WildlyParenthetical: Yes, I see where you’re going there and I agree.

Everyone *has* seen Six Feet Under, right? Right? You *do* realize it has more win than True Blood even? Alan Ball is a genius!

But Tara… she’s utterly breathtaking. All the way from her sassy mouth (and I have to say, Lafayette rocks to absolute awesomeness too) to the spiky edges of her fragility to her loyalty to her open, knowing sexuality. And she’s funny as hell too.

And really, there’s got to be something about a series that depicts a man going down on a woman as its first (overt) sex scene (and intriguingly moves swiftly into some pretty edgy and potentially problematic breath play), and as the introduction to any recurring characters. I like that the grime and grit crosses over into the sex scenes, so very little is ever perfect. I also think that it does something interesting to contemporary depictions of sex on TV, in that it doesn’t turn the two people having the sex into simply representatives of class ‘Woman’ and class ‘Man’ engaging in the always-the-same activity known as ‘Teh Secks’. Instead, each encounter, in its entirety, is shaped by the characters and their unique style of interaction. I can’t specify, coz it would be spoilery, but to me it looks like a shift in representations of sex which do better justice to the (for want of a better phrase) multidimensional characters they’re working with, and to the variety of sexual acts people, y’know, actually engage in. [shrugs] It may not be the significant thing I’m making it out to be here, but I think something different is going on…

[Tara] simply kicks ass. Her mouth is priceless. She’s made of win.

Quoted for truth!

Five seconds of Tara as we first see her (part of this larger scene):

More from episode one:

She gets less stereotypical and far more complex as the series goes on. But I love that she is doing the public-reading thing in these two clips. You don’t see that often on TV.

I devoured the show, loved it, and then recently borrowed the books to devour as well. I have just come up for air after reading them almost nonstop for two weeks. I have to say that I thought Sookie was more badass in the books. The show makes her come off more stereotypically damsel-y in certain respects. Some examples: A0 The run through the cemetary in a white lacy nightgown. Oh, the cheese! In the book, there is a more natural progression to the inevitable scene. B) The final showdown in the final episode of the season (trying not to spoil here) has more men try and come to her rescue. In the book, she kicks ass all by herself and the men show up afterwards.

And all that grime, grit and sweat you speak of, Lauredhel is purely Alan Ball. It’s how he does things. Not that the books weren’t grimy and gritty when they needed to be.

Personally, I would have chosen Tara as the Hoyden over Sookie. Tara as she appears in the show doesn’t exist at all in the books and she is the biggest improvement Alan Ball made when creating the show. She simply kicks ass. Her mouth is priceless. She’s made of win.

I could have done without some of the sex scenes (or at least truncated them), but I can see, as time goes on, how they fit into the whole of the story. There’s absolutely nothing elegant about it; it’s grimy and gritty and messy and deeply unpretty. And when I say that, I don’t mean artfully-smeared Hollywood grime on a pretty background, I mean presented with a real eye for detail – down to things like lots of visible sweat on days when sweat would be visible, bra straps showing (and not in a self-consciously sexy way) when women are wearing spaghetti strap tops, that sort of thing. You can almost smell the body odour, feel the pain and anger and blood.

I find this all refreshingly different.