Playing catch-up with my vamp media

I finally got to see the first two episodes of True Blood recently. There's a romantic pairing between a vampire and a telepath. The telepath likes being with the vamp because she can't hear his thoughts and it's relaxing. Of course, readers of crap YA fiction know that a human-girl/vampire romance with blocked telepathy also features prominently in Twilight.* It seemed weird that this particular kind of pairing would emerge in two sources concurrently. I was deeply concerned: Was Alan Ball ripping off a Mormon housewife? My enjoyment of Six Feet Under would be retroactively degraded were this true. Fortunately, the 2008 True Blood TV show is based on a book series published years before the release of the original Twilight novel.

* Apparently there is also a love triangle in both involving the vampire, the human girl, and a shapeshifter who can turn into a canine, but I haven't gotten that far in True Blood yet.