Vampires have been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. As a child I had a dogeared copy of the Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories, and I probably re-read Dracula a thousand times. Needless to say, I was a diehard fan of Buffy and Angel, so I felt like a pioneer when the latest vampire craze hit a few years ago inspired by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

While I have never been able to stand Meyers’s vision of sparkle vampires or purple prose, I quite enjoy such programs as HBO’s True Blood, and CW Network’s The Vampire Diaries that came about because of the trend, with one big caveat—women’s roles in these programs seem to have devolved since the glory days of Buffy.

Twilight is the most egregious example with its legendarily misogynistic creepy message endorsing marriage and motherhood at the age of 18 and that it is completely rational to give yourself wholly to a controlling personality like Edward’s. I have my share of problems with The Vampire Diaries and True Blood as well.

The Vampire Diaries is quite arguably the best paced show on television. They manage to squeeze more plot developments and twists into one episode than other series do in an entire season. The cast is ridiculously attractive and talented, and the writing quite witty. But the main female protagonist of the show, Elena Gilbert, played by Nina Dobrev (while much better than the whiny Bella of Twilight), seems at times to be less a real person and more like a paper angel with a martyr complex designed to elicit the affections of the vampire Salvatore brothers among others. She is constantly the damsel in distress. (Supporting female characters on the show such as Bonnie the witch and baby vamp Caroline tend to have far more agency as well as greater complexity). Also the show has a habit of killing off strong female characters, surpassed only by the tendency to kill off African American characters. Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder), the main eye candy and fantasy boy object of the series, regularly uses vampiric “compulsion” to get women to provide him with blood and sex, yet Elena continues to be Damon’s closest friend. It’s entertaining fantasy but it’s hardly feminist.

For a while, True Blood seemed to suffer some of the same limitations. It’s main protagonist Sookie Stackhouse, played by Academy Award-winner Anna Paquin, also falls in love at first sight with tall, dark, handsome, brooding, vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer). A Civil War Veteran, Compton, has some distinctly patriarchal attitudes about women as evidenced by his continued insistence that he has to “protect” Sookie, the whirlwind nature of their courtship, and the sudden out-of-the-blue marriage proposal. But then series creator Alan Ball did something delightfully subversive; he took his show’s “fairy tale” romance and in Season 3, turned the whole thing upside down and inside out as a cautionary tale about being swept away by “romantic” fantasies of an all-consuming love.

First of all there’s Sookie’s best friend Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley) whose “relationship” with the psychotic Franklin Mott (James Frain) becomes a sick twisted parody of Sookie’s Season 1 courtship with Bill. Girl meets vampire in bar. Chemistry is magnetic. Later on there’s a fight outside with redneck trash. Vampire declares his undying love for the girl proclaiming how special she is. Girl runs around in a white dress—barefoot at one point—and vampire makes a proposal of marriage. But Tara’s story arc is no romance and when she’s running in that white dress she’s trying to escape the grounds where she’s been held captive, abused, and raped. She later is the one to help Sookie escape vampire clutches as well, joins a support group, and in the kickoff of Season 4, Tara has been reborn as a cage-fighting lesbian.

And as we find out, Sookie’s great romance was never all it was cracked up to be, either. Her supposed soul mate, Bill Compton, is unfaithful to her. In a particularly hair-raising sequence with his ex-lover Lorena (Mariana Klaveno), he nearly drains Sookie to death in the back of a van. And, in the season finale’s shocking conclusion, it’s revealed that his “accidental” meeting with Sookie was no such thing; he was in fact sent to procure her by his superior the Vampire Queen of Lousiana. Worse yet, he let a pair of violent criminals beat her within an inch of her life the night they first met so he could feed her his blood thereby ensuring she would be attracted to him. Sookie’s Byronic Prince Charming is actually a manipulative monster. Sookie tries to deal with this situation by escaping with her fairy godmother to fairyland, only to learn there’s a dark side to that as well, and makes another narrow escape.

And therein lies the feminist subtext of True Blood. There are no Knights on White Horses, no Easy Answers. The women have to figure out how to survive on their own. It might not have the appeal for tweens that Twilight does, but it’s a good lesson to learn.