(Leaving aside the first line of the next scene -- "You need to try and relax" -- though, we should discuss. Now, first rule is don't ever use the word rape unless you're talking about rape. And in the books, we got through this part of the day with a scene that managed to be more complex and multivalent in a lot of ways, but also more brutal. I am glad what happens, happens. But we just went from a scene in which pretty much this exact thing happened, in order to break a woman's strength in the very realm of her feminine power. So we're getting there, and it's not even really a metaphor.

But secondly, he's feeding on Sookie because he is an animal. The thing she couldn't see him as, because when we are in love, and especially first love, even the most animalistic and passionate things are beautiful and overwhelming and full of power. But what Bill is, what men are and what people are, is an animal. A dead thing, and a feeder on people. Sookie needed to understand that, and Sookie does not historically want to hear your bullshit. But along with this comes the idea of darkness and light, specifically: He is not feeding on her to steal her light. He is feeding on her because he is hungry and out of his mind and dying.

But, and this is where the parallel to sexual violence becomes most important: He is not stealing her light with this act, but he is having his darkness taken away. For a time. As the passive party you can't say she's stealing his darkness, and you can't say it remains in her, but after he has drained her he can withstand the sun. This opposition may not matter now, but given the storyline to this point I think the knife's edge that it breaks down to is going to be very important. Darkness is a force on this show; but if darkness is simply the absence of light, then the world is a fundamentally good, and fundamentally dangerous, place. And we all live in the shadows between, and have to make our home there.

And because this episode plays skillfully with a lacuna here -- it's important we not know what happens in that closed box right now -- I will go on to say that, if darkness is merely the absence of light, then V and its use and sale will always be a factor on this show, because the exchange of blood goes both ways. Vampires are magical creatures who feed on blood, yes. But if they are merely displacing the darkness in themselves with our light, then what is their blood? Life. Life so magical that it causes the dead to walk, right, but also so dark that it can show you your soul -- and everybody else's -- as through a glass: Darkly. But if V is life-force replete with darkness, quantifiable, it only makes sense that there is a Light to life as well, and that's what werewolves don't understand, because their life is all fucking and fighting and blood.