True Blood’s Sookie Stackhouse & why I love to loathe her

True Blood is undeniably kitschy, absurd, the ultimate repressed housewife fantasy, and also my recent obsession these past two weeks. It’s hard to take a show with homoerotic vampire dream sequences or meth-cooking inbred were-panthers seriously, but what often seems to be the most ridiculous is the generally intolerable female lead. Sookie Stackhouse is not just your ordinary waitress from the fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, she is a telepath with a dangerous attraction to men of the supernatural. With her gratingly squeaky southern accent and rubbery, expressive face, she’s both irritating and comical. Her actions always seem to be based off of which ever vampire or werewolf with a greco-roman wrestler’s body that she’s attracted to at the time, usually ensuing a whole other mess of chaos. The show is nothing, if not a series of teen drama love triangles surrounding Sookie and without her general “will we, won’t we?” dilemmas with Bill, Eric, Sam, Alcide (the list goes on) there would be none of the drama that I crave for.

But that’s why Sookie is so critical, she’s part of a formula that has been working in film and television for ages, like Twilight, Bridget Jones Diary, Sabrina, Lost, or Grey’s Anatomy. The central female figure which these plots revolve around are what keeps audiences on the edge of their seat, cheering on one of the many hunky and usually emotionally damaged men who fawn after her.

As I binge-watch the show these past few weeks, almost finishing the 7th and final season, I realize that it is no less ridiculous as the novelas my grandmothers watch. There is no denying that I watch True Blood for the same reasons they watch Flor Salvaje on Telemundo, but I do so under the guise that it is an “edgy” supernatural show on HBO. Anna Paquin plays Sookie as loud, obnoxious, and often dumb-founded by what her ridiculous actions in pursuit of romantic bliss have played out on her friends, family, and neighbors.

In season 1 a serial killer, who spoke in a heavy cajun accent and had a bitterness for all women who fraternize with vampires, brutally murdered Sookie’s sweet and unprejudiced grandmother in an attempt to reach Sookie. Rather then place her budding romance with the suave, southern gentleman vampire Bill on hold and focus her attention on putting her grandmother’s killer to justice, they frolic around town holding hands and serenading each other, either blind or indifferent to how this endangers her life and the lives of those around her. But no complaints from me. Her actions, while stupid and self-involved, are what make True Blood as outrageous and binge-worthy.

Sookie is the kind of character to naively dress in a low-cut and virginal floral white number and head to Fangtasia for the first time, a vampyric bar with an all too ironic name, basically looking like vampire candy. While just barely making it out without becoming lunch, she also manages to make heart eyes across the room with the next heartthrob to enter into the equation. Here we are introduced to Eric, a jaw-droppingly handsome and ancient vampire who looks like he was designed specifically for this genre of television. So naturally some series of events cause him to lose all of his memories and relinquish him from all the evil he had done in over 1,000 years allowing him and Sookie to briefly fall in love. But like a broken record, their affair and superficial adoration comes to an abrupt end after another series of paranormal disasters and the introduction of love interests new and old.

While the romance between Bill and Sookie began as innocent and wholesome as the plot of any Nicolas Sparks picture, things spiraled out of control into a bloody and murderous mess that would only happen in an HBO series. So it would only make sense in the show’s close that Bill would contract the fatal disease, Hep V, at the hands of his first true love in 100 years all because of her sickening Mother Teresa complex and thoughtlessness (in an all too humorously expected plot twist, she was tainted with the virus shortly before she made him feed on her blood for strength). Sookie parades throughout each season of the show with a sense of entitlement either because of her fairy lineage, pseudo-selflessness, or connection with all things vampire, werewolf, and whatnot. She acts like she is desperately doing her best to help everyone without discrimination, but to no fail her interests always tend to fall in line with the vampire cause.

The titular lead is the reason we watch True Blood, whether we would like to admit it or not. We love to hate on Sookie, for her incredibly distorted moral compass and magnetism to most of the bona fide supernatural James Deans that walk in and out of the show with their immortality and devil-may-care attitudes. She’s basically like Mina of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, if Mina wore Daisy dukes and served food in a dingy bar in Louisiana, with all major events of this romantic paranormal drama happening all leading to her. With each season arrives a new baddie, always all too interested in the “special fairy princess” for one reason or another. Whether it be for reasons of true love, her rare and delicious blood, her unexplained powers, or because of a secret and dangerous fairy pact forged centuries before, she can hardly rest because someone is always out to get her. While she did pain me with many headaches, both from her romantic indecisiveness and her painful accent, I truthfully say that I appreciate all the drama and mayhem raised by Sookie. She kept me seriously entertained these past few weeks with a genre I didn’t think I would care for. Nevertheless, I can also say that I am all too glad to be rid of this show. I have had enough vampire puns and werewolf butts to last a lifetime, and after I stream this next and final episode of the series I can safely presume I won’t ever be turning back.

As Pam, the snarky vampyress who ran Fangtasia, once all too perfectly said, “I am so over Sookie and her precious fairy vagina and her unbelievably stupid name. Fuck Sookie!”

Finally, after 7 seasons, I couldn’t agree more.