i'm going to wear that mask and gypsy coin belt andi_horton gav

[intrikate88]

Because I knew I had to Work Hard on my True Blood paper today, I... woke up late, went out to lunch with Dad, and rearranged the links on my sidebar into categories and to add links to my latest favorite webcomics, Girls With Slingshots and Shortpacked! which are both clever and have great characters so you should do like me and spend three days straight reading them from the beginning. Hark! a Vagrant  and Wondermark are also usually good, but I don't read them as consistently. Yet. (Goddammit. I forgot to add A Softer World.)

If Lillie and I decide to write a Steampunk novel after we get done with this article, this Wondermark post will definitely come in handy.

Okay. But for real, though. Stuff that I'm working on.

Wait, wait. This is about where I am in life. Sad, I should have had forty years of disillusionment first.



Alright. Back to work. Today, we are talking about TARA THORNTON! It is no secret that she is one of my favorite characters on this show and I think she's just generally awesome.

 

Who is gorgeous, smart, sassy, and vulnerable. In personality she also resembles one of my best friends to an alarming degree, but that is beside the point.

[Customer snaps his fingers to get Tara's attention for a drink]

Tara: Uh-uh! Do not snap at me. I have a name. And that name is Tara. Ain't that funny, a black girl being named after a plantation? [laughs softly and then glares] No it ain't funny at all. In fact it really pisses me off that my momma was either stupid or just plain mean. Which is why you better be nice if you plan on getting a drink tonight.

Customer: Sorry.

When we're first introduced to Tara, she's just about to walk out of her job at a hardware store (she doesn't know it yet) (hell, she probably knows it already and is waiting for Purple Monstrosity Lady to make it that much easier.) She's reading a book in the first shot- it's Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, all about capitalism and its downfalls, which shows her to be a woman inquisitive about the world she lives in; possibly self-educated but still knowledgeable. These early images make a definite statement about who Tara Thornton is.

When she quits, she threatens her boss and the Purple Monstrosity that she'll send her babydaddy, who's fresh out of jail, to kick their teeth in. They take her seriously, and she steps back. "Oh my god! I'm not serious, you pathetic racist. I don't have a baby. Day-umn. I know you have to be stupid, but do you have to be that stupid? Shit." In one simple statement, Tara has deconstructed a stereotype about black women, associated the stereotyping with the certain type of people she's dealing with (white people displaying a sense of entitlement, between Waylan's ass-grabbing and Purple Monstrosity's expecting Tara to magically produce whatever she's looking for- it's some sort of plastic sheeting, making me think she's in league with Dexter Morgan.)

It's not hard to see why she and Sookie are close friends. They grew up together, and their lives have not been that different. Sookie's parents died when she was young, and while Tara's father is nowhere to be seen, her mother, an alcoholic, completely refuses all responsibility for her daughter. It seems it was mainly Sookie's grandmother that raised both of them. So neither of them have parental support in their life. Neither, also may have had a structured school life; Sookie says in the first two books of the series that college didn't work for her because of her "disability" of reading minds, and she gained a lot of knowledge from reading on her own (especially genre fiction, which, incidentally, often mirrors developments and anxieties about women's roles over the course of publication history.) Tara, as we also see, reads a lot on her own and, based on her service industry employment history, probably did not go to college either. They eventually both end up at Merlotte's Bar and Grill. So does it makes sense that, given similar backgrounds, they would have similar roles in the action to come?

To be continued later...

Comments

[andi-horton.livejournal.com]

Hmph, I am still miffed that you did not take a picture of the whole ensemble. That was one thing I meant for us to do in Boston that did not happen!