, but then I hear an Epilogue of sorts is coming out at the end of October.  We know the show is ending after Season Seven. Personally, I think the best idea Harris had about “romance” was with the fourth book where Sookie is with Amnesia!Eric.  The romance happens, but then Eric gets his memory back.  We get a reboot because Eric doesn’t remember, and Sookie realizes that she wasn’t really with Eric–not the way he is now…leaving it open for the romance to happen again…
 
Of course I will point out that there is a lot of sex in the books and on the show, because it really marks the culmination of that romance…but once it happens, then there is that change that has to take place..and why we have to keep finding new men and new situations for our heroine.
 
Anyway, I’m giving the series another shot too–along with the books.  I have had the first two seasons on blu ray since they came out, now I’m getting and watching all of them so I will write up a little ditty on each season as I finish them.  As a newbie to the fandom, I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts on the show and the books.  I am trying to keep them separate and having different expectations for each–I find I enjoy things better that way. Different forms of media require different emphasis…Besides…some of the changes I really like.  Sometimes I really want to yell at Sookie while I’m reading to put down the banana clip and back away slowly…
 
Don’t worry, I’m not a spoilerphobe!  Knowing what is going to happen doesn’t hurt my enjoyment…I remember back when Buffy was on, the website “Much Ado About Buffy” had practically a scene by scene breakdown of the eppies hours before they aired, and I never missed an update…
 

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