.. and over at The Mamafesto.
In our discussion of last week’s episode we talk about why we still watch True Blood and what’s up with the sex scenes. This season we have a friend of mine joining us for discussions. Her name is Siall and she’s fabulously smart and feminist, like so:
The things you’ve described capture some of the meh and yes and no responses I’ve had to the episode, and you’ve made me think about what drew me to the show. In the first season the thing that appealed to me most, moralistic little human that I am, was the way the vampires-among-us device exposes and challenges a lot of prejudices around queer culture, drug culture and even ability politics. Over the following seasons the vampire-as-other role has expanded to treat issues around religion, which I think is less meaty here than in the southern US, party politics and now the war on terror, and I feel like the costume has gotten a bit baggy. I have a sense this might be because there aren’t really any “normal” characters left whose dilemmas serve to allow us, as viewers, to relate our own, inevitable, inner conservative impulses to; there’s no opportunity anymore, as there was in the first season, to think “Yes, I would struggle, too, with learning the world isn’t as I imagined, but I can embrace the idea of change.” I think it’s that shift to a standard sci-fi/fantasy genre you mentioned, Andrea; the rules of the fantasy world are all established, the characters are increasingly comic book, both in terms of their taken-for-granted supernatural abilities and their exaggeratedly developed bodies, and consequently the show has become much less a comment on our world than a fun escape.
blue milk 
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