During its seven-season run, HBO‘s True Blood treated fans to a love triangle between half-fairy Sookie Stackhouse and the vampires Bill Compton and Eric Northman, with a romance with werewolf Alcide Herveaux thrown in for good measure. Yet in the series’ final moments, it was revealed that Sookie didn’t end up with Bill, Eric, Alcide or any other supernatural being. Instead, in a conclusion that left fans woefully disappointed, it was revealed she married a nameless, faceless everyman. This gave her the normal life Bill imagined for her, but after years of supernatural romantic drama, it felt like a let down.
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While other vampire stories like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries have angered a portion of their fans by having their leading ladies choose one supernatural suitor over another, True Blood avoided that fate — and instead underwhelmed all its fans equally, regardless of which Sookie paramour they preferred. This is just one of the reasons Sookie ended up with the wrong person in True Blood‘s finale.
The fan disappointment over Sookie’s faceless husband is also indicative of a deeper issue with this outcome: it was a choice dictated by Bill, not Sookie. In the series’ seventh season, Bill was infected with Hepatitis V, a disease fatal to vampires, and instead of taking the cure Eric offered him, he chose to die instead. His reasoning had everything to do with Sookie.
Since the beginning of the series, Bill and Sookie were powerfully drawn to one another. At one point, Bill even planned to propose. However, in the seventh season, Bill came to believe that Sookie needed to move on from him so she could live a normal life and have kids, and despite her stated desire for him to take the cure and live, he believed she’d just keep coming back to him and never live the life he dreamed for her if he was alive.
But Bill’s reasoning went beyond that. He asked Sookie to kill him with her fairy light before the Hep V could, a move that would make her fully human. As half-fae, Sookie’s smell is irresistible to vampires, and Bill argued that, with or without him, her life would never be normal if she retained her fairy side. Yet while Sookie initially agreed to Bill’s idea, she ultimately decided against using her fairy light to kill him because it’s a fundamental part of who she is. Bill still opted to die, and Sookie made good on her promise to him by using a stake to end his life. However, by declining to become fully human, she effectively ruled out the possibility of a completely normal life.
Nevertheless, the series attempted to put a bow on the story by ignoring that and having the final scene show Sookie living what appeared to be a normal life anyway. Sookie is pregnant, and she and her husband are throwing a Thanksgiving feast with almost all the characters who survived the events of the series in attendance. The scene has the feel of the kind of life Bill wanted for Sookie and the man she ends up with is a symbol of that. However, given her fairy abilities, Sookie’s life had never been completely normal, and throughout the series, she rarely made choices that would lead to a quiet small-town existence — that is, until Bill more or less forced that choice on her at the end of the series.
The irony is if Sookie had her druthers, she’d likely have chosen to end up with Bill. While Eric always loved her, their relationship was short-lived, and as Sookie told Arlene, she never really gave herself to Alcide when they dated because she was still hung up on Bill. Bill may have dragged Sookie into all kinds of vampire drama, but it was often not of his own making. At his core, Bill was a proper Southern gentleman who probably could have made Sookie happy if they could keep entanglements with other vampires at arms’ length. The one issue would be their inability to have children together, but there are other ways they could have kids.
Moreover, while Bill believed dying was the only way to set Sookie free, even in death it’s impossible to say if Sookie really let him go and was just as in love with Mr. Faceless as she once was with Bill or if she settled for him as a way to fulfill Bill’s wish for her.
True Blood took an original approach to the conclusion of Sookie’s story by showing her living a life beyond vampire romance. However, given all the questionable logic that led Sookie to her faceless husband, the show ultimately sacrificed a more satisfying conclusion for an ending that lived up to no one’s expectations.
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