unreconstructed fangirl

him-e:

ohiogurl:

SNIP

Brava! Yes, I don’t think I’d like it if there was a sexual component to their relationship in the show. It’s been written and acted so paternally up to this point that it would seem weird and squicky if Eric was suddenly macking on Pam. I know that they were lovers for a while in the books before Pam decided she liked women more than men. But their relationship in the books is much less protective/father-cum-daughter. They are more partners in the books.

Look at that scene above. He’s totally her “dad” there. Tender, not at all lustful or sexual.

I DO like Pam a lot. She’s painfully honest. She says whatever comes to mind, and there isn’t a speck of sentimentality in her. Her line in season one about getting chill bumps from watching Sookie and Bill’s passionate farewell thus now strikes me as a moment when the writers were still struggling to find her “voice.” True Pam might have commented that they were really in love, with a disdainful sniff, but she wouldn’t have been emotionally touched by that. Not with the thinly veiled contempt she has for Bill, or any emotional displays. She is a great “voice of reason” when Eric succumbs to emotion.

THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT PAM IS THE VOICE OF TRUTH ON THE SHOW. On other message boards I have seen people try to anoint various characters as omniscient truth-tellers, from Pam to Tara. There is no single voice of truth on this show. Which is entirely as it should be.

In real life, NO ONE has a monopoly on truth. No one is divinely blessed to always be right (thank goodness). We’re going to have to figure out what’s going on in True Blood without the crutch of some oracular character. Every character, even the most unrepentant villains, gets to tell an important truth at some point on the show. That’s part of the fun—you can’t tune out what anyone is saying, because they all might spill something important. At the same time, you can’t completely trust anyone, because even the most intelligent and well-intentioned characters are stuck in their own POVs. They can’t know everything. And their perspective may be flawed, because of emotion or bias. Sometimes people lie, too, for whatever reasons. It’s a challenging show, because of this complexity, but also FUN. And as we have seen in the True Blood fandom, this lends itself to arguments, because there’s always ambiguity.

ITA with UFG when she wrote that Pam simply doesn’t feel as deeply as Eric. I don’t think she responds to Eric’s emotional turmoil because she doesn’t grasp it. Her emotions are stunted. This makes her a great voice of reason, when everyone else around her goes crazy with emotion (like Eric and Bill’s suicide pact to save Sookie in 4x11). It doesn’t make her a great confidante or emotional anchor. That may be why amnesia Eric seemed perfectly happy with Sookie, away from Pam. His undamaged emotions (I believe he lost his memory, but not his emotional connections) told him that Sookie was reliable, that he could trust and lean on her. He knows he can trust Pam, that he cares for her, but not that he can rely on her to empathize with him. And she doesn’t. She’s pretty clueless about his reactions throughout season four. Sookie, for all her overt mistrust of Eric, is tenderhearted and sympathetic to him. Pam possesses absolutely no empathy; she’s just not tenderhearted.

Harris seems to like that toughness and lack of sentiment because it’s unusual (she mentioned this in an interview). Usually men are the stoic ones and women have emotional depth. But I think her implicit message is that isn’t this a bit sexist, really, to assume that all women are sentimental and all men insensitive? It’s fun (she said) to write a female character who is so tough and no-nonsense. Harris plays a lot with gender and sexuality in the series. Pam’s characterization, show and books, is an example of that.

Pam is extremely feminine (her designer clothes, all the makeup, the pink and girly stuff), but she’s also a stone cold bitch and a lesbian. She’s not really slottable into any stereotype of dykes or women generally. She’s a real human being (even as a vampire), with all the variation that implies. 

Anyway, I think that Pam has tried to empathize with Eric, and it’s not like she is completely emotion-proof. She was shocked when she learnt about Eric’s human family, and she was hurt by the fact that Eric never shared the saddest part of his past with her. I saw her reaction to that as a genuine desire to be Eric’s confident, and a disappointment in realizing that she has never been, not for the important issues. I think part of what Pam is comes straight from her true nature, but part is also a product of Eric’s teachings that now have come to bite him in the ass. When he turned Pam, choosing her as a companion of death, he recognized in her the qualities he valued (her lack of sentiment, her cynicism, her coldness) and, I believe, he trained her to nourish only those aspects of her personality, and to systematically atone every hint of feeling, to the point that she ended up having none. Because Eric thought it was the best he could teach to Pam, to survive in the vampire world. I believe that the potential loss of Eric, combined with the newly found knowledge that her Maker has never been the piece of stone she always thought, is exactly what will trigger some emotional character growth in Pam and, ultimately, will help her reconnect with Eric.

All of this is true. I don’t mean to say that Pam can’t feel deeply, just that she doesn’t, and that Eric does not share that part of himself with her. I also completely agree that her stunted emotional life is at least partially Eric’s influence. He taught her what he thought was best, and what his very revered maker taught him. He was cold, and he taught her to be cold. 

But, I also agree with Ohiogurl when she says that Pam didn’t respond to or empathise with Eric’s emotional turmoil because she does not recognise it for what it is, or understand it. She does not have tumultuous feelings. She leads her life sheltered by him, and doesn’t have to face anything that could shake her out of her comfortable feelinglessness — until now, because if there is one thing Pam feels deeply, it is her love for Eric. People get so upset about seeing these characters suffer emotionally; Eric when Sookie chose to be alone, and Pam when Eric sends her away… But this pain they feel is the only reason they have to grow and change.

Pam’s pain is the best thing for her, as Eric’s is for him. And, for us? It means SO MUCH GREAT STORY TO COME.

(via tempella)