True Blood: Fangbanging Fun For Everyone!

Once upon a time, deep in the perilous backwoods of Bible-Belt Louisiana, there lived a gap-toothed, blonde waitress named Sookie Stackhouse. So begins True Blood, HBO's smash hit series of 3 seasons, based on the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. 

Sookie is just your average telepath living in the small town of Bon Temps when she meets Bill, who just happens to be (you guessed it) a vampire, and her new next door neighborhood. Sookie (Anna Paquin) is attracted to Bill (Stephen Moyer) not only for his undeadness, but because unlike the other men she's attempted to date, she cannot read his mind (and is therefore spared the inner monologue of his libido). The two strike up a relationship, despite the prejudice of the rest of the town towards vampires (who are publicly "out" in this series). 

It isn't all fun and games, nor, as we find out, is Bill the only supernatural creature in the neighborhood. There's Sam, the loveable shapeshifter who owns what appears to be the only restaurant in town, Marianne, a psychopathic  maenad of Ancient Greek origin, and multiple packs of werewolves that make their debut appearance in Season 3. 

Throw in a supporting cast of quirky townspeople, and some gratuitous sex scenes, and voila! You've got the next big thing in the vampire craze!

VAMPIRE CANON 

"Out of the Coffin" 

One of the unique aspects to this vampire canon is that True Blood vamps are publicly "out of the coffin", that is, they have made their existence known to the human population. The mainstreaming of vampires into society becomes a social issue, and parallels (in a blatantly obvious way) the plight of other social equality movements (complete with your stereotypical, white southern Bible-thumping church leaders that audiences are meant to vilify... what a concept.). 

TruBlood

As you might guess, social integration for vamps would be pretty difficult if they were constantly preying upon society. Cue TruBlood, the artificial blood substitute that comes in what looks like Sobe bottles. The "do-gooder" vampires of the world (read: Bill), happily consume TruBlood, but as we all know, sometimes there's just no substitute for the real thing... 

Vampire Blood 

Vampire blood plays a significant role in the series. It is a highly powerful, highly addictive drug when consumed by non-vampires (humans, werewolves, etc.). Think acid trip x 100. When consumed directly from the source, vampire blood causes blatant sexual attraction to the vampire-- with no regard whatsoever to gender or sexual orientation (fun, right?!). Vampires themselves also cry tears of blood, which just looks cool. 

Vampire-y Powers

-Glamour: Essentially, mind control. As if the human race didn't have ENOUGH to worry about... 

-Super Strength/Super Speed: Come standard on your new, shiny vampire. Special features (comes with certain vampires only) include flying. 

-"Sire" Powers: There is also a significant connection between a sire and the vampire he/she creates. A sire of a vampire can summon and control his/her vampire spawn. 

Destructibility Factor 

-Sunlight: is LETHAL. We're talking burned to a crisp, "ashes, ashes we all fall down" lethal. 

-Stakes: Also lethal. And very messy. 

-Silver: Draining, and immobilizing. 

WHAT WE LIKE 

1. Lafayette is MADE OF WIN. Meet the most bad-ass, gangster, flaming, black male homosexual in all of HISTORY (we say this with the utmost reverence and respect. Seriously). This guy is awesome, and can make any scene instantly hilarious.  

2. Jessica and Hoyt 

Because they're just... so... CUTE! In an unfortunate turn of events, Bill is forced to turn teenage good girl Jessica, which begins the delightful subplot romance between her and sweet-hearted momma's boy, Hoyt. 

3. Vampire Kingdoms 

Another nifty side of True Blood comes from the hierarchical structure put in place. The vampire world is divided into "kingdoms," where every state is ruled by a king or queen. Under the king or queen are "sheriffs," who are responsible for specific areas within the kingdom. Sophie-Ann (Evan Rachel Wood), the Queen of Louisiana, is a particularly bad-ass favorite of ours. 

4. Eric Northman 

Speaking of sheriffs, we also love our Sheriff of Area 5, Eric Northman! We love snarky vampires who could be classified on any given day as either good or evil. Also, the fact that he is tall, blonde, Scandinavian, dyes his hair, and refers to children as "teacup humans" is another big reason behind our love. We also love Pam, his sadistically sarcastic fledgling counterpart. 

 :) 

5. Godric 

We also love Godric, who plays a major part in Eric's back-story. Godric is an ancient vampire in the body of a teenager who is creepy and cool and just... plain awesome. 

6. The Jason Stackhouse-Andy Bellefleur Duo

We love these characters joined force in Season 2/3, going from characters that individually annoyed us to a dynamic duo that defines the word hapless. 

7. JAMES FRAIN JOINING THE CAST!!! yesssssh. 

WHAT WE DON'T 

1. ANNOYING MINOR CHARACTERS. We will tackle this in list form. 

-Tara: Sookie's best friend. We alternately want to feel sorry for her for all the crap that is thrown her way, and smack her in the face for her regularly scheduled "angry black woman" tirades.

-Arlene: The hapless ginger waitress clearly needs to discover condoms. 

-Marianne, the Maenad: Possibly the worst subplot in TV show history; rich, mysterious woman comes into town, people lose their minds, and the rest of the world needs brain bleach. STAT! 

-Lorena: Bill's maker. In the words of Lafayette: "DIS HOOKA NEEDS TO BE STAKED, YO!" 

-Tara's Mother. Oh dear god. The mommy issues. Jesus would be happy if this woman jumped off a cliff. 

-Eggs: Hot and dumb. Also, whuddup with the name? 

2. Fangs 

We are (obviously) huge fans of fangs. We are not, however, fans of the weird, wood-choppy sound that we hear when they pop out of nowhere. Nor do we like that they're so close together. Altogether, they look cartoonish and weird.

3.Sheer amounts of weird ass gratuitous sex. 

Award winning moments include: 

-The multi-episode Marianne inspired group orgy

-The 180 degree Lorena head-twist in probably the most disturbing sex scene either of us has ever seen in our entire life. Literally. Sick and TWISTED. 

4. Every single man in the series wants to get in Sookie's pants. 

Seriously? You'd think the Texas-sized gap between her front teeth would be somewhat of a deterrent, but NO! Every SINGLE man in this series wants to get with Sookie. Honestly, we feel sorry for the poor child. We're seriously surprised there hasn't been some sick, incestuous subplot between her and Jason, THAT'S how bad it is. 

 

If you can get past the sex, True Blood is altogether a pretty decent vampire show. We definitely enjoy it for the characters-- they're what really give life (ha) to this undead drama. 

Fang Rating: 

 1/2

3 1/2 Fangs

Friday Fail of the Week, July 16th 2010

Thought the Edward Cullen panties were bad?

Well, shockingly enough, it gets worse in this week's Friday Fail: 







Stay tuned: Next up, The Vampire Preservation reviews HBO's smash hit, fang-banging series, TRUE BLOOD!

MOONLIGHT: Vampire CSI Killed Before Its Time

In the spirit of this being a vampire blog, we’ve decided to kick off with something already deceased:  CBS ‘s Moonlight (2007).  

Tragically killed before its time, this show followed a crime solving private investigator and vampire, Mick St. John (think CSI, starring the undead). Mick (Alex O’Laughlin :D) is your typical brooding, conflicted vamp,  turned against his will by his ex-wife, Coraline (Shannyn Sossamon). Mick plays the intrinsically flawed hero attempting to atone for the misfortune of his vampirism by solving crimes in L.A. with the help of Beth (Sophia Myles), a tabloid journalist.

We like to think of Mick as a vampire on a rocky quest to find a way to live with what he is. He refuses to feed on humans (though he does drink “Red Cross Issued” human blood), and he clings to his desperate desire to be as human as possible. He is constantly thrown into conflict, however, as it is his vampire nature that enables him to solve crimes and protect the people he cares about.

        

VAMPIRE CANON

Turning

Turning someone into a vampire in the Moonlight universe follows almost an identical path to Dracula, Interview, and others: drain the human’s blood, feed them yours, and presto—you’ve sired a vampire. Snaps for sticking to the old standard.

Freezers= Coffins for the 21^st Century

Poor Dracula. He missed out on the electronic age. Creatively upgrading the archaic myth that vampires sleep in coffins, the creators of Moonlight decided that Mick and his undead buddies should catch their Zs in body-sized freezers. Slightly weird at first, but when you consider that, well, they’re dead, and what else would you do with a dead body ? it makes sense.

Stakes

Moonlight takes a different approach to the “stake to the heart” myth—not death, but paralysis. Again, an interesting takeoff on an old classic.

Eyes

One tell-tale sign of a hungry (or pissed off) vampire in the Moonlight canon—the eyes. No dreamy “Edward Cullen” topaz eyes here… these vamps go crazy blue-white on us. It’s conspicuous and altogether inhuman, which make for some interesting moments throughout the show.

Photo Reflections

Again, a modern spin on an old aspect of vampire nature. In Moonlight, it is explained that while vamps cannot be photographed because of silver emulsion in film, digital photos are no problem.

Sunlight

Sorry to all the vampire purists out there, but the Moonlight vamps don’t spontaneously combust in the sunlight. Instead, their energy is drained by prolonged exposure… which could prove problematic for a vampire in L.A….

Silver

Plain and simple, silver= poison.  

Real World Integration

Another thing we like about this show is the attention to “real world” detail, and the effort put into explaining how the vampires are able to co-exist  so closely with the rest of the mere mortals. We see the way the vampires work to protect their identities and stay invisible, and the consequences that follow when they don’t. The whole concept of a “Cleaner” who is called in to patch up feedings gone awry is pretty nifty.  So is the concept of vampires working late nights in the morgue.

WHAT WE LIKE:
1. One of the best “revelation moments” in vampire history.

Question:  How many times have we seen the melo-dramatic, confrontational “I’m a VAMPIRE” line delivered?

Answer: More than we’d like to count.

Moonlight successfully takes possibly the most crucial moments in a vampire-human drama like this one and pulls it off superbly. There’s no Edward Cullenness about it… we see Mick as vulnerable, reduced to literally cowering behind a counter as he grudgingly admits to what he is. Trust us, it’s a moment, and definitely one of our favorites in the show.

2. Josef

Allow us to introduce you to one of the best supporting characters ever created in a vampire show like this. His name is Josef Koston, a 400-something year old vamp who’s snarky humor and biting sarcasm play off against Mick’s more self-loathing tendencies. Think: a nicer Lestat to Mick’s happier Louis (for all you Interview fans out there).

WHAT WE DON’T:

1. THIS SHOW WAS CANCELED

Dear Asshole Producers in Charge of Picking Programs for CBS: You created an awesome show. It won the 2008 People’s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Drama. It got higher ratings than Gossip Girl. You set us up for a BRILLIANT season 2, and then you took it away from us. WHY?? WHYYYYYYYY???
WHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY???????????????????????????????????????????????

2. The Ex-Wife/Boyfriend Subplots

It’s always easy to create surplus melodrama by adding romantic entanglements for the two main characters who are so obviously meant for each other. In Moonlight, both our hero and heroine have their emotional baggage. For Mick, it’s his psycho but beautiful ex-wife Coraline; for Beth, it’s her do-gooder, white-knight D.A. boyfriend, Josh.  

The Coraline subplot drags a little, that is, until she discovers a secret about vampirism and the possibility is introduced that she might not be all bad. Then we can tolerate her.

Josh bothers us because he is just… too… good. The guy is the perfect boyfriend, and as you might be able to imagine, he is powerless to stop his girlfriend from becoming hopelessly attracted to her undead crime solving partner. The path that this character’s role takes is a familiar one, that we feel like we’ve seen many times before. The one good thing we can say for Josh is that he remains a genuinely good guy (i.e. no character assassination for the sake of the Mick/Beth romance).

The show ran for 1 season (16 episodes) before it was canceled. We consider it to be a tragedy—and (we grudgingly admit) that this show might have been saved if it had been able to ride the “Twilight Wave”: it debuted and fizzled out just before the craze erupted.

Reruns of Moonlight currently run on the CW on Thursday nights, and occasionally on the SyFy Network. Season 1 is also available on DVD.

We think that everybody should check out this show—it’s creative, fun and packed with vampire drama! Fangtastic! 

Fang Rating :

4/5 Fangs

Introducingggggggggggg..... THE FRIDAY FAIL OF THE WEEK!

Today is Friday-- it's the first Friday of our blog's existence, so we'd like to introduce something that we hope to make a weekly thing here at the Vampire Preservation Project.

It's called the Friday Fail of the Week and the concept is simple. Every Friday, we'll post a picture that we think expresses some form of ultimate failure. We'll use pictures from the web, pics we take ourselves, and pics from other people. So if there's anybody out there reading this blog (anyone? anyone? buhler?), send us your favorite pictures that express acts of supreme failness, and we may use them for our next FRIDAY FAIL OF THE WEEK!!

While this is a vampire blog, the Friday Fail is not an exclusively vampire thing. But seeing as it is our first, we think we've found a pretty epic fail right here in the vampire world:

We have no words, because there are none.

Confessions of Recovering Twilighters

Okay. We confess. We read Twilight.
We loved Twilight.


Then Breaking Dawn came out. And we saw the light.

Before we go any further with this blog, we feel it necessary to lay out our feelings about Twilight, since it is currently the hottest thing in vampire lit.


Firstly, we take issue with the whole "Epic Saga" aspect.
People. A review. Harry Potter is epic. The Lord of the Rings is epic.
Twilight is a teenage romance novel, and a pretty poorly executed one at that. We feel that Stephenie Meyer fell into the trap of loving her characters too much, thus condemning her fans to a psychotic, anticlimactic and indecisive piece of prose, that ran for not 1, not 2, but 4 installments.

Now before all the Fangirls go crazy on us, we submit to you a quote from EDWARD CULLEN HIMSELF (Robert Pattinson) on Stephenie and her novels:


"When I read it I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, 'Oh I've had this dream about this really sexy guy,' and she just writes this book about it. Like some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced, like, 'This woman is mad. She's completely mad and she's in love with her own fictional creation.' And sometimes you would feel uncomfortable reading this thing."


His words, not ours.


Secondly, we take issue with her canon.
Throughout history, vampires have been portrayed as powerful, mysterious, and dangerously lethal. Meyer's vampires don't drink human blood and "sparkle". Let's just say, we can hear Bram Stoker rolling over in his grave.
Even so, we RESPECTED Meyer's canon, because it was, in fact, hers.
It's her vampire world, she's entitled to do what she wants with it.
The one thing she's NOT allowed to do as an author, however, is go against her own canon, which she does (see: Breaking Dawn).
We'll provide you non-believers with one of many examples: Throughout the entire series, all we hear about is how violently dangerous newborn vampires are, how uncontrollable they are, heck, there's even an ARMY of newborn vamps sent after Bella in Eclipse. But what happens to Bella when she becomes a newborn?
NOTHING!
That's right, she's essentially managed to do in a few days what took Edward and the rest of the Cullens decades to learn.
We smell a cop out.


The third reason we take issue with Twilight (and the last one we'll give today, though rest assured, the list goes on and on) is the main characters themselves.
Bella, Edward, and Jacob.
a.k.a. Human, Vampire, and Werewolf
a.k.a. Hapless Klutz, Sparkly Stalker, and A Potential Rapist with a Raging fever.


Seriously?




While this post nowhere near expresses the full extent of our Twilight critique, we'll leave it here for now, but leave you with these parting words of wisdom:





See people? Even Sesame Street knew better.

The Vampire Preservation Project Explained

The idea for the Vampire Preservation Project was created by Kate and Monica (collectively "The Muses") while suffering through the third painful movie installment of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, Eclipse.

The mission: To remind the world of all the things that make vampires AWESOME, and attempt to crack the new stereotype that the perfect vampire is a sparkly stalker who walks and talks like he's a bad, cheap imitation of Mr. Darcy.

The method: Introduce the world to some REAL vampires, from the works of Anne Rice to the classic original Dracula. (And yes, before that, Carmilla).

We'll give our opinions on all of it-- the good, the bad, and the fangtastic, in the hopes that the world will come to see the full bad-assness of vampires, and understand that there is more to the genre than Edward Cullen (Fangirls, beware). Nothing shall be spared, and blood will be spilled, so grab your Holy Water and hold onto your wooden stakes for dear life.

You may ask yourselves, "Who are these brave souls who dare oppose the legions of Team Edward Fangirls?" Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are two college students, long time vampire lovers, and aspiring vampire writers. Together, we've read it all and seen it all (or at least, most of it), and want to pass on some of our vampire wisdom to the world!

If you believe, like we do, that vampires should not sparkle, if you believe, like we do, that vampires deserve their moniker as deadly, mysterious creatures of the night, then join us as we seek to take back the dignity of the VAMPIRE.

It's sure to be a bloody ride...