True Blood has become one of my favorite guilty pleasures. The sexed-up vampire television series is based upon the coexistence of humans and vampires in a small, rural Louisiana town. There is tension and prejudice between the vampires and humans because, frankly, vampires had killed and drained humans for centuries. The invention of synthetic blood has allowed for the vampires to come out of hiding and attempt to coexist with their living counterparts. The parallels between the integration of vampires into society and the abolition of slavery/civil rights movement are abundant. The humans are fearful of the unfamiliar vampires and many of the inhabitants of Bon Temps refuse to associate with them. For example, when the main character, Sookie Stackhouse, falls in love with a vampire, all of her family and friends try to talk her out of it and look down upon her for it. She tries to make them understand that the vampires aren’t so different from them and that people shouldn’t be afraid. She falls into the so-called “sympathizers”, who vampire haters consider traitors. In season one, any females who associated or sympathized with vampires were killed by a man who hated vampires.
Another interesting aspect of the show is the portrayal of African Americans in Bon Temps. The two main black characters are Tara and Lafayette. Tara has an alcoholic and crazy religious mother who abandons and abuses her. It is a stereotypical broken black home, with the child ending up to have emotional issues. Tara can’t keep a job and frequently loses her temper with the people she loves. She and her mother also both have exorcisms to get the “demons” out of them. Associating black characters with voodoo magic is a different form of stereotyping. Lafayette is a flamboyantly gay black drug dealer, who also works at the same restaurant as most of the other characters. He is the only gay character on the show and the drug dealing image is commonly associated with blacks in TV. One other character who was on the show for most of season two is Eggs. He and Tara are taken in by a woman who tries to give them a home so they can rebuild their lives. Tara had just been thrown in jail for a DUI and Eggs had committed many crimes before the woman saved them. They are the only two people she takes in and seemingly the only “troubled youths”. It appears that only black people get in trouble, deal drugs, or are gay based on the portrayals in the show. Despite these characterizations, Tara and Lafayette are lovable characters who are integral to the community and at the end of the day, the prejudice towards vampires trumps race.
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