WTF, True Blood No. 2: Do any of the Hot Shot women end up impregnated by Jason?
And, why is trauma handled so poorly by the showrunners?
CW: addiction, sexual assault, kidnapping, inbreeding, dosing – not in any great detail
True Blood creator and producer, Alan Ball does many things well. He masterfully adapted captivating novel characters for the screen who effectively walk the line between profound, harrowing, and hilarious. He excels at the campy absurdity that makes the show an unforgettable respite from reality. He creates perfect hooks and cliffhangers to get a person to watch eight episodes a day (do not judge me). Unfortunately, Ball consistently fails at tying up loose ends… and handling trauma.
When season 4 of the HBO original starts, we learn that Jason Stackhouse has begun taking care of the good folks of Hot Shot where his beloved werepanther lover, Crystal is from. The folks in Hot Shot are essentially an inbred drug syndicate led by drug addict and maniac, Felton Norris. Whether or not he was an addict before or after he ran away with his half sister/wife, Crystal, is unclear, but one thing’s for certain: when he returns to Hot Shot a year and a month later, he is addicted to vampire blood and so is Crystal.
This new addiction is a major contributing factor to their decision to kidnap Jason and use him as a sex slave to impregnate the women of Hot Shot after turning him into a werepanther. That, and being uneducated and inbred criminals.
It turns out that you can’t be made into a werepanther — you have to be born one. But somehow a family so infatuated with their own werepanther lineage doesn’t seem to know that. Felton and Crystal bite Jason all over his body in an attempt to trigger a transformation that will never come, nearly killing him. Crystal pats mud onto the bites in an attempt to keep Jason stay alive for the next part of her and her brother/husband’s plan. She reckons this is going to heal him but instead it gives him an infection that makes him feverish, which she believes means the werepanther genes are taking over.
While all of that is absolutely bad enough, True Blood is a show where things always go from bad to worse to “what the absolute f*ck?!”, so of course the buck doesn’t stop there. Crystal feeds Jason what she refers to as “Mexican Viagra” and proceeds to r*pe him. Ever in that “what the absolute f*ck?!” vein, all of the women in Hot Shot line up to r*pe Jason. They even have Becky — a teenage werepanther sired by Felton — line up to copulate with the eldest Stackhouse sibling.
Thankfully Jason is able to convince Becky to free him and avoids having to procreate with the underage girl. Even though it almost kills him (and does actually end up killing Felton), Jason escapes to safety and is saved by Jessica and Hoyt (but mostly Jessica).
My question is, did any of those Hot Shot women get pregnant? Does Jason have any baby Stackhouses running around Hot Shot, all sticky and troglodytic? Or was that yet another flaw in Felton and Crystal’s fakakta plan? It seems disgusting to consider, but it also slightly unlikely that he would have produced no pregnancies considering how many women r*ped him.
I also feel that it’s kind of weird that we just never hear from Crystal again. She’s out of her mind on V and obsessed with Jason. Especially with Felton out of the picture, it doesn’t make sense that she wouldn’t continue pursuing Jason even more voraciously. Why doesn’t she ever turn up? Did she just give up? Is she dead? What happened? I do believe that Hot Shot does not fare well against the H-vamps, but it doesn’t make logical sense that we simply would never hear from any of these people who live not too far away, especially considering the emotional attachment Becky and Timbo developed towards Jason.
It’s necessary to state how little I care for how the whole issue of r*pe is handled throughout the season. It’s important that Jason realizes that his illicit sexual relationship with his high school teacher, Miss Steeler was r*pe (statutory or not), but there remains no real resolution to that situation either. He sleeps with her, realizes the nature of what they’ve done, and leaves but there isn’t much exhibition of internal development throughout the remainder of the season or show. Sure, he has an epiphany that he should stop using sex to fill a void and attempts to develop an exclusively platonic relationship with Jessica, but he doesn’t succeed, and that’s about it. We never hear about Miss Steeler again and Jason is making out with a faery in the very next episode.
The entire arc of Jason transcending his sexual abuse and low self-worth is beyond clumsily fumbled. It is in fact treated irresponsibly considering that it deals with a widespread issue that’s rarely engaged with, especially in popular media. Next thing we know, he’s finally starting a family of his own but it’s framed as if he simply grows up after realizing it — not as if he is a man who has had his autonomy robbed of him time and again and needs to heal. Instead he acts compulsively again and develops a sexual relationship with Jessica less than a week later! Then he’s being taken advantage of by his abusive vampire girlfriend that he meets in jail, Violet Mazurski. Yes, he does realize his penchant for dangerous women, but there’s little more than that exposition. We don’t see him grappling with these realizations or receiving any real support or help after that.
Jason is one of my favorite characters on True Blood but that’s not the only reason why I’d like to see a world where Jason actually grieves his stolen innocence. He should be allowed greater depth of character than what he is able to access in the show because the narrative is a provocative and powerful one that could have had a lasting impact on pop culture had it been done right. Instead it is a missed opportunity that was sloppily thrown together with only superficial engagement and very little care.
Obviously, I’d also like there to have been some clean conclusion to the Hot Shot thread. It’s not a real cliffhanger if it didn’t actually lead anywhere, especially considering that almost nobody in Bon Temps really knew about it.
Jason as a character develops in a pleasing way throughout the seven season series. He’s a fine male specimen who learns empathy and care, forming an identity beyond his good looks and sexual prowess. However, to say that it is satisfactory in an actually fulfilling sense would be dishonest. It seems a real waste to not dig deeper into the psychology and evolution available to the character.
This is an issue that we see across the show with characters like Tara and Lafayette as well. Trauma isn’t just a means of character development, shock value, and progression of action. It certainly isn’t a valid source of entertainment. When a show introduces traumatic narratives, it is the duty of the showrunners to use these topics responsibly and in an elevated manner. It’s a disservice to the content, the viewers, and the media itself to do anything less.
While True Blood introduced identities and narratives to mainstream media in ways that we hadn’t seen much of before, it misses the mark in doing so effectively. This is what makes True Blood a show that despite being a definite cultural moment, fails to develop a cult following and probably never will. I hope that it does come back around because it certainly has potential, and there’s so much more to explore. If handled with more dexterity, it may yet be able to foster a cult fandom. I guess we’ll have to wait and see!
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I’ll continue sharing these burning True Blood questions I have here on The Channel until we get through all ten of them! I want to thank everyone for your sustained patience while I go through some transitions in my life that have made it somewhat difficult to get to this aspect of my work. I hope you enjoy them as they come along and I’d love to hear what you all think!
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xoxo, Vie