Happy Endings - From Sleeping Beauty to Sookie Stackhouse

For a short time as a child, I imagined myself as a fairy princess bride. Complete with white chariot and prince charming, led by white unicorns with glossy manes & shimmering horns. Later in my childhood as I became well-read, this fantasy changed to me as a warrior princess, destroying evil as I encountered it and saving the innocent.


The main common similarity in all my childhood fantasties was a happy ending.


I learnt to read at an early age, mum says around 2 & a half years old I was starting to read bedtime stories with her. As I got older, I discovered words of magic & mystery hidden between pages & quickly learnt that I could use the stories as an escape from my sometimes tough and lonely upbringing. With parents who worked two jobs sometimes & who moved town every year or two, gypsy-like, I was always the "new girl" and subjected to sporadic bullying and cruel social-shunning if I wasn't what some of the kids thought was "cool" at the time. So, I learnt to withdraw from the stress with the help of my beloved stories.


Every book I read had a "happily-ever-after" ending. The boy got the girl; the girl got the boy. Lost children were reunited with their loved ones; no one ever got seriously hurt. Everybody lived; everybody got what they wanted - if they were the "good guys", that is.


Recently I started reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels, the  base for the True Blood television series. The story has made me think about these happy endings we take for granted. Sookie's situation is far from a fairytale. There is no traditional garden-variety happy ending for her as there is for Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, the children from the Narnia novels and even for Bella of Twilight.


Sookie will never share a lover's breakfast with Bill; she'll never awaken in his arms as the first light crawls through the bedroom curtains. They'll never go on an afternoon picnic together, or walk along the beach at sunrise. Bill will never grow old with Sookie, they will never have biological children. They will always will in danger of ending up scapregoats of the  violent "fang-hater" mobs as a Vampire and his "fang-banger."


Sookie has no family left except her brother; Bill's dies a hundred or more years before he met her.


Bella, on the other hand, has it all: a Vampire who sparkles instead of burns in the sunlight. He is able to give her a child. They are not hunted by religious fanatics.


Twilight is a fairytale; True Blood is not. And yet, Sookie's story seems to have more substance, more romance: despite her & Bill's differences, despite their trials, they manage to keep their unconditional, passionate love alive. It shows, to me, that you can still be happy, without a traditional "happy ending."