Found this interesting article and thought we’d share it with you!
The characters of True Blood are a metaphor for the diversity of life itself and our means of meandering through it.
Those are the words of Susan L. Smalley, Ph.D. is a professor and behavior geneticist at UCLA Semel Institute and Founding Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC).
She recently watched all four seasons of True Blood through HBOGO and came up with some psychological analysis as to why the show, and the books it is based on, are so widely popular.
She came up with a number of reasons how the characters of True Blood could be any one of us, if they were living in our own world.
Let’s see what she said;
1. A role model in Sookie Stackhouse – a person who is transparent – her outward actions align with inward intentions. When Sookie sees injustice, she acts regardless of the risk. She knows herself – what she deems right and wrong – and acts in accord with it. Deception is not part of her repertoire unless it’s used to save someone she loves.
2. The world is not always what it seems to be. Nowhere is that more true than Bon Temps Louisiana where humans may be shapeshifters or werepanthers or fairies or witches and where vampires are sometimes full of heart and kindness. We are constantly reminded that perceptions are full of illusions and we wake up all the time to seeing something we hadn’t seen before. The vast magnitude of the unknown is revealed again and again.
3. The question of equality of all ‘beings’ is a recurrent theme of True Blood forcing the viewer to question ‘better than/less than’ thinking in general. Where does it arise? How is it perpetuated? We see that harmful actions, thoughts, and feelings arise from ignorance – from people being ‘possessed’ or ‘unaware’ – and that helpful actions arise in knowledge. In True Blood the harmful actions are exceedingly gruesome but they are a metaphor for the harmful actions of pride, greed, anger, envy, and hatred that foster suffering in the world today.
4. Religion can fuel intolerance and hatred when better than/less than thinking becomes institutionalized within it.
5. The big question ‘who am I’ emerges weekly as characters work to discern their value systems, and investigate the origins of their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Every member in True Blood asks themselves that question, each in their own way. When illusion masks the truth time and time again and reactions get in the way of discovery; love seems to open the door to clarity.
6. The ordinary is shown as extraordinary. Sookie’s wardrobe and the everyday human interactions are juxtaposed on supernatural, blood engulfed, beyond life-threatening experiences make the very ordinariness of life all that more extraordinary.
True Blood is a way of viewing life – the struggles we all face with emotion, with right and wrong, with pain and suffering – and of learning to experience (notice with curiosity) things as they are, whether viewed in a human lifetime or over 1000s of years.
Some of this is nothing new to most of us. I think that’s why most of us have found it so easy to relate to these characters created by Charlaine Harris in the Sookie Stackhouse series. Just like we are flawed, so are these characters. You can definitely see many parallels between real life and Sookie Stackhouse’s world.
What do you think? Share your thoughts below!
