Sucker Punch has an insightful look the theme of love and sacrifice in ’9 Crimes.’ The only real quibble I have is when he says these themes are limited to this episode. Au contraire. This is what the series is about, exploring all the different forms of love from the most selfish to the selfless, the sacrifices they demand, and the lengths people go to hold on to them.

The focus on love in the series is why The Symposium is in Sookie’s library. The Symposium is structured just like the SSNs and True Blood–the narrative is about love, but because of the faulty narration, it is also about epistemology, the study of how meaning is conveyed and transmuted.

Both Charlaine Harris and Alan Ball address these two subjects the way Plato did. The Symposium is set during a drinking party, which one of the reasons why two bars are central to the Sookie’s world. During the party, each guest narrates a story about love. This is exactly what is going on in True Blood with characters who experience all the forms of love and wittingly or not convey faulty information to one another and to us as they struggle to find and hold on to love and meaning, even in its most degraded forms.

I’ve talked before about how Alcide is based on , Alcibiades, the historical figure who was fictionalized and immortalized in many works of literature throughout the ages. That tradition started with Plato in The Symposium and his other dialogues, and is the reason we have to thank the philosopher for Harris’s creation of Alcide, the most charismatic of werewolves.

I’ve also written about how the faulty narration, Alan Ball’s corruption of Charlain Harris’s story, their corruption of the vampire myth, and Ball and Harris’s errors in continuity and logic are as deliberate as all those things are in Plato’s Symposium in which he uses them to provide a lesson in epistemology. This is because the Sookie series is a deliberate updating of Plato’s work in two modern art forms, the novel and dramatic series.

In The Symposium, when each character tells his story, he indicates the year it occurred by referring to which playwrite won the dramatic competition at the annual Dionysia. This is how Plato honors the god of wine at his drinking party, by including references to his festival.

Alan Ball demonstrated the importance of that god to his vision of the series last year with Maryann’s storyline, which was expanded beyond all proportion and reason from the novels. With Maryann we saw what the older form of Dionysus worship looked like. Through wine and frenzied behavior, worshipers became different people. That was the beginning of acting and explains why acting and drama are connected with drunkenness. It also explains why the Greeks viewed acting and drama as a transformative religious ritual, not as entertainment.

Fast foreword a few centuries to the civilized society that was Plato’s Greece. The annual Dionysia was Athens’s civic festival to honor the god. Acting was still only connected with his worship. Three playwrights each wrote three tragedies and a shorter comedic satyr play based on a central theme to be performed and judged. These dramas were not to entertain. They were seen as a transformative religous experience that was intended to make them better Athenians.

While I certainly don’t discount Alan Ball’s intention to entertain, his ambition for True Blood is much greater than that. The goings on in Bon Temps are Ball’s annual summer Dionysian in which he honors the god of theater and provides a tranformative drama leavened by humor for the edification of his audience. That’s why the series utilizes the hero’s journey and the alchemical process, two techniques that writers use to help the audience identify with the transformation the protagonist is going through and be transformed by it themselves.

Hat Tip to Osterby for the link to Sucker Punch.