Fannish rambling...

[telaryn]

For the record, I'd always been planning on reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and I'd always been planning on watching "True Blood". I've really never heard a bad word about the books, and I think Charlaine Harris is one of the most amazing studies in "never judge a book by its cover" I've ever met. (Seriously - meeting this woman in person, you would *never* believe she's the brains and talent behind those books!)

I just never found the time.

Well, a couple months ago I discovered that the library had the audio book of "From Dead til Worse". I've been listening to it finally over the last week or so, and enjoying the crap out of it. The story is well-plotted, fun and engaging - her prose is clean and quick, and she's got a well-crafted world and interesting characters to populate it.

And the narrator reading the book is one of the good ones. This? Helps bunches (see Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" books for what *not* to do in choosing an audio book narrator).

Enjoying the story as much as I have, I finally broke down and started watching True Blood on HBO On Demand.

*needle screech*

Wow. I've kind of been skimming peoples' episode commentaries, so I knew it wasn't necessarily a show for fans of the books, but *damn*. It's slow, the pacing sucks, and I think I can count the characters I'm invested in on one hand at this point and really not get above two. Characterizations on Bill and Sookie are uneven at *best*, and somebody's really going to have to explain to me why I'm supposed to give two craps about Tara and Lafayette. (Speaking of which...Lafayette honey? Lady Chablis did that routine *so* much classier than you in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil".)

I understand from reading around that this Tara is not the Tara in the books (she doesn't really appear in "From Dead til Worse"), which I guess is a good thing. I realized this morning after watching episode two that this version of Tara is really nothing more than an updated version of Florence the maid from "The Jeffersons".

And while that works for a 70's era sitcom, it's not something I'm going to easily tolerate in an hour long HBO drama.

I kind of like Jason, but the horndog routine just gets stupid after a while. Especially because I understand that Alan Ball is seriously in love with this character and his, um, attributes.

Worst of all, I flat out want to slap Sookie. Problem is, I can't tell if it's my bone-deep dislike for all things Anna Paquin, or a truly awful interpretation of a really enjoyable character.

The completist in me will probably force me to watch all the episodes, but something's going to have to really change radically to make me enjoy the experience at this point.

Moving on to more familiar territory...


Where n = necrophiliac.

My Gods and hairy little fishes - I still can't wrap my brain around the idea that people have shifted from thinking of Sam Winchester as a rapist to thinking of him as a necrophiliac!

Okay, the rapist argument had merit. *If* he was sleeping with Ruby, and *if* she was possessing an unwilling body, *then* the argument could be made that he was fucking someone incapable of giving consent to the act.

I get that, and from the point the question was obliquely raised in "Lazarus Rising", the SPN folk were pretty much going to have to address it at some point. It's an ethical gray area, and Sam up until the season opener had been established as the moral compass of the Winchesters.

Having it run out the way it did, that Ruby possessed a body in a coma a split second after the plug had been pulled and the soul had fled, was freaking *BRILLIANT* as far as I'm concerned. Soul gone, Ruby as only occupant of the body...it more than satisfies the question of consent.

Especially when, GUH! They showed us that *YES* they had sex. Broken, desperate, needy chair fucking where Sam was snarling, and the shoulders, and *fans self*

True Blood only *wishes* it could have scenes that hot.

All that said, the body ceased to be dead once Ruby walked in and reanimated it. It is a functioning, live body just as it would be if the original owner had been able to be saved. There's traditionally a four minute window during which any human body can be resuscitated with little to no permanent damage.

This not only works within SPN canon, it works within established scientific parameters.

Sam is not fucking a corpse.

Actually? If you wanted to get technical, it's *Ruby* who's fucking the corpse, since Sam was reanimated from a longer stretch of being dead than her current body was.

As trollprincess pointed out - every single one of the male Winchesters has been dead longer than Ruby's current body was, and then brought back to life.

Nobody bitches about *that*.

Personally I'd like to know how anyone can watch that scene (SHOULDERS HOMG SHOULDERS AND ARMS AND HOMG!) and find the brain power to *care* about the particulars.