People Love Giving Redheads Tips
by MOLLY LAMBERT
True Blood barely conceals its softcore intentions these days. When they introduced yet another hot love interest for Sookie I realized they had given up the ghost of pretending this show was anything else besides a showcase for super hot men with muscular body types of all races. You know, like the X-Men or World Cup soccer.
If you think watching a main character with no real personality go through a bunch of different fantasy fulfillment scenarios mostly based around encountering sexual variety is just for chicks may I direct you to the ultimate male Mary Sue: Agent James Bond. Yeah yeah, he's the best spy in the world and he likes martinis or whatever but unless Sean Connery is playing him Bond's charisma is mostly implied.
There is nothing people want more to than to get to know a group of fictional characters and then see them paired up in different romantic combinations. Audiences want sex scenes with backstories. They want to invest in characters and then see them fuck each other. This is why movie and television sex scenes are titillating in a way pornography can never be. As fantasies go, they are way more like real life.
It accounts for the enduring popularity of love triangles (keeping Archie comics in business since 1942) and explains why John Mayer said he wants to write fan fic for porn he watches. What is missing in pornography that is present in other kinds of fiction is an interior aspect to the characters. Television uses long form seriality to go deeper into characters and their connections, approximating actual relationships.
When social boundaries are transgressed, they are often boundaries that have been carefully established and built up over time. That's why Rachel and Joey was such a big deal on Friends, because they'd managed not to fuck for eight seasons despite being the two hottest people on the show. Rachel should probably have picked Joey. She would have saved us a failed spinoff and spared Ross another failed marriage.
We don't even necessarily like to see romantic buildup paid off in fiction, because perversely enough often wanting is more pleasurable than having. Mulder and Scully sustained The X-Files through seven seasons by not fucking each other, and their sexual chemistry murks Bill and Sookie's, who we've actually seen have sex.
In serialized television you are sometimes logging literally hundreds of hours with characters over the course of seasons. It's like getting to know people in real life, seeing their lives build and progress over time. The parasocial relationships people have with fictionalized characters are stronger than many real life relationships.
Even though the Twilight Saga is four books long and six hours of film deep, its characters are filled in with the most basic of details. Eclipse tries to remedy this by providing several backstories for its vamps and werewolves, but ultimately the dots connecting the characters from their pasts (Civil War) to the present (revenge) seem like Stephanie Meyer's rushed attempts to fill in blanks and pad out her romantic fantasy masturbation tale after exhausting ways to say that Edward is cold and sparkly.
What is with the Civil War obsession, vampire nerds? Brother against brother? Twilight fetishizes the Pacific Northwest but Stephanie Meyer also has a boner for the Confederacy. It is also probable that Stephanie Meyer was influenced by another Hollywood romantic blockbuster based off a "women's novel," Gone With The Wind. Either way, vampires and the antebellum South go together well because they are both steeped in decædance and romanticized heavily by a certain kind of nerdy girl.
Southern Gothic predates Anne Rice's vampire novels but Rice literalized the "gothic" part in her 1976 supernatural thriller Interview With The Vampire. Flannery O'Connor's depiction of the South as a place where freakishness and grotesquerie run rampant paved the pathway to Rice's supernatural New Orleans that currently leads True Blood's endless stream of magical vagrants just passing through Bon Temps.
Part of True Blood's fetishization of the South seems to have to do with a fantasy about simplicity. Jason Stackhouse is most often given this role of the idiot as truthsayer, but True Blood is prone to letting all its characters bear this out. In many ways it is exactly like Li'l Abner, a comic I was obsessed with as a kid.
In True Blood's version of the South, the racists always look like grimy rednecks, and small towns are pan-sexual rural oases. How fucking bummed is Sam Merlotte going to be when Sookie is like "it's not that I don't like shapeshifters, it's just you."
Alan Ball may be from Georgia, but True Blood is Hollywood all the way. Bon Temps is just a super-horny Mayberry. Sookie Stackhouse has to choose between her brunette vampire fiance who is literally sort of corpse-like, a way hotter blond vampire with possible repressed Nazi tendencies, and now also a jacked as fuck hot beardo werewolf dude. Including the fan service dream sequence sex, chick gets laid as much as Don Draper. Maybe it's the alliterative names?
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is on tumblr and twitter.
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