Honor your Parents: Vampires and the Fifth Commandment

The vampiric take on the fifth commandment: Honor your father and your mother is skewed, but then, the skewing begins while the vampire is still human. Too often humans believe that to honor just means to show appreciation for the parents, you know, the obligatory present on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day sort of honoring. The idea of honoring goes much deeper than that. It includes performing actions and living ones’ life in a way that the parent would approve of – the way they trained one to go.

But a vampire has their human birth parents to honor, and then their un-birth mother or father to honor. Generally it is the latter relationship which is the money one since it is through the progenitor that they get status/power/ability. Pam honors and obeys Eric Northman, her progenitor, while I don’t know that she ever even mentions her actual human birth parents. They are long dead which makes them hard to honor except by behavior which they would have approved of. Would they have approved of blood drinking and the occasional killing of humans for food? Probably not. This would make Pam evil, right? She isn’t honoring her parents. Yet she is honoring her un-birth parent, Eric. He would kill her if she flaunted his authority; indeed, the made vampire is incapable of disobedience to their parent. This isn’t the human sort of incapable which can be over-ridden with enough effort or will, this is a true inability – a true state of being, such as being white or black.

So is Pam not evil simply because she does what “honors” her parent? Makes my head hurt….