Twilight: Why True Blood Kicks Twilight's Ass

It's hardly even a fair fight. It's like watching a bed-ridden asthmatic try to knock down a sequoia. By huffing and puffing. True Blood is a salaciously sinister and fiendishly fun series featuring insane characters filled with life and color. Twilight is a sniffly-nosed, dew-covered mope-fest filled with silence and shame.

Yes, because of the "vampire factor", these two creative products share fans as there will always be fans of vampires no matter what movie they're in or what show they're on. Like everything else that exists in pop-culture there are apologists. But Twilight is listless and dreary. And it's not that we don't fully appreciate the forests and gravel roads of the Pacific Northwest as a backdrop, but Twilight wallows too much in the picturesque serenity of its locale and loses all sense of danger.

Who wants to sit around for two hours and watch people yearn? Who really wants to explore the depths of an ultimately unfulfilling relationship? Yes, there is merit to tackling the themes of lovelorn longing, but we'd rather leave that topic to more adept authors than Stephenie Meyer. In True Blood, everyone has sex! They bone 24/7! And they don't try to hide the fact that the thing that initially draws each of them to one another is raw sexual attraction. Sure, they grow to know each other later and, hell, they might even learn to tolerate each other's contrived southern eccentricities, but first things first! Sex. And lot's of it. Hell, Sookie and Bill spent almost an entire episode under the sheets.

Bella and Edward spend all their free time exchanging meaningless niceties under porcelain pretences. Sulky stares and sullen smirks. And of course Bella's dad is cool with her dating a vampire! He knows that dude is never going to even touch her boob! It's pretty much just like letting her date a gay guy. Actually, no. It's safer. See, dads don't care about their little girls running around with monsters if that monster is an ineffectual, uncharismatic neutered lump. Yes, Edward and Bella do wind up having sex eventually. After they get married. And just once. Enough to get her pregnant


True Blood's world is vibrant and fresh. Vampires live among humans. They've come "out of the coffin." They have jobs. They have magazines. Talk shows. Bars. Townships. But it's still a fairly new scenario so there still are rampant prejudices on both sides of the vampire/human relations. Whereas Twilight is an allegory for not giving in to your "dirty, filthy urges," True Blood tackles racism, segregation, religion and a flurry of other socially relevant topics that helps the series stand out as a true game-changer in the vampire genre.

True Blood vampires are able to make progressive leaps and bounds genre-wise while still adhering to the basic established vampire rules concerning sunlight. And they're horny. And complex. And feral. And peaceful. And able to think like creatures of the modern-era. Let's compare the two scenes – the meet/cute scenes – in both Twilight and True Blood; when Edward sees Bella for the first time and when Bill sees Sookie for the first time. When Edward sees Bella, his eyes awkwardly widen, his nostrils flair and he gets an uncontrollable vamp-boner (see: Edward smelling her "specialness") and has to excuse himself from science class like a dandy who just pooped his pantaloons. When Bill sees Sookie, there's a sultry sexual brooding that happens, letting us know that Bill wants to "f the s" out of Sookie and he's not ashamed to show it in his eyes.