Eric's Humanity

Eric’s Humanity

Granted, in the show, Eric has very little in the way of humanity. But we also see in season two that though he may not have feelings for humans (yet) he has feelings for his maker, the tragic Godric.

Eric was a man of his time. He was a Viking whose sole purpose in life was to kill and be killed. When he became Vampire, he took that philosophy with him into his Vampiric life, which seems to have served him well as he is a Vampire a thousand years old. When he reencounters Godric, he is faced with being in his maker’s presence for the first time in centuries. He cares for others, he explains to Bill, just not humans. His sole interest is his maker.

Sookie is the foil to Eric’s experiences with humans. I suspect that Eric’s experiences with humans have been limited to the blood whore he was feeding from, a contemptible creature good only for his personal satisfaction. He does business with humans and profits from them but he does not care for them. They are a means to an end.

When he sees his maker, he sees a changed Vampire. Godric has spent a great deal of time considering the light of his fellow Vampire and their relationship with humans. He has become far more philosophical. And Eric knows that his maker has changed. He has gone from being a powerful survivalist to philosopher. He declares to Eric: I was wrong, we are wrong, we don’t belong here! Eric roars “But we are here!!!” and then we see Eric’s façade crumble in front of his maker and Sookie. He falls on his knees and begs Godric to stay, to not give away his existence to the coming dawn.

How will Eric change? And what will Sookie’s influence do to the big Viking trying to find his way in this brave new world for both humans and supernaturals.

I think it is going be really interesting to see how he changes. For his growth to be so calculated, so measured, this is going to make his character really interesting and really difficult for Sookie to resist. Eric as he is, he would be easy to turn away, he being so limited and one dimensional. But as he evolves..it will be very intense.

Of course I don't want to be soft and lovely dovey, I want him to be a real contrast to Bill. He should be a conflicted character but the other way around. Bill is a human like Vampire...but I want Eric to be a Vampire with human qualities...Does that make sense?

WHat is so funny is that we say they are not human....that they have limited abilities to feel emotions and all that, but I think their range of emotions are just aimed differently. They have a great range of emotions toward their own kind and now that they are living among us in this world, they are leaning a whole new set of feelings.

Funny, the traditions and taboos of Vampires in this world are far more complex than the way humans feel for each other. If you compare us and our interaction with one another. We are far more violent and disrespectful to one another. They seem to have more respect for one another as fellow beings if not as individuals....it is almost like a hive...if you harm one, they all come after you


Everything that happens to Eric from now on is going to be tough emotionally for Eric. He may have made a blood bond with Sookie, but he shared something with her that bonds people. I can't think of anything more intimate, excluding sex, than to cry and show your weakness in front of someone. Once you share that with someone, you are never the same between the two of you.

Yes, I imagine that Eric was private with his emotions as a human as well. He was of a warrior culture and he would have been taught from a young age to keep his emotions in check. I think too, the blood bond works both ways. He hasn't had her blood, but he feels his blood inside her, which is how Bill feels Sookie and how Eric feels Sookie. He would not only feel her reactions to his influence on her via the blood but feel her emotions whether they had anything to do with him or not and Sookie, if nothing else, is very very emotional and as Bill said, tender hearted. Imagine Eric feeling her compassion as it is directed to others, like Tara or Sam or Lafayette and even her misery and anger about Bill.

So Eric may have gotten more than he bargained for when he bonded with her. Bill, being so much closer to his humanity, would be able to internalize it and relish it as a way of reconnecting further with the humanity he seeks, but Eric may be a bundle of emotions in the future. DO you think, as his feelings for her intensifies, he will regret from time to time opening that link between them, after all, he will be having feelings and he even tells Sookie, "I don't like having feelings,"

What is so interesting about Eric is that he may want to be in Sookie's orbit but he really doesn't feel the whole human thing. He is still very much a Vampire, he doesn't want to be anything but.

But now we have seen his emotional side on the show, I wonder if that will change Eric's dynamic with Sookie. And one of the things that I have been wondering about is the thing Godric said: We are wrong, we don't belong here, and Eric roars "But We Are Here!!!" I never felt so sorry for anyone in my life.


Do you think Eric is afraid of exploring the vestiges of his humanity, because it seems he does. Like Gertrude, Hamlet's mother said, "The Lady (Vampire) doth protest too much," when he is confronted about his growing interest in Sookie. He tells Sookie: "Don't use words I don't understand," and "I am not interested in Sookie Stackhouse," and in the books, he tells her, "I don't like having feelings,"

And now that he has suffered this loss of the conflicted Godric and he is now in contact more with humans more than he has in a long time beyond the aspect of a sag and sip, do you think he will have as painful a rebirth as we all suspect? Or will he simply be a Vampire who has a strange obsession with our telepathic barmaid?


This is in it's rough stages and needs to be shaped up

Season three really showed us many sides to Eric's personality. Eric is now experiencing things that are quite new for him in his one thousand year existence. And we have seen him as he was in life and he was not unlike any other man. As Barrister said, he is looking for the solace of the warmth between a woman's legs and he is a person content to be in the bosom of his family but he is not looking for any real responsibility. He cares nothing for his father's crown and position....

Funny, but all that changes for Eric. Not only in the moment he sees his family butchered by wolves but in the moment he becomes a Vampire. I wonder if Eric had been wounded in a battle against the weres the night Godric saw him fighting. I wonder how he confided in his maker. The little bit we saw Godric in season two as he was before he was enlightened, I imagine the Vampire would have been up for the adventure of hunting werewolves, a long drawn out frolic.

He would also be teaching Eric the way to be a Vampire and teach him how to survive. Eric is a very bright man and would have been an apt pupil but he did that have weakness, the desire for revenge. He even violates the law of the blood. Which if you think about it is a very human thing to do. Most humans if asked would say I would do anything for revenge. I think that would be doubly so for a Vampire with unlimited time and amazing strength.

Through the long corridors of time, Eric follows the wolves and their Vampire master til he finally simply loses them. He tells the Authority he thought Edgington met the true death. But can you imagine the shock of being in some rich man's house and seeing something that belonged to your father a thousand years ago, simply another knick knack in a vast collection of things.

Eric's reaction is more than human. His rage is so exquisite, so overwhelming it amounts to a sort of madness in Eric. He takes risks, blinds himself to things that have no purpose to him at the moment. He knows this is his final chance to get the thing he has wanted since he was a human. To hold on to a grudge so long tells me something about the Viking...if he says he loves you...if he makes you a promise, he will keep it and be faithful to it forever. But is that a true example of humanity?

I am not sure...we as humans make vows all of the time. We promise to love honor and cherish til death do us part and we routinely break those promises (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad). We make promises to our deities, but our God(s) know we are frail inconstant humans and we break our pledges to them on purpose or accidentally or we make promises rashly.

Not Eric. If he promises to kill you, he will, he will hound you to the end of his days. But what if he promises to love you? Would he love you to the day you die. I think he would. If you get the strong, stoic Viking to love you, he will. And if that is what you are looking for, then you have it made.

Eric has not fallen in love with Sookie yet but his mere interest in her at Fangtasia in season one, to his desire to trick her into a blood bond in season two and now his day dreams of her saying she smells his memories and she makes him feel uncomfortably human shows the slow build of his interest in her. And now he has tasted her blood. He is as much bonded to her as she is to him...

That is why I don't think the amnesia thing will be necessary. And I hope it is left out. I want to see them uncomfortable and a bit adversarial toward one another so he has to open up more to her so she will let him in to her confidences and she his. Intimacy is so much more than the intimacy of the body. She needs to see Eric as she has seen Bill. The only thing different will be the fact that she is already aware of Eric...there are no carefully built facades and deceptions. He is a brute, a part time villain, a head honcho full of politics....but she has also seen him loving and caring, she has seen his devotion, she has seen his love.

When Eric says his goodbye to Sookie when she goes to see him at Fangtasia, she may feel as though he tricked her with his...the only thing I will regret is not having kissed you...and then followed up by dumping her in his basement and chaining her up and seemingly selling her to Edgington for a chance to walk in the sun, she will realize that he...and Bill...were simply trying to get rid of Edgington once and for all.

So, now, to get in her good graces, he will have to tell her things about himself, a sort of true confessions. It is gamble, but now he is blood bound her as much as she is to him. This is where we will struggle with the faces of Eric's coin...and so will he.

Becoming human is not the easiest of births...there will be pain and I suspect....blood

One of the things I thought was interesting about Eric when he had amnesia was how old fashioned he could be on one hand and how he had these obvious memories of things he had mastered for his life in a modern world.

For example, he sort of gently chastises Sookie for being a woman out in the night and says she should be taken into her brother's home to be guarded and cared for. Sookie of course, a modern woman, thinks this a ridiculous burden for her brother when she can care for herself and a silly suggestion anyhow because Jason is not the sharpest tool in the shed.

His attitudes about sex do not surprise me in the least. The world he came from sex was earthy with few or no inhibitions and anything you might imagine we would do sexually has already been thought out and done and discussed in art religion and philosophy. So his sexual prowess and his openess to doing whatever with Sookie is just part of the man he was. It is ingrained in him like his being a Vampire is a fact he simply states. "Yes, I know I am Vampire, and you are not," he tells Sookie.

The only glitch in the story I see is the fact Eric has a hard time figuring out the lever to roll up the car windows on her shitty little car but later in the book when the witches and the weres are at Bill's house, he goes and gets Sookie's car. Of course you can argue that he has had a some time to think things over, perhaps he was trying to figure out what he did know how to do and driving was something he remembered.

But aside from the obvious, I think that one of the things we do see about Eric is not so much the modern man who is different by virtue of not remembering who he is and what he is the world, but a sort of reversion to the human he was and this is very interesting... and makes me wonder if he still feels after he is restored the man he once was and if he wants to go back to that more primal man who saw things in a very basic almost romantic way. In some ways, far more romantic than Bill with all his old fashioned ways. The simply earthy pleasure of sex and warmth, the companionship he confesses to Sookie much later which made him so happy and his struggle to maintain the Vampire self he has built over one thousand years is going to be an interesting re-imagining of Eric's character....

And it will be the last time he sees the day.

When the fairy blood starts to lose efficacy, Eric tells Sookie, "Sookie, I am burning, my blood is burning," and then even as she leads him out of the water, he keeps looking back at the water with the golden light sparkling on it. No matter how many times you look at a thing you visit and study it, you will never really see it in the living and honest light. He keeps saying, "No, please," like his protestations would give him another moment, like he would have some reprieve from he knows is a dark prison of his immortality and being a Vampire. "I don't want to go back to the dark," childlike, it is as though Eric is a boy who has woken from bad dreams and being admonished to there are no monsters, and to go back to his own room and bed.

It is sad and beautiful to watch..

From Aolani:

It is and I also think it will be one of the most powerful scenes of the season. Talk about humanity! To have even for a moment what so many of us take for granted and what he gave up when he became vampire. Yes, he was in the sun once before, but he also knew what would happen. This was pure unadulterated innocence and joy for the moment with no thought at all of what might come. When he goes back underground you can just feel how deep that hurts and how the darkness in the ground is no competition for the darkness and depression in his soul. He may not remember much, but to have something that makes you so happy and then to lose it. Its like saying goodbye to a lover with no chance of reconciliation.

Eric's Inner Struggle as of Season 4 episode 11- By Aolani

I feel like Eric is really, really reeling and dealing with a lot right now. For example, he does love Sookie, and he tried to tell her that but she was just all about Bill. And who is to say that the "more of him" is something that Sookie can deal with or even wants? And so there is the altruistic Eric who wants to step aside, the real Eric who would kill for her, and all of this is while they battle the witch *sigh*. Then throw Pam in there and hells bells shit fire, it’s kind of like being at your limit and you just cannot deal with one more thing that puts people you love in jeopardy. You have to deal with one thing at a time and when those things are at odds, they need a separation, not to mention some extremely wounded Viking pride in there. Add that to the fact that he WAS happier when he didn’t know, he didn’t want to know who he was, and now that he DOES know who the hell he is, he isn’t any the damned happier for it either. It’s enough to make anyone feel like a bear with a sore tooth.


So Eric doesn’t tell Pam to get out of his sight forever. He hasn’t truly banished her. He has simply told her to get out of his sight before he kills her. Now this is shocking and rude, I can agree but there is a huge difference between the two. Eric always has the ability and option to call for her when he chooses. So yes, he was angry, and he wasn’t very nice about and his reasoning sucked ass, but who hasn’t lost their temper before?

Now Sookie, she is conflicted about both of them...I think his problem is he can't claim exclusivity to her...and in all fairness...Bill can claim absolutely nothing about her...So, right now, as far as being able to lay some claim and press a suit...Eric has the upper hand..And truth be told I don’t know that it matters who has it or not because to Eric’s mind, it IS all about claiming what is his and he can’t do that right now.

So you have amnesiac Eric battling with current Eric and figuring out what to do and how to do it, knowing it’s at a critical juncture with Sookie, and with Pam all over the place challenging his authority, Sookie is where she doesn’t need to be all tied up with the witches, and Eric competing with Bill over who will give more to her. *sigh* I know vampires think fast but damn!

It has nothing to do with Bill at all. It's all Sookie, she is the one who can't decide and it’s about forcing her to do something that she will always fight about, or not agree to, or winning her over in a way he isn’t sure he can. I mean, he can’t stay amnesiac Eric and be of help and deal with all this shit right now, not at the same time. He has to try to navigate the two Eric’s, what he was when he was an amnesiac and what he was as his previous self and what he is now...He doesn't know... And Eric is not used to being uncertain. He has to be one or the other and it may tip the scales very unfavorably for him in Sookies eyes so, I don’t see him saying what he said to Pam as all that unreasonable when you figure it all up. Shocking and rude, yes, but not unreasonable.

The whole violent Vampire thing is the thing that will weigh on Sookie's mind more than likely.She has never seen Bill behave that way. But Eric, he is all animal when he is fighting. But see, first off, I don’t think that WAS about Sookie at all, she was just there, but if there was a message in that to Sookie, it was that he will fight for her with no hold barred and he won’t be as civilized about it as Bill might be. So it kind of comes down to what kind of man or vamp do you truly want Sookie? IF it’s even about her at all.

We have seen Bill be a savage and an animal, just as much if not worse than Eric because he didn't have any altruistic reason. Eric responds to threat the way he does, it”s that simple, but Sookie doesn't know how to intellectualize that. She hates the vampirism, she always has. She hates anything that reminds her of the fact they are not the same clay, and since she has never seen Bill do that, then she has no reference for it. She sees it as savagery. In Eric’s mind, that is who and what he is when provoked and there is no reason for him to claim different. It’s like, you have seen who and what I am for the best and the worst, now you need to decide if you can accept that. He is a prideful vampire. Her yapping on about Bill as soon as he gets his memory back has to sting like hell, not that he would ever admit to it.

Book Sookie and show Sookie are fundamentally different and we have to see her differently too as the way she is in the show. Book Sookie after she is tortured, could handle the savagery a lot better than show Sookie ever could at this point in time.

So I have been imagining him back in his office in a fairly black mood. Pam has been sent away for a bit, Aslinn has yelled at him, Renee has rescinded his invitation to her home and if I were to walk in, I don’t think he would be overly welcoming at all.

I think he is a trifle mad and put out and doesn’t want to talk about it or explain it or jack shit. He is mad. So if I went in and just told him that he didn’t have to say a word and start to tell him what I think and know and that we are sad to see him and Pam at odds since they are ALL our friends including her, but that it doesn’t mean we aren’t still there for him, I think it would sooth some pride. I would just lay it all out as in, hey Eric, these are your feelings broadcasting loud and clear and I am not here to judge or yell or challenge. I just want to be here for you and regardless if you say or do nothing, for you to know I’m here and care and you’re not alone more than you choose to be, and then I would probably hold his hand, kiss him on the cheek and leave and it would be up to him if he called me back or what happened or not after that.

AND I would probably let him know that we welcomed him back and that we all missed him god awfully terribly when he forgot us all since we have not yet given him a proper welcome back. That has to hurt as well you know. He is back and all we do is yell at him and get mad and kick him to the curb, poor darling.

In seasons four and five, we saw a great deal happen to Eric. I was interested in his new found relationship with Bill in season five. The bromance or the Butch and Sundance relationship he had with Bill was wanted by those of us who like Bill and identify with him the most and when that dissolved as Bill explored "religion" it made me a little sad and I think that Eric was disappointed. I think he expected better of Bill.

Eric them loses his hold on his small bit of humanity in season six. I understand it completely. His entire world has been destroyed. He has lost his business and he lost his freedom and he became the hunted one. His relationship with Sookie and with Pam, the most significant relationships he had, were broken and disassembled before him and I sort of wander if they can be put back together. I count out no possibilities. If Eric is on the earth, he is making things right for him.

I hated to see him lose it. Nora was just the last straw. Having her die in his arms and her fevered body and blood wash against him when she died would have been a deal breaker for me too. I would have turned my back on humanity and on everyone else because caring means you lose something some time and though he had helped save Pam and the others, he was never going to be satisfied, his heart was not going to be unbroken, his loved ones were never going to come back.

And I really can't blame him for killing Steve Newlin, not just because he would have betrayed them again, but because I knew as he did Newlin had orchestrated the deaths of his vampire family: first Godric and then Nora.

Can Eric come back from that? I couldn't say. I hope so. He is a beautiful soul in the way lions and tigers are beautiful but dangerous. I hope he has the strength to come back and I will be here to watch it....