So, I’m driving home and there’s a bunch of traffic but all of a sudden I am hearing Bill Compton saying he’s not as warm as the men that I must be accustomed to… WHAT? That’s right, Bill Compton was on NPR today. Seems Margot Adler put together a segment on vampires and what they reflect in the popular culture of their time. Here’s the part where they mention True Blood:

“How do you treat someone you love, for example?” she says. “The core question is always: Does might make right?”

The question comes up again and again in True Blood, the HBO series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. In True Blood, vampires have emerged from hiding to become mainstream citizens drinking a form of synthetic blood. Bill Compton, who was turned into a vampire after the Civil War, is trying to re-embrace his humanity. In one scene, he voices his envy for a teenager who’s become a vampire just recently, in the modern world, and doesn’t have an evil and violent past to confront.

“It’s so different for her,” he says with sadness and yearning. “When I was made, one had no choice but to live completely outside the human world, as an outlaw, a hunter.”

Whether it’s Bill Compton wanting to embrace his humanity in True Blood, or the entire Cullen family rejecting humans as nourishment in the Twilight saga, these modern vamps are all struggling to be moral even though they are predators by nature. Which brings us to a question: Who are we?

Read the transcript here. The audio will be up at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.

Posted in Commentary, Stephen Moyer, True Blood