Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley) is Sookie Stackhouse’s (Anna Paquin) best friend in The Southern Vampire Mysteries by American author Charlaine Harris and in the HBO adaptation series True Blood.
In the novels, Tara is straight. She has a series of relationships and eventually opens a chain of successful clothing stores. She marries JB, and they have twins, but later divorce.
In the HBO adaptation, True Blood, Tara has a very different storyline. She flirts with a few men and eventually falls in love with “Eggs” (Mehcad Brooks) in the first two seasons. He is killed in Season 2, and his death precipitates a crisis for Tara. She is taken prisoner by a vampire, finds out that her childhood crush, Jason (Ryan Kwanten), is the one who killed Eggs, and walks in on her mom having sex with the Reverend Daniels. She decides that it is all too much for her and leaves town.
While she’s away, she becomes an MMA fighter and meets her girlfriend, Naomi (Vedette Lim), but they break up after she returns to Bon Temps.
Tara takes a bullet for Sookie and nearly dies. In a last-ditch attempt to save her friend’s life, Sookie convinces Pam de Beaufort to turn Tara into a vampire. Tara is devastated by this transformation and becomes incredibly bitter. She feels that she has become the one thing that she hates the most.
Pam de Beaufort takes Tara in, and Tara becomes a bartender (and later a dancer) at Pam’s club, Fangtasia. Over time, the two develop romantic feelings for one another and become very close. After a lot of flirting, they share their first kiss at the end of the fifth season and continue as a couple at the start of the sixth season. However, unfortunately, Tara Thornton is killed by another vampire at the beginning of the seventh season while fighting to save her mother.
