babyboy, you're not the only one who's special in this world.
Do you really want to get your heart's desire, or even to meet yourself? Sookie meets another telepath and another vamp-lover. Sam meets another shifter. Tara who never lets herself want things gets mixed up with a goddess of Id. And Maryann and Godric, who can and do live truly to themselves without constraint, don't want to live with what they see and set out to self-destruct.
And you can't depend on other people to figure out the real you when they see it, as we see with Maryann's insistence that Sam is meant to be the hollowed-out host to Dionyseus. Sam has kind of set himself up as the Dioyseus of Bon Temps. Sam takes care of everybody, he gets them to have a good time, he feeds them and keeps the drinks flowing. He's the infrastructure that let Maryann come in and wreak her havoc.
Along those lines, Sookie continues to make me very uneasy. Like, I know Bill not mentioning Jessica to her was....dicey? I know rationally that their whole relationship is a power game she's set up to lose at every turn, but her hectoring him really rubbed me the wrong way. "I tell YOU everything so YOU have to tell ME everything" is like..."I set the terms here whether YOU like it or not." Jesus, Sookie, just because you can usually invade people's every thought doesn't mean you're actually entitled to know their every thought.
Loving the contrast between Chez Maryann and Jesus Camp. People are in thrall to these charismatic leaders who offer them something they've never had. The anti-vamp camp offers structure and challenge and purpose, teaching people about the nuts and bolts of survival. It's about meaning, as cruel as that meaning ends up being. And then Maryann takes people who have had to work too hard for their own survival and gives them all their immediate needs while encouraging them to continue living moment-to-moment. Chez Maryann is also a painful contrast to Lafayette's imprisonment - he's a clear-eyed survivalist who hasn't had to handle such immediate endangerment recently, but he's equipped himself to get through it.
The question of characters' origins doesn't dominate the question of identity in the way it can, but of course their families are part of it. Jessica comes face-to-face with her parents and Hoyt learns the truth about his. Bill's relationship with his own maker collapses as he's getting to understand himself in relation to Jessica. Eric learns more about and then loses his family in Godric. I was all set to like Godric, but he wasn't around quite long enough for the death to hurt the way I'd have expected. It's part of the tragedy of vampirism, I guess: even someone who acknowledges the value of change might not actually be able to adjust to that change.
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