True Blood – Not Your Everyday Vampire Love Story

July 1, 2012 | By Rakhitha | Filed in: TV.

I recently started watching this TV show called True Blood. Which is mainly a story about vampire human interaction based on the set of novels “The Southern Vampire Mysteries” by Charlaine Harris. It’s sort of like Twilight for grown ups. It is much darker, and more sophisticated than Twilight and uses lot more violence, horror and sex. True Blood is definitely not for kids or sensitive people.

In True Blood it’s all about the interaction between vampires and humans, and the things happen as a result of that. In most vampire stories humans aren’t aware of vampires. You only find out that some one is a vampire just before your death.

True Blood is different. Vampires has always existed in the world in secret like in all the stories, killing people, drinking blood. But for humans they were only legends. But this change when Japanese scientists invent a way to produce synthetic human blood. This is the main plot device. A drink called ‘True Blood’, which is synthetic human blood available in restaurants and bars.  This allows vampires to surface as a race. And create a whole bunch of issues like vampire rights, vampire marriage, human-vampire marriage in number of levels such as religion, society, business, politics ….

Vampires and humans co-exist but barely. Vampires as a race as well as co-existence is at its very early stages. As a result there is a lot of friction and conflicts. Of course most people don’t like vampires and vice versa. Which is understandable. Most vampires are not nice guys. Existence of ‘True Blood’ does not mean they don’t kill any more. ‘True Blood’ just give them a politically and legally correct way to exist. Killing and drinking human blood is not just something vampires do for survival. It’s a social activity. Also people hunt/kill vampires because of their religious/social views or just to hunt for vampire blood.

Center of the story is a relationship between a vampire and a human. But its only another plot device to keep main vampires characters and human characters bumping in to each other. Story runs through the stuff that happen around an neighborhood where both vampires and humans live. And also there are no full-time good guys and full-time bad guys. There are only good things, bad things, and down right disgusting s**t. All people do all things at different times and they always have reasons to justify them.

Just like every vampire story there is a set of ground rules which govern what vampires can and can’t do. And they are exposed one by one over the episodes. And here is few. Vampires exposed to sun light burn to death. But new/young vampires burn slower than the old ones. Vampires are stronger than humans. With age strength increases. But some viruses and silver can make them weak. Vampires cannot enter to a house of a human. Unless invited by someone who live there. Vampire blood is a powerful drug. It gives temporary strength, healing powers to any human who drink it.

In true blood each season has a main plot arc. In Season one, it’s about finding a killer who kills girls that hang out with vampires. In season two, story is about looking for a very powerful vampire sheriff who has gone missing. Season three covers some intense vampire politics.  One thing I didn’t like is except in season one other seasons take little too much time to build up the story. And as a result first few episodes tend to be bit slow and boring. But things pick up after episode six and become very intensive. Another thing I don’t like about this show, is the fact that every episode ends with a cliffhanger. That is completely unnecessary. You don’t need that to keep viewer coming back.

In overall True Blood is a sophisticated, multi-dimensional story. It has drama, fantasy, horror, romance and everything. Most characters has a significant dark side. There are no all round nice guys.  Also it might still been a great show even without most of its sex seens. How ever let me repeat this again. This show is not for kids and sensitive people. Also there is a lot of row violence, and sexually explicit content ranging from romantic to very disturbing. IMO it is done intentionally to show that vampires are note a nice bunch of lovable people. This show is not made to show the nice side of things.


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