Summary

• True Blood chose to underwhelm fans by having Sookie end up with a nameless, faceless everyman instead of one of the supernatural suitors she was involved with throughout the series.
• Bill's influence and desire for Sookie to have a normal life played a significant role in her final decision, despite it being a choice dictated by him rather than one Sookie made for herself.
• The show attempted to wrap up the story by showing Sookie living a normal life with her faceless husband, but this ending felt unsatisfying and robbed Sookie of her agency.

During its seven-season run, HBO's horror series True Blood treated fans to a love triangle between half-fairy Sookie Stackhouse and the vampires Bill Compton and Eric Northman, with werewolf Alcide Herveaux thrown in for good measure. Yet Sookie didn't end up with Bill, Eric, Alcide or any other supernatural being. Instead, in a conclusion that left fans disgruntled, it was revealed she married a nameless, faceless everyman. This gave her the normal life Bill imagined for her, but after years of supernatural romantic drama, it felt like a letdown.

While other vampire stories like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries angered a portion of their fans by having their leading ladies choose one supernatural suitor over another, True Blood avoided that fate -- and instead underwhelmed all its fans equally. Fan disappointment over Sookie's faceless and unidentified husband was also indicative of a deeper issue: It was a choice dictated by Bill, not Sookie. In the series' seventh season, Bill was infected with Hepatitis V -- a disease fatal to vampires -- and instead of taking the cure Eric offered him, chose to die. His reasoning had everything to do with Sookie.

Updated January 29, 2024 by Joshua M. Patton: It may not have been the first or best-known iteration of the sexy vampire fiction trend in the early 21st Century, but True Blood has a larger legacy. When audiences think of HBO's violent and horny fantasy series with magic, politics and absurd levels of gore, today they think of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon. Alan Ball's Six Feet Under was a critical darling, and he created True Blood after discovering a series of horror romance novels by Charlaine Harris. Featuring moments equal parts ridiculous and heart-wrenching, the storytellers made a controversial choice about who Sookie Stackhouse ended up with in the finale.

Why Sookie Didn't End Up with Bill At the End of True Blood

Bill and Sookie were powerfully drawn to one another from the beginning of True Blood. At one point, Bill even planned to propose. But he came to believe in Season 7 that Sookie needed to move on from him so she could live a normal life and have kids. Despite her stated desire for him to take the Hepatitis V cure and live, he believed she'd just keep coming back to him and never live the life he dreamed for her.

His reasoning went beyond his own fate. He asked Sookie to kill him with her fairy light before the Hep V could -- a move that would make her fully human. Since Sookie was half-fae, her smell was irresistible to vampires, so Bill argued that her life would never be normal if she retained her fairy side. While Sookie initially agreed to Bill's idea, she ultimately decided against using her fairy light to kill him because it was a fundamental part of who she was. Bill opted to die anyway, and Sookie made good on her promise by using a stake to end his life. However, by declining to become fully human, she effectively ruled out the possibility of a completely normal life.

Nevertheless, the series attempted to put a bow on the story by ignoring that and having the final scene show Sookie living normally anyway. Sookie was pregnant, and she and her husband were throwing a Thanksgiving feast with almost all the characters who survived the events of True Blood in attendance. The scene had the feel of the kind of life Bill wanted for Sookie, and the man she ended up with was a symbol of that. But Sookie's life had never been completely normal, and she rarely made choices that would lead to a quiet small-town existence -- until Bill more or less forced that on her.

Who Does Sookie End Up With on True Blood?

If Sookie had her agency, she'd likely have chosen to end up with Bill. While Eric always loved her, their relationship was short-lived, and, as Sookie told Arlene, she never really gave herself to Alcide because she was still hung up on Bill. Bill may have dragged Sookie into all kinds of vampire drama, but it was often not of his own making. At his core, Bill was a proper Southern gentleman who could have made Sookie happy if they'd been able to keep entanglements with other vampires at arm's length. The one issue would be their inability to conceive children together, but there were other ways they could have had a family.

Moreover, while Bill believed dying was the only way to set Sookie free, even in death it's impossible to say if Sookie really let him go and was just as in love with Mr. Faceless -- or if she settled for him as a way to fulfill Bill's wish for her. True Blood took an original approach to the conclusion of Sookie's story by showing her life beyond vampire romance. However, all the questionable logic meant that it sacrificed a more satisfying conclusion for an ending that lived up to no one's expectations.

Why Sookie Married a Faceless Man In the Series Finale

True Blood is an outlier among its romantic vampire fantasy contemporaries like Twilight or The Vampire Diaries in that the Endgame One True Pairing for the story's central character is a man-shaped question mark, played by stuntman Tim Eulich. Executive Producer Brian Buckner admitted the storytellers wanted Bill to be right about what Sookie did with her life. "We felt like it was irrelevant, honestly, who Sookie wound up with," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, adding, "We wanted to know was that she was happy and living the life that she wanted to lead." While the writers were content with that, the choice failed to land for many fans of a show foundationally about love and self-acceptance.

Like most things in society primarily enjoyed by young women, the Sexy Vampire™ trend doesn't get the respect it deserves. True Blood, by virtue of the freedom HBO series enjoy, was equal parts shocking horror, titillation and heartfelt stories about interesting characters played by impressively talented actors. While the allegory may not have always landed cleanly, the show tried to be about accepting "otherness" both in society and within themselves. The parallels to the LGBTQ+ experience were not subtle and completely intended. The show made a lot of controversial decisions, especially when it came to killing characters. True Blood was a weird, impressive genre series with a lot to enjoy in its seven seasons. But the finale unintentionally robs Sookie of her agency and denies the audience some important closure.