Marked Redux: Chapter 1
ZeldaQueen: Here we go! Ready to begin, Ruin?
Ruin: Yes!
ZeldaQueen: Brilliant!
Chapter 1
ZeldaQueen: We start off with an opening sentence that’s actually rather promising - “Just when I thought my day couldn't get any worse I saw the dead guy standing next to my locker”. Now, that sort of opening sentence actually gets one thinking. Is there a zombie? Is she going to be attacked? If so, the fact that she’s being so casual about it is kind of interesting. What do you think is going to happen next, with an opening sentence like that?
Ruin: Honestly? I’d have thought, with a sentence like that, we’d be greeted with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style opener.
ZeldaQueen: Same. Actually, I’m reminded of the opening of an episode of Archie’s Weird Mysteries, where Veronica has a dream that she’s going through her locker at school and, when a vampire goes to attack her, she casually zaps him away with a magic pendant while complaining on her cell phone about how a flock of bats messed up her hair.
Here, we get neither of those examples. Instead, we’re “treated” to hearing about how Zoey’s best friend (or best friend for all of this chapter, as we’ll see), Kayla, is talking “in her usual K-babble”. Right. I know that friends can reach a point where they affectionately rib on each other, but given how Kayla is treated later? I don’t think that’s the case. I think Zoey’s just whining because Kayla’s talking too much.
Miss Judgemental: 1
We also hear about how Zoey was apparently the only one who noticed the vampire (for that’s what he is) until he spoke, which she somehow attributes to “more evidence of [her] freakish inability to fit in”.
Speshul Snowflake: 1
Ruin: In other words, her first concern isn’t “why is this vampire on school grounds and who gave him a hall pass?”, but how this makes her even more ‘freakish’ than ever.
ZeldaQueen: Aaaaaactually, this is where the Cast ladies start to tie their world-building into knots. The vampire Zoey is seeing is a Tracker. We’re later going to learn that Trackers are adult vampires who are given work solely based on finding teens just about to turn into fledglings, mark them with the crescent moon tattoo, and tell them in flowery prose that they’re to go to the House of Night. Apparently they have some magical sense that directs them to exactly where a transforming fledgling will be. Keep this in mind when we look at exactly how the transformation works.
For now though, from what we see in other books, a Tracker will just… enter any area to find the fledgling. They’ve been doing this since the days of Ancient Greece. By this point in history, you’d think society would be familiar enough with them that they’d recognize what the presence of one means.
AU Doesn’t Work Like that: 1
Not to mention, it brings up two other issues. The first is how Zoey even knows that this guy’s dead. The vampires just look like normal humans (albeit insanely hot, as EVERY FRICKING CHARACTER reminds us) and the only things to tip Zoey off are a few tattoos, which plenty of people have. The second is why it’s treated like Zoey has some mystical sixth sense and can magically see this guy. I don’t think it’s mentioned whether or not the Trackers turn invisible, but the short story with Boudicca has a Tracker being stabbed to death from behind, suggesting that ordinary people can see them. (Of course, Zoey only seems to see the guy for half a second, so either way, her wangst is pointless.)
Anywho, back to Kayla. She’s complaining because apparently Zoey’s boyfriend, Heath, is a football player who also gets ridiculously drunk…
Stereotypes Mambo: 1
And she feels that Zoey is being too hard on the meathead.
Ruin: Which makes me wonder why she’s being so hard on him for drinking. Does she have something against teen drinking, or just against Heath drinking?
In either case, what it boils down to is that drinking alcohol seems to cross Zoey’s line of ‘Acceptable Behaviour’, and if you cross that line, you deserve the scolding you get.
Miss Judgemental: 2
ZeldaQueen: Oh, we find out why Zoey’s against Heath’s drinking, albeit not until after Zoey tells us about how she has a horrible cough, she and Kayla both whine about Zoey’s parents enforcing a curfew for her, and Zoey takes Kayla saying “It's been like a million years since Broken Arrow beat Union” literally and uses it as an excuse to bash Kayla’s math skills.
Miss Judgemental: 3
Ruin: Is hyperbole literally that bad of a crime?!
ZeldaQueen: Coming from Kayla, apparently yes. Given how much the poor girl is bashed, I seriously have to wonder if she’s based off of a friend who Kristin had a falling out with or something. Anyway, care to guess why Zoey doesn’t want to date a chronic drunk?
Ruin: Outside of his reassessment of his life goals? “he’s going to get fat from all that beer”.
ZeldaQueen: That, and “kissing him is like sucking on alcohol-soaked feet”. Clearly, one must have one’s priorities in line for situations such as this.
Kayla admits that those two points are gross and says that it’s a pity, because Heath’s apparently incredibly hawt. Of course he is. God forbid Zoey date someone who wasn’t Mr. Hottie.
All The Beautiful People: 1
Then, we get one of the most blatant instances of hypocritical bullhonkey I’ve yet to read in anything.
“I rolled my eyes, not bothering to try to hide my annoyance at her typical shallowness.”
ZeldaQueen: Ho-ley Je-zus.
Ruin: Oh, honey, look at yourself! You won’t call a guy your boyfriend because he might get fat from consuming fermented yeast drinks! Who are you to talk?!
ZeldaQueen: That’s not even going into how she bases her relationships on how hot the boy is, while they have the actual character of wet cardboard!
According to Zoey, now is actually about when she sees the vampire.
Ruin: About damn time. How much of the last few pages actually had anything to do with the upcoming plot?
ZeldaQueen: Heath being drunk does affect the climax in the stupidest way possible, but the game and the evil parents and everything? They’re more or less forgotten after Zoey goes off to frolic amongst the vampires.
Zoey starts quibbling over the semantics of calling him “dead”, saying “Okay, I realized pretty quick that he wasn't technically ‘dead.’ He was undead. Or un-human. Whatever. Scientists said one thing, people said another, but the end result was the same”.
I’m really not sure how “the end result is the same” here. A corpse can’t get up and walk and media generally shows differences between vampires who died and come back to life and vampires who are made via viruses and such. Speaking of which, we’re going to see that people know that vampires are made through some genetic quirk, I’m not sure why people would get the idea that vampires are “dead”. Even the vampires treat the “deaths” of humans who turn into fledglings as metaphorical.
Ruin: Are we supposed to take this seriously?
ZeldaQueen: I...think so?
Ruin: Really? The contradictions run far too deeply.
ZeldaQueen: Really really. If you think this is contradicting yourself, are you in for some surprises later!
Ruin: I’m coming to the conclusion that I will regret everything.
ZeldaQueen: A fine conclusion, to be sure.
Zoey mentions that she can feel the “the power and darkness that radiated from him”, which, besides making no sense (how does Zoey know what “power and darkness” feel like?), is a rather overused phrase.
Tired Metaphor: 1
Ruin: Considering that, as an ignorant human, she shouldn’t associate those feelings with this ‘monster’, the Cast ladies must be getting heavy-handed with the Foreshadowing of Epic Destiny.
Or as we know it:
SUBTLE FORESHADOWING: 1
ZeldaQueen: Which also goes the wrong way, since most people would associate “power and darkness” with “evil being”. Granted that’d be a great way to show why humans were afraid of them, but all we’re ever told is how vampires are so kind and loving and intelligent.
This is where the issue with the Tracker becomes more confusing, incidentally. Zoey recognizes that he’s a Tracker and realizes that he’s standing next to her locker and freaks out. Never mind that this is a frigging high school and he could just as easily be there for Kayla (who is also standing there). The way it’s worded, it sounds like the Trackers just choose victims and turn teenagers into vampires, when actually it’s that the teens would turn into vampires anyway and the Trackers are just glorified Wal-mart greeters herding them to the nearest House of Night.
Ruin: So the Trackers are glorified Rubeus Hagrids. “Yer a vampire, Zoey.”
ZeldaQueen: Pretty much, yeah, if Hagrid were a ton more boring and purple and useless. Seriously, just look at this.
“Then the vampyre spoke and his ceremonial words slicked across the space between us, dangerous and seductive, like blood mixed with melted chocolate.
‘Zoey Montgomery! Night has chosen thee; thy death will be thy birth. Night calls to thee; hearken to Her sweet voice. Your destiny awaits you at the House of Night!’
He lifted one long, white finger and pointed at me. As my forehead exploded in pain Kayla opened her mouth and screamed.”
Ruin: I think the purple pained me in the face.
ZeldaQueen: *twitches* Same. Let’s just get the counts in, shall we?
Tired Metaphor: 3 (“blood mixed with melted chocolate”? “dangerous and seductive”? Really?)
Vampire Elitist Snobs: 1 (Dude, you’re there to tell her to go to the school. Fucking tell her that! Don’t make a Shakespearean production out of it!)
Ruin: “You’re going to be a vampire, and you’ve got a pretty sweet free scholarship to a quality boarding school. Come with me if you want to live.” That’s ALL you need to say.
ZeldaQueen: He doesn’t even stick around to make sure that Zoey makes it there! See what I mean about him being a more useless version of Hagrid? In Hogwarts, the people who went to talk to the Muggle-born students would sit down and say in plain English, “You’re magical, you’re invited to a boarding school to learn how to do spellwork, here’s a list of the stuff you need to buy, any questions?”
Ruin: “Also, we’ve made some concrete travel arrangements, and you shouldn’t get lost on our watch. Tell us if you need anything.”
ZeldaQueen: Precisely! Here, there’s nothing, which is especially dumb seeing as people are supposed to be super-suspicious of vampires, so there realistically should be plenty of idiots who try to prevent fledglings from going to the House of Night! In fact, spoilers, Zoey’s stepfather tries to do just that! And in the story about Boudicca and her daughters, after the daughters were marked and the Tracker who found them was killed, nobody thought to come check on them! The daughters were dragged around as sex slaves for the army their mom was fighting for an unspecified amount of time before they managed to escape.
Ruin: They had a window of less than 72 hours before they’d die if they didn’t get to the House of Night - which is precisely why this Tracker should have at least offered to stick around to escort Zoey from Broken Arrow to Tulsa and deal with any narrow-minded guardians. Because exsanguination.
ZeldaQueen: The vampires in this world are all complete and utter idiots.
Zoey wakes up with just herself and Kayla in the hallway, because apparently someone screaming and falling over doesn’t attract attention here. Kayla is a hysterical, weepy mess, freaking out because Zoey is now a vampire and will be going to the vampire school and “[w]ho [is she] supposed to go to all of [their]football games with?”
Ruin: How often do students at BASIHS get Marked? It must be fairly often.
ZeldaQueen: I… really can’t say. In Neferet’s Curse, Neferet’s mentor says that the humans vastly outnumber the vampires. Just about every significant figure in history is made a vampire though, so I still get the sense that there are a lot of them. It doesn’t help that they seem not to die of old age, so that causes their population to go up. We never hear how many students at Zoey’s high school get marked, though.
I’m just curious why Kayla’s acting like Zoey is so freaky now. Spoilers - when vampires become adults, they look and act exactly the same, except they’re supposed to be hotter and more cultured than the average human (natch) and all but guaranteed a great job. They can’t go out in the sun (at least not for long) and get sleepy during the day and stay awake during the night. Oh, and they have to drink blood (which the vampire community acquires ethically from donors) and have pretty tattoos. They don’t turn into skeletons or start hunting people murderously or anything. They aren’t even locked up in the school! We’ll later see that Zoey’s fine to take trips outside of the House of Night when she has free time, as long as she covers her mark and isn’t away for long enough to get sick. She should still be able to go to the games! Why is Kayla - or anyone for that matter - upset over this?!?
Ruin: It might be that the Cast ladies are telling us as early as possible that Kayla’s not a person to pin your hopes on. “She’s shallow! She’s inexplicably prejudiced against vampires! How many more hints do you want that she’s not to be trusted?!” Or, spoilers, Kayla may be using Zoey’s Marking to escape consequences for something she’s done as soon as possible, in which case she must be an excellent actress.
ZeldaQueen: Well, Kayla issupposed to be shallow and untrustworthy, but most of the other humans in the series act the same way. So it still makes no sense, unless the Cast ladies were trying to tell us that nearly all humans in general are shallow, inexplicably prejudiced, and untrustworthy. I mean, it made sense with the X-men because in that series, there was a chance one’s mutation would turn one into a monster or make one go insane or something. Here, there are virtually no downsides at all.
Zoey takes a moment to be grateful that she went back inside after school to get her textbook (while stretching the whole thing out waaaaaay too much to make fun of how sucky and pointless studying is, because Geometry’s haaaaaard) and thus was marked inside instead of out where all the students are. When then get an even more pointless aside in which Zoey bashes her “Barbie-clone” sister...
Miss Judgemental: 4
...And is contemptuous over how smug said sister is when she refers to the school buses as “the big yellow limos”. Uh, is it just me, or does that make no sense, as far as catty insults go?
Ruin: That really doesn’t. Is she trying to say that having some pride in your school is a bad thing?
ZeldaQueen; I think it’s more like she’s insinuating that anyone who takes the bus is slumming it, but if that’s the case, why call them limos? That’s really just a stupid insult.
It’s also hard to side with Zoey on this, considering that she goes on to say that while she has her own car, it’s apparently tradition of some sort to stand outside of the school with the “less fortunate” students. I’m sure they appreciate those sentiments, Zoey.
Miss Judgemental: 5
Also, when I went to high school, I bloody well walked to and from. And unless I was meeting someone, I left right after school. *waves cane*
Ruin: I took three buses to get to school everyday; wasting a further 45 minutes hanging out with people who ignored you anyway is not my idea of a good time.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. Also, that entire section about the buses was entirely pointless.
As it is, besides Kayla, the only person hanging around is a boy, described as “a tall thin dork with messed-up teeth, which I could, unfortunately, see too much of because he was standing there with his mouth flapping open staring at me like I'd just given birth to a litter of flying pigs”. Well then.
Stereotypes Mambo: 2
Also, maybe he’s staring because you just fell over and then had a loud, sobby conversation with Kayla. Given that it’s after school and the halls are pretty empty, Kayla’s freak-out should be really loud and obvious. Zoey, please get your head out of your ass for a minute and think.
Miss Judgemental: 6
Zoey coughs and the boy - who Zoey continues to refer to as “[t]he dork”, despite knowing fuck-all about him -
Miss Judgemental: 7
goes running off with what’s apparently a chess board clutched to his “bony” chest. Zoey mentally notes that he must be there for the chess club meeting, because obviously guys who are tall and thin and have bad teeth are also dweeby chess club nerds. I’m surprised the Cast ladies didn’t think to have him spout off some gratuitous D&D references.
Stereotypes Mambo: 3
Ruin: Fun fact: BASIHS doesn’t have a chess club.
ZeldaQueen: Considering how self-absorbed Zoey is, it would not surprise me if she actually had no idea what clubs the school did and didn’t have.
Ruin: (Zoey): “Extra-curriculars are for the hoi-poi-loi, duh.”
This diatribe coming up is seriously on my shit list.
ZeldaQueen: Which makes it extra-hypocritical, considering that the later books essentially having Zoey and her friends acting as the student council of the House of Night.
Zoey goes on to give her internal musings, which are oh-so-clever and charming.
“Do vampyres play chess? Were there vampyre dorks? How about Barbie-like vampyre cheerleaders? Did any vampyres play in the band? Were there vampyre Emos with their guy-wearing-girl's-pants weirdness and those awful bangs that cover half their faces? Or were they all those freaky Goth kids who didn't like to bathe much? Was I going to turn into a Goth kid? Or worse, an Emo? I didn't particularly like wearing black, at least not exclusively, and I wasn't feeling a sudden and unfortunate aversion to soap and water, nor did I have an obsessive desire to change my hairstyle and wear too much eyeliner.”
Truly, nothing makes for a good young adult series like alienating a large chunk of your potential readership.
Stereotypes Mambo: 7
Ruin: And “guy-wearing-girl’s-pants weirdness”? Yeah, that’s not erring on the side of ignorant/transphobic or anything.
ZeldaQueen: Now Ruin, don’t be silly! This series is very progressive and sensitive towards non-heteronormative relationships, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
*coughs*
In any case, so nice to see Our Heroine being so open-minded about ways of living that aren’t her own.
Miss Judgemental: 15
Zoey nearly has a laughing mad fit and Kayla nervously asks if she’s feeling okay. Zoey whines about how Kayla’s still not coming near her, even though Zoey is currently nearly coughing up a lung and almost laughing hysterically, both of which I would take as signs to stay away from a person. Zoey gets pissed because she and Kayla have been friends since the third grade, and now she’s turning on her. That tidbit might have carried more weight if we’d have known Kayla for longer than… *counts* nine pages.
Ruin: It might have carried more weight if Zoey hadn’t spent those nine pages flinging nothing but contempt at her.
ZeldaQueen: Doubly so since the Cast ladies are going to treat this brief moment of distress and confusion from Kayla as sufficient grounds to prove that she’s a heinous bitch. Apparently she’s throwing away years of friendship when she doesn’t feel comfortable with Zoey touching her, but Zoey’s perfectly within her rights to call Kayla a skank and threaten her life (but more on that later).
Zoey makes a brief but somewhat glurgy speech about how she’s still the same person, blah, blah, blah, and then Kayla’s cell phone goes off
Ruin: The ringtone is ‘Material Girl’. Oh, how telling!
Stereotypes Mambo: 8
ZeldaQueen: The call is apparently from Kayla’s boyfriend, Jared (who we’ll never see and never hear about again after a brief mention later, so there’s really no point in having him at all), and Zoey tells Kayla that it’s okay and to go ride home with him. Kayla is relieved at this and, yet again, Zoey feels all hurt and betrayed by the fact that her friend wants to leave a stressful and awkward situation. I could understand this working if it were played as both of the girls were upset and reacting badly from the stress, but it’s never portrayed like that. Zoey never considers that maybe, just maybe, she misunderstood her long-time friend. Kayla, meanwhile, is turned into a very minor Mean Girl side villain for the rest of the series.
Ruin: Wouldn’t her inclusion in the story make more sense if more was done with her?
ZeldaQueen: You’d think so, but the Cast ladies have a fondness of using characters as springboards for hating and bashing. I personally suspect that Kayla, like we’ll see later with Elliot, is based on someone one of the Cast ladies knows in real life and doesn’t like. The pettiness they treat her with feels uncomfortably personal, at least to me.
So yeah, Kayla goes running off, talking into her cell phone the whole time, probably because don’t you know that shallow, stupid high school girls yammer on their cell phones the whole time…
Stereotypes Mambo: 9
… And Zoey talks about how she’s no doubt gossiping with Jared about how “I was turning into a monster”. No, I don’t know how she decided this, besides the fact that she seems determined to think of Kayla in the worst light possible. I’m sure Kayla is telling Jared what happened, but there’s a difference between “My friend just turned into a vampire!” and the “Ew, Zoey’s now a bloodsucking freak!” that’s being implied.
Miss Judgemental: 16
We then get to see the Cast ladies make an incredibly lame attempt at telling us that there’s conflict ahead.
“The problem, of course, was that turning into a monster was the brighter of my two choices. Choice Number 1: I turn into a vampyre, which equals a monster in just about any human's mind. Choice Number 2: My body rejects the Change and I die. Forever.
So the good news is that I wouldn't have to take the geometry test tomorrow.
The bad news was that I'd have to move into the House of Night, a private boarding school in Tulsa's Midtown, known by all my friends as the Vampyre Finishing School, where I would spend the next four years going through bizarre and unnameable physical changes, as well as a total and permanent life shake-up. And that's only if the whole process didn't kill me.”
ZeldaQueen: Doesn’t that sound interesting, Ruin? Aren’t you looking forward to a vampire series about an attractive teenage girl actually turning into a hideous monster?
Ruin: I’d read that, but that series isn’t this one.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. Light spoilers, people - those “bizarre and unnameable physical changes” Zoey mentioned? Humans turning into vampires become gorgeous, pale, get tattoos in artful places on their bodies, and their nails grow long. That’s it. They don’t smell bad, they don’t get strange eye colors, they don’t move like animals, they don’t act feral, they’re totally normal people. And Zoey (and every other frigging person in this series) ought to know this because prominent social figures as far back as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen have been vampires! We’re going to hear about there are famous musicians and actors who are vampires in modern times! People should be well aware that anyone turning into a vampire comes out more or less the same!
The same goes for the whole “Oh, I have to go to that creepy vampire finishing school” baloney. The school isn’t hidden behind some glamor or guarded at all times. It’s an ordinary building which is ridiculously luxurious. The second book shows that parents go in for designated days to meet the teachers and their kids, so again there’s no reason for the human community to not hear about what it’s like in there!
Now, would you say that the whole “I’m a vampire and that makes me a monster by default” thing counts as a tired metaphor?
Ruin: I’d say so, since it has no basis in the reality of this world and not even Zoey can keep that straight - one minute she’s talking about a Tracker with beautiful blue eyes speaking ceremonial words ‘like blood mixed with melted chocolate’, the next she’s bemoaning a fate that involves ‘turning into a monster’.
ZeldaQueen: Alrighty then!
Tired Metaphor: 4
Smells Like Teen Spirit: 1
Because “total and permanent life shake-up”? While she’s apparently terrified about what’s going to happen to her future? Really now?
So yeah, Zoey whines about how neither option appeals to her. And sorry for dumping another large quote, but… Jesus Christ.
“I just wanted to attempt to be normal, despite the burden of my mega-conservative parents, my troll-like younger brother, and my oh-so-perfect older sister. I wanted to pass geometry. I wanted to keep my grades up so that I could get accepted into the veterinary college at OSU and get out of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. But most of all, I wanted to fit in-at least at school. Home had become hopeless, so all I was left with were my friends and my life away from my family.”
ZeldaQueen: Urgh, where to start?
Ruin: Yikes, the first sentence, maybe?
ZeldaQueen: Good one. Here’s a tip, Cast ladies - if you want us to believe that your protagonist is suffering from a horrible home life, it helps if you don’t have her sound like a whiny brat who’s pissed that she can’t have a fifth cell phone after losing the last one running from the police at a kegger. Especially since “I have strict parents and annoying siblings” is something just about EVERY teenager has complained about at some point, whether or not it’s a legit problem!
Smells Like Teen Spirit: 2
Miss Judgemental: 19 (one for her parents, her brother, and her sister)
Ruin: I know I complained about my family as a teen, but I have a feeling it was for worse reasons than what Zoey’s dealing with.
ZeldaQueen: Well, her family does virtually nothing to actually hamper her life or choices. But we’ll get to that when we meet them in the next chapter. For now, let’s take a look at her “I have only my FRIIIIENDS” pity party there. Yeah, Zoey, I sure do believe you value your friends. That’s why you only seem to have one and you spend all your time talking about how stupid and ditzy she is. That’s why you only consider breaking up with your boyfriend (who we’ll later see has loved you for many years) because he’s going to be fat and smell bad, ew! That’s why you’ve already driven the Miss Judgemental count up to 16 with the catty and nasty descriptions of the other people at your school.
Also? You’re dating one of the football stars. In the later books, you’re going to mention how you often hung out at parties with the popular kids because you were there with Heath. I refuse to believe you “can’t fit in”, especially since you fit in just fine with the vampires and WE JUST MET YOU AND HAVE YET TO SEE YOU INTERACT WITH ANYONE!
Ruin: For someone with ‘mega-conservative’ parents, she’s been to more high school parties and functions than I have.
ZeldaQueen: She goes to parties, goes to sports games, and has a boyfriend. Yeah, that really sounds like her parents are controlling her life.
Ruin: Honestly, the Cast ladies should watch a few episodes of ‘Gilmore Girls’. Even in that happy show, they’d learn a thing or two about super-strict parents controlling their daughters’ lives.
ZeldaQueen: Or the very brief origins comic for Emma Frost. Her home life was utterly horrific. As an example, when her dad realized she was developing a precocious crush on a teacher because said teacher was actually praising her academic work and giving her a sense of self-worth and indirectly causing her to want to make her own career choices (as opposed to what HE wanted her to do), he arranged for Emma to accidentally be left stranded while getting a ride home so that the teacher would, by coincidence, give her a lift. She kissed the teacher in a moment of passion, her dad snapped a picture, the teacher got fired. All that because his daughter told him that she was going to make her own choices about her career and life.
Zoey continues to whine about how she’s lost even the small opportunity to have a life outside of her family. Dear lord above, YOU JUST SAID YOU WERE GOING TO A VAMPIRE FINISHING SCHOOL! This should be a dream come true for you! YOU GET TO MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR PARENTS FOREVER!!! Did the Cast ladies not read Harry Potter? Because when he was told, “You’re a wizard and you get to move away from your mean relatives and spend the rest of your school life living in a castle learning magic”, his response was a kid-friendly version of “FUCK YEAH!”
Ruin: Exactly! Because that poor boy had been abused his whole life and was being offered a way out.
ZeldaQueen: I could understand if the idea of moving out at the cost of turning into another species was frightening, but like I said, there’s absolutely no reason she should be going into this blind!
So Zoey uses her bangs to cover the tattoo marked on her forehead. And yes, it’s called her “Mark”. And no, I refuse to call it that. It’s a fucking tattoo used to show she’s a fledgling.
Vampire Elitist Snobs: 2
She goes to leave, with her head ducked down and generally acting as noticeable and suspicious as humanly (or vampirely, I guess *rim shot*) possible. I’m reminded of Johnny Tremain, where the titular character has his hand burned in an accident and later, after some character development, realizes that if he acts like his hurt hand is some ultra-gross thing, people naturally react with horror towards it. If he acts naturally and doesn’t draw attention to it, people don’t notice it. That’s how people work, you know?
Ruin: Not that the Cast ladies seem to have figured out.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. They seem to follow Meyer’s school of thought, that having your characters be as obvious as possible is a clever way of being sneaky.
So yeah, Zoey stops at the door and sees that there’s a group of people flocked around Heath. She takes a moment to disdain both the girls for being flirty and the boys for “[trying] (but mostly fail[ing]) to look cool”...
Miss Judgemental: 21
… Before disdainfully thinking “Doesn't it figure that I would choose that to be attracted to?”. Uhhhh… what does that mean? You’re pissy because people gather around Heath? It would seem to me that being able to attract friends is a good quality. Or are you upset that your boyfriend attracts people you deem to be losers? In that case, the social circles you approve of are quite limited. And again, you talking like this doesn’t convince me that you cling to the life you have outside of your family.
Miss Judgemental: 22
Ruin: Something tells me this is why she ‘doesn’t have many friends’ and doesn’t feel like she fits in. This judgemental side of hers is going to stop her from getting to know people who may actually become really good friends… then again even if she did, she’d probably talk smack about them behind their backs.
ZeldaQueen: To add another layer of uncomfortableness to this, Kristin Cast has openly admitted to Zoey being based off of her and the decisions she’d make if she were in the story. Yeeeeeeeah… Just keep that one in mind…
Ruin: I will. Remind me to never attempt to be friends with Kristin.
ZeldaQueen: Don’t worry, I will.
Well, Zoey is in the process of a life-changing species-change, but she still has time to whine about a girl named Kathy Richter, a character who we never heard of before and will never hear about again, so there’s zero purpose to including her. She’s apparently “the biggest ho in school” and shows this off by smacking Heath, which Zoey insists is “obvious she thought hitting him was some kind of mating ritual”
Let’s Have A Ho-Down: 1
Miss Judgemental: 23
I guess there’s also the possibility that she’s just being playful, but that can’t be true. Zoey called her a slut and in this series, that’s automatic grounds for hating someone. If you think I’m joking, just you wait. Me, I’m just wondering why the hell the Cast ladies thought that was necessary. It just leads directly to Zoey wangsting that she can’t possibly reach her car without being seen, and it was already established that there were a lot of teenagers in the area. Do the Cast ladies really and truly think that it’s sympathetic to have Zoey talk like that? Or is this them trying to have her be Hip to our Jive? If so, I promise, it’s not a dealbreaker to have a teenage character who talks like that. Many don’t. I swear, no one’s going to say, “She isn’t calling girls ‘hos’! That’s not a believable teenager!”
Ruin: It’s not a dealbreaker! Honestly, I wish I saw more books where teen girls weren’t calling other girls whores and attacking each other due to an overdose of internalised sexism.
ZeldaQueen: Hell, that’s one of the reasons I loved The Princess and the Frog so much! Tiana and Charlotte were best friends, then they fell in love with the same guy… and they STILL were best friends! In fact, Charlotte stepped aside when she saw that Tiana and Naveen were in a real true love fairy tale romance!
But yeah, the Cast ladies slut shame a LOT and it’s horrible. It’s not just this series, incidentally. I’ve read some of PC’s works. Her stories, marketed as feminist fantasies that empower women, have it as well. How, I ask you? How?
*rubs temples* Right, moving on. Zoey thinks about something actually relevant, specifically how she saw the last kid at her high school who got turned into a vampire. He was changed on his way to first period (or “his first hour” as Zoey puts it, do they call it something different in Oklahoma?) and got changed in the middle of a crowded hallway. That lead to him running away crying, because we all know how humiliating it is for people to see you changing. *rim shot*
Zoey remembers how the halls were all crowded and everyone, herself included, backed away from the kid as he bolted from the hallway. She treats this like them viewing him as a pariah, but I have to wonder what else people would have done. In my high school hallways, if anyone, vampire or not, decided to go tearing down them, everyone would back up so they didn’t get run over. High school hallways are crowded and tend to have idiot students roughhousing. It would be common sense to back away from someone moving quickly and clearly too upset to care if they ran into another person.
Ruin: It would make perfect sense, yes, but I’m not certain on the irony of her not helping the boy because she “hadn’t wanted to be labeled as that-one-girl-who’s-friends-with-those-freaks”.
ZeldaQueen: Could she even have done anything to help him? She clearly understands that there’s no turning back once a person’s been changed into a vampire and the kid was running out of there ASAP, so it’s not like she had time to cheer him up or offer a ride to the HON or anything.
Ruin: True, which makes me wonder why she regrets ‘not helping’ if there’s nothing she could do.
ZeldaQueen: It would have made more sense if, say, someone decided to beat the kid up as he ran from the school and Zoey and a few others saw it and opted to walk away. That would have been believable as a traumatic experience where it was understandable that Zoey would have found it difficult to do something at the time, but in hindsight she wished she had.
Zoey slips off into the bathroom solely so we can have the obligatory Mary Sue badfic moment where she looks in the mirror and gives us an infodump on her appearance, which of course is given in as flattering a manner as possible. Here we go.
“It was like staring into the face of a familiar stranger. You know, that person you see in a crowd and swear you know, but you really don't? Now she was me- the familiar stranger.
She had my eyes. They were the same hazel color that could never decide whether it wanted to be green or brown, but my eyes had never been that big and round. Or had they? She had my hair-long and straight and almost as dark as my grandma's had been before hers had begun to turn silver. The stranger had my high cheekbones, long, strong nose, and wide mouth-more features from my grandma and her Cherokee ancestors. But my face had never been that pale. I'd always been olive-ish, much darker skinned than anyone else in my family. But maybe it wasn't that my skin was suddenly so white…maybe it just looked pale in comparison to the dark blue outline of the crescent moon that was perfectly positioned in the middle of my forehead. Or maybe it was the horrid fluorescent lighting. I hoped it was the lighting.
I stared at the exotic-looking tattoo. Mixed with my strong Cherokee features it seemed to brand me with a mark of wildness…as if I belonged to ancient times when the world was bigger…more barbaric.”
ZeldaQueen: *folds hands in front of her* Hmm, I’d say that this right here sums up a major issue with the series - the usage of the Magical Native American stereotype. Ruin, how familiar are you with that trope?
Ruin: Well, it’s the whole ‘paint with the colours of the wind’ thing, isn’t it? The idea of ‘the noble savage’ who is on one hand ‘wild, uncivilised’ like an animal, and on the other hand ‘spiritual, in touch with Mother Earth, practically magical’. ‘Magical Native Americans’ tend to be used as supporting characters in the adventures of white main characters, as with the ‘Magical Negro’ trope (see Morpheus of the Matrix), but the main deal is that they’re not portrayed as real people with real feelings, or flaws - they can be mentors, or sidekicks, or simply ‘mysterious and misunderstood natives’, but not actual people with their own stories and goals. But that’s my understanding.
ZeldaQueen: Well, mostly people think of the first part of that - the idea that Native Americans are inherently more in-tune with nature because they’re closer to the earth and such. These days, it’s like the Magical Negro trope in that it’s something Native Americans in real life want to discourage - like you said, it’s not about real people. It might be a nice stereotype, but it’s still a stereotype. It’s like thinking that all Chinese people are master martial artists. It’s harmful in that it doesn’t show people of that group as actual people.
The Cast ladies don’t seem very aware of that trope, because just about every Native American character in this series (and again, other works of PC Cast) are knowledgeable about their mythology, spiritually in-tune, and have some capability to perform magic. In all fairness, we’re going to see other characters who can work magic as well. But the Native American characters act like it’s totally normal for all of them collectively to know their mythologies backwards and forwards and believe in it like it’s real. To go back to my comparison, it’d be like expecting all Chinese-American people to not only be able to rattle off all their mythologies, but believe in it. Sure, some would and plenty would know some of the stories, but not all would. And making this even more telling, we’re going to see in the next chapter that Zoey and her equally- Magical Native American grandmother treat her native-descended mother like some sort of traitor because she doesn’t memorize their legends and is happy to marry and settle down in suburbia and not know what a fucking Yule log is (and yes, the third book bashes her for that).
I’m sure the Cast ladies wanted Zoey to be a character who took pride in her heritage, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that said heritage is described in an exotic, fetishized way. Oh look, she’s got exotic dark skin and hair! Oh look, she has a tattoo that makes her look like a barbarian from the days of yore! If she weren’t in the bathroom, I’d half-expect to see her posing dramatically on a rock as John Smith came by.
Stereotypes Mamba: 10
Ruin: Just thinking about that makes me feel sick, I’ll be honest.
ZeldaQueen: It makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. It’ll only get worse when Grandma Redbird and her gratuitous Cherokee shows up.
And speaking of uncomfortable topics to address… okay, we just talked about how the Cast ladies pulled up one trope that ought to be avoided when using an ethnic character. Here’s another. However stereotypical she was written, the Cast ladies clearly did want Zoey to be seen as clearly Native American. That’s who she is and they made sure her features just screamed “CHEROKEE” at us (which I suspect wouldn’t work that way genetically because her dad was Caucasian, but whatever).
Well, right now, the Cast ladies just whitewashed her.
That’s what that is. She turns into a vampire, she suddenly became pale.
Ruin: Didn’t they learn when Meyer tried to pull that shit?
ZeldaQueen: Apparently not! And what’s more, this makes even less sense than when Meyer tried to pull it! She, at least, gave a weak-ass justification for her vampires losing color. Yes it made fuck-all sense, but she knew to put it in. The Cast ladies wanted to have scientific vampires as well, but I have noclue why their vampires would go pale! We’re given some nonsense about hormones and junk DNA being the reason for the sickness (and yes, we’ll be sporking that part when it’s relevant in the next chapter), but I fail to see how that would make someone get more pale. The Cast ladies probably had it happen because older sources described vampires as being pale… except in those cases, the vampires were dead! These ones clearly aren’t, they still have blood, so why do they go pale?!?
Ruin: Because regardless of whether your characters are POC or not, vampires are ‘pale’, so Zoey should be pale here?
ZeldaQueen: >_< But if your vampires are scientific, they should have a scientific reason to be pale. It’s logical! *furiously rubs head* Okay, so point is, if you’re writing about a POC character, saying that they turned pale is really not a good idea, regardless of if it’s expected in media.
Stereotypes Mambo: 11
Then, there’s the last thing to address. Uh, Cast ladies? If you’re going for the whole “look in the mirror and be horrified by the changes” thing, it helps to actually have changes happen. Saying “her eyes are a little bigger and rounder and she’s a little more pale” doesn’t count, unless she’s morphing into a live action anime character.
Ruin: I don’t think it counts at all. It’s an opportunity to wax lyrical about Zoey’s beauty, as well as her white-washed but CHEROKEE appearance. I’d say ‘’that’s it’, but it’s ten times worse when we see that she’s not only, suddenly, happy about not belonging, but also proclaiming that “deep inside of me the blood of my grandmother’s people rejoiced”.
ZeldaQueen: Yeah, I doubt the Cherokee would have rejoiced about her being a bloodsucking being. And she still seemed to indicate that she was a “stranger in the mirror”, which makes no sense. She still has the same features. Is she so shallow that that’s all it takes to confuse her?
No, wait, don’t answer that.
And that’s all for Chapter 1, ladies and gents. Man, we’ve got a journey ahead of us!
Ruin: Indeed! Join us next time for chapter 2 - if you can stomach it!
Tired Metaphor - 4
Sledgehammer Of Symbolism - 0
Miss Judgemental - 23
As Paris In The Spring - 0
Stereotypes Mambo - 11
Procrastinators Unite Tomorrow - 0
SUBTLE FORESHADOWING - 1
Smells Like Teen Spirit - 2
Vampire Elitist Snobs - 2
All The Beautiful People - 1
Interfaith Smoothie - 0
AU Doesn’t Work Like That - 1
Speshul Snowflake: 0
My Deus Ex Machina Senses Are Tingling: 0
Let's Have A Ho-Down: 1
Acknowledgments | Table of Contents | Chapter 2
Ruin: Yes!
ZeldaQueen: Brilliant!
Chapter 1
ZeldaQueen: We start off with an opening sentence that’s actually rather promising - “Just when I thought my day couldn't get any worse I saw the dead guy standing next to my locker”. Now, that sort of opening sentence actually gets one thinking. Is there a zombie? Is she going to be attacked? If so, the fact that she’s being so casual about it is kind of interesting. What do you think is going to happen next, with an opening sentence like that?
Ruin: Honestly? I’d have thought, with a sentence like that, we’d be greeted with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style opener.
ZeldaQueen: Same. Actually, I’m reminded of the opening of an episode of Archie’s Weird Mysteries, where Veronica has a dream that she’s going through her locker at school and, when a vampire goes to attack her, she casually zaps him away with a magic pendant while complaining on her cell phone about how a flock of bats messed up her hair.
Here, we get neither of those examples. Instead, we’re “treated” to hearing about how Zoey’s best friend (or best friend for all of this chapter, as we’ll see), Kayla, is talking “in her usual K-babble”. Right. I know that friends can reach a point where they affectionately rib on each other, but given how Kayla is treated later? I don’t think that’s the case. I think Zoey’s just whining because Kayla’s talking too much.
Miss Judgemental: 1
We also hear about how Zoey was apparently the only one who noticed the vampire (for that’s what he is) until he spoke, which she somehow attributes to “more evidence of [her] freakish inability to fit in”.
Speshul Snowflake: 1
Ruin: In other words, her first concern isn’t “why is this vampire on school grounds and who gave him a hall pass?”, but how this makes her even more ‘freakish’ than ever.
ZeldaQueen: Aaaaaactually, this is where the Cast ladies start to tie their world-building into knots. The vampire Zoey is seeing is a Tracker. We’re later going to learn that Trackers are adult vampires who are given work solely based on finding teens just about to turn into fledglings, mark them with the crescent moon tattoo, and tell them in flowery prose that they’re to go to the House of Night. Apparently they have some magical sense that directs them to exactly where a transforming fledgling will be. Keep this in mind when we look at exactly how the transformation works.
For now though, from what we see in other books, a Tracker will just… enter any area to find the fledgling. They’ve been doing this since the days of Ancient Greece. By this point in history, you’d think society would be familiar enough with them that they’d recognize what the presence of one means.
AU Doesn’t Work Like that: 1
Not to mention, it brings up two other issues. The first is how Zoey even knows that this guy’s dead. The vampires just look like normal humans (albeit insanely hot, as EVERY FRICKING CHARACTER reminds us) and the only things to tip Zoey off are a few tattoos, which plenty of people have. The second is why it’s treated like Zoey has some mystical sixth sense and can magically see this guy. I don’t think it’s mentioned whether or not the Trackers turn invisible, but the short story with Boudicca has a Tracker being stabbed to death from behind, suggesting that ordinary people can see them. (Of course, Zoey only seems to see the guy for half a second, so either way, her wangst is pointless.)
Anywho, back to Kayla. She’s complaining because apparently Zoey’s boyfriend, Heath, is a football player who also gets ridiculously drunk…
Stereotypes Mambo: 1
And she feels that Zoey is being too hard on the meathead.
Ruin: Which makes me wonder why she’s being so hard on him for drinking. Does she have something against teen drinking, or just against Heath drinking?
In either case, what it boils down to is that drinking alcohol seems to cross Zoey’s line of ‘Acceptable Behaviour’, and if you cross that line, you deserve the scolding you get.
Miss Judgemental: 2
ZeldaQueen: Oh, we find out why Zoey’s against Heath’s drinking, albeit not until after Zoey tells us about how she has a horrible cough, she and Kayla both whine about Zoey’s parents enforcing a curfew for her, and Zoey takes Kayla saying “It's been like a million years since Broken Arrow beat Union” literally and uses it as an excuse to bash Kayla’s math skills.
Miss Judgemental: 3
Ruin: Is hyperbole literally that bad of a crime?!
ZeldaQueen: Coming from Kayla, apparently yes. Given how much the poor girl is bashed, I seriously have to wonder if she’s based off of a friend who Kristin had a falling out with or something. Anyway, care to guess why Zoey doesn’t want to date a chronic drunk?
Ruin: Outside of his reassessment of his life goals? “he’s going to get fat from all that beer”.
ZeldaQueen: That, and “kissing him is like sucking on alcohol-soaked feet”. Clearly, one must have one’s priorities in line for situations such as this.
Kayla admits that those two points are gross and says that it’s a pity, because Heath’s apparently incredibly hawt. Of course he is. God forbid Zoey date someone who wasn’t Mr. Hottie.
All The Beautiful People: 1
Then, we get one of the most blatant instances of hypocritical bullhonkey I’ve yet to read in anything.
“I rolled my eyes, not bothering to try to hide my annoyance at her typical shallowness.”
ZeldaQueen: Ho-ley Je-zus.
Ruin: Oh, honey, look at yourself! You won’t call a guy your boyfriend because he might get fat from consuming fermented yeast drinks! Who are you to talk?!
ZeldaQueen: That’s not even going into how she bases her relationships on how hot the boy is, while they have the actual character of wet cardboard!
According to Zoey, now is actually about when she sees the vampire.
Ruin: About damn time. How much of the last few pages actually had anything to do with the upcoming plot?
ZeldaQueen: Heath being drunk does affect the climax in the stupidest way possible, but the game and the evil parents and everything? They’re more or less forgotten after Zoey goes off to frolic amongst the vampires.
Zoey starts quibbling over the semantics of calling him “dead”, saying “Okay, I realized pretty quick that he wasn't technically ‘dead.’ He was undead. Or un-human. Whatever. Scientists said one thing, people said another, but the end result was the same”.
I’m really not sure how “the end result is the same” here. A corpse can’t get up and walk and media generally shows differences between vampires who died and come back to life and vampires who are made via viruses and such. Speaking of which, we’re going to see that people know that vampires are made through some genetic quirk, I’m not sure why people would get the idea that vampires are “dead”. Even the vampires treat the “deaths” of humans who turn into fledglings as metaphorical.
Ruin: Are we supposed to take this seriously?
ZeldaQueen: I...think so?
Ruin: Really? The contradictions run far too deeply.
ZeldaQueen: Really really. If you think this is contradicting yourself, are you in for some surprises later!
Ruin: I’m coming to the conclusion that I will regret everything.
ZeldaQueen: A fine conclusion, to be sure.
Zoey mentions that she can feel the “the power and darkness that radiated from him”, which, besides making no sense (how does Zoey know what “power and darkness” feel like?), is a rather overused phrase.
Tired Metaphor: 1
Ruin: Considering that, as an ignorant human, she shouldn’t associate those feelings with this ‘monster’, the Cast ladies must be getting heavy-handed with the Foreshadowing of Epic Destiny.
Or as we know it:
SUBTLE FORESHADOWING: 1
ZeldaQueen: Which also goes the wrong way, since most people would associate “power and darkness” with “evil being”. Granted that’d be a great way to show why humans were afraid of them, but all we’re ever told is how vampires are so kind and loving and intelligent.
This is where the issue with the Tracker becomes more confusing, incidentally. Zoey recognizes that he’s a Tracker and realizes that he’s standing next to her locker and freaks out. Never mind that this is a frigging high school and he could just as easily be there for Kayla (who is also standing there). The way it’s worded, it sounds like the Trackers just choose victims and turn teenagers into vampires, when actually it’s that the teens would turn into vampires anyway and the Trackers are just glorified Wal-mart greeters herding them to the nearest House of Night.
Ruin: So the Trackers are glorified Rubeus Hagrids. “Yer a vampire, Zoey.”
ZeldaQueen: Pretty much, yeah, if Hagrid were a ton more boring and purple and useless. Seriously, just look at this.
“Then the vampyre spoke and his ceremonial words slicked across the space between us, dangerous and seductive, like blood mixed with melted chocolate.
‘Zoey Montgomery! Night has chosen thee; thy death will be thy birth. Night calls to thee; hearken to Her sweet voice. Your destiny awaits you at the House of Night!’
He lifted one long, white finger and pointed at me. As my forehead exploded in pain Kayla opened her mouth and screamed.”
Ruin: I think the purple pained me in the face.
ZeldaQueen: *twitches* Same. Let’s just get the counts in, shall we?
Tired Metaphor: 3 (“blood mixed with melted chocolate”? “dangerous and seductive”? Really?)
Vampire Elitist Snobs: 1 (Dude, you’re there to tell her to go to the school. Fucking tell her that! Don’t make a Shakespearean production out of it!)
Ruin: “You’re going to be a vampire, and you’ve got a pretty sweet free scholarship to a quality boarding school. Come with me if you want to live.” That’s ALL you need to say.
ZeldaQueen: He doesn’t even stick around to make sure that Zoey makes it there! See what I mean about him being a more useless version of Hagrid? In Hogwarts, the people who went to talk to the Muggle-born students would sit down and say in plain English, “You’re magical, you’re invited to a boarding school to learn how to do spellwork, here’s a list of the stuff you need to buy, any questions?”
Ruin: “Also, we’ve made some concrete travel arrangements, and you shouldn’t get lost on our watch. Tell us if you need anything.”
ZeldaQueen: Precisely! Here, there’s nothing, which is especially dumb seeing as people are supposed to be super-suspicious of vampires, so there realistically should be plenty of idiots who try to prevent fledglings from going to the House of Night! In fact, spoilers, Zoey’s stepfather tries to do just that! And in the story about Boudicca and her daughters, after the daughters were marked and the Tracker who found them was killed, nobody thought to come check on them! The daughters were dragged around as sex slaves for the army their mom was fighting for an unspecified amount of time before they managed to escape.
Ruin: They had a window of less than 72 hours before they’d die if they didn’t get to the House of Night - which is precisely why this Tracker should have at least offered to stick around to escort Zoey from Broken Arrow to Tulsa and deal with any narrow-minded guardians. Because exsanguination.
ZeldaQueen: The vampires in this world are all complete and utter idiots.
Zoey wakes up with just herself and Kayla in the hallway, because apparently someone screaming and falling over doesn’t attract attention here. Kayla is a hysterical, weepy mess, freaking out because Zoey is now a vampire and will be going to the vampire school and “[w]ho [is she] supposed to go to all of [their]football games with?”
Ruin: How often do students at BASIHS get Marked? It must be fairly often.
ZeldaQueen: I… really can’t say. In Neferet’s Curse, Neferet’s mentor says that the humans vastly outnumber the vampires. Just about every significant figure in history is made a vampire though, so I still get the sense that there are a lot of them. It doesn’t help that they seem not to die of old age, so that causes their population to go up. We never hear how many students at Zoey’s high school get marked, though.
I’m just curious why Kayla’s acting like Zoey is so freaky now. Spoilers - when vampires become adults, they look and act exactly the same, except they’re supposed to be hotter and more cultured than the average human (natch) and all but guaranteed a great job. They can’t go out in the sun (at least not for long) and get sleepy during the day and stay awake during the night. Oh, and they have to drink blood (which the vampire community acquires ethically from donors) and have pretty tattoos. They don’t turn into skeletons or start hunting people murderously or anything. They aren’t even locked up in the school! We’ll later see that Zoey’s fine to take trips outside of the House of Night when she has free time, as long as she covers her mark and isn’t away for long enough to get sick. She should still be able to go to the games! Why is Kayla - or anyone for that matter - upset over this?!?
Ruin: It might be that the Cast ladies are telling us as early as possible that Kayla’s not a person to pin your hopes on. “She’s shallow! She’s inexplicably prejudiced against vampires! How many more hints do you want that she’s not to be trusted?!” Or, spoilers, Kayla may be using Zoey’s Marking to escape consequences for something she’s done as soon as possible, in which case she must be an excellent actress.
ZeldaQueen: Well, Kayla issupposed to be shallow and untrustworthy, but most of the other humans in the series act the same way. So it still makes no sense, unless the Cast ladies were trying to tell us that nearly all humans in general are shallow, inexplicably prejudiced, and untrustworthy. I mean, it made sense with the X-men because in that series, there was a chance one’s mutation would turn one into a monster or make one go insane or something. Here, there are virtually no downsides at all.
Zoey takes a moment to be grateful that she went back inside after school to get her textbook (while stretching the whole thing out waaaaaay too much to make fun of how sucky and pointless studying is, because Geometry’s haaaaaard) and thus was marked inside instead of out where all the students are. When then get an even more pointless aside in which Zoey bashes her “Barbie-clone” sister...
Miss Judgemental: 4
...And is contemptuous over how smug said sister is when she refers to the school buses as “the big yellow limos”. Uh, is it just me, or does that make no sense, as far as catty insults go?
Ruin: That really doesn’t. Is she trying to say that having some pride in your school is a bad thing?
ZeldaQueen; I think it’s more like she’s insinuating that anyone who takes the bus is slumming it, but if that’s the case, why call them limos? That’s really just a stupid insult.
It’s also hard to side with Zoey on this, considering that she goes on to say that while she has her own car, it’s apparently tradition of some sort to stand outside of the school with the “less fortunate” students. I’m sure they appreciate those sentiments, Zoey.
Miss Judgemental: 5
Also, when I went to high school, I bloody well walked to and from. And unless I was meeting someone, I left right after school. *waves cane*
Ruin: I took three buses to get to school everyday; wasting a further 45 minutes hanging out with people who ignored you anyway is not my idea of a good time.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. Also, that entire section about the buses was entirely pointless.
As it is, besides Kayla, the only person hanging around is a boy, described as “a tall thin dork with messed-up teeth, which I could, unfortunately, see too much of because he was standing there with his mouth flapping open staring at me like I'd just given birth to a litter of flying pigs”. Well then.
Stereotypes Mambo: 2
Also, maybe he’s staring because you just fell over and then had a loud, sobby conversation with Kayla. Given that it’s after school and the halls are pretty empty, Kayla’s freak-out should be really loud and obvious. Zoey, please get your head out of your ass for a minute and think.
Miss Judgemental: 6
Zoey coughs and the boy - who Zoey continues to refer to as “[t]he dork”, despite knowing fuck-all about him -
Miss Judgemental: 7
goes running off with what’s apparently a chess board clutched to his “bony” chest. Zoey mentally notes that he must be there for the chess club meeting, because obviously guys who are tall and thin and have bad teeth are also dweeby chess club nerds. I’m surprised the Cast ladies didn’t think to have him spout off some gratuitous D&D references.
Stereotypes Mambo: 3
Ruin: Fun fact: BASIHS doesn’t have a chess club.
ZeldaQueen: Considering how self-absorbed Zoey is, it would not surprise me if she actually had no idea what clubs the school did and didn’t have.
Ruin: (Zoey): “Extra-curriculars are for the hoi-poi-loi, duh.”
This diatribe coming up is seriously on my shit list.
ZeldaQueen: Which makes it extra-hypocritical, considering that the later books essentially having Zoey and her friends acting as the student council of the House of Night.
Zoey goes on to give her internal musings, which are oh-so-clever and charming.
“Do vampyres play chess? Were there vampyre dorks? How about Barbie-like vampyre cheerleaders? Did any vampyres play in the band? Were there vampyre Emos with their guy-wearing-girl's-pants weirdness and those awful bangs that cover half their faces? Or were they all those freaky Goth kids who didn't like to bathe much? Was I going to turn into a Goth kid? Or worse, an Emo? I didn't particularly like wearing black, at least not exclusively, and I wasn't feeling a sudden and unfortunate aversion to soap and water, nor did I have an obsessive desire to change my hairstyle and wear too much eyeliner.”
Truly, nothing makes for a good young adult series like alienating a large chunk of your potential readership.
Stereotypes Mambo: 7
Ruin: And “guy-wearing-girl’s-pants weirdness”? Yeah, that’s not erring on the side of ignorant/transphobic or anything.
ZeldaQueen: Now Ruin, don’t be silly! This series is very progressive and sensitive towards non-heteronormative relationships, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
*coughs*
In any case, so nice to see Our Heroine being so open-minded about ways of living that aren’t her own.
Miss Judgemental: 15
Zoey nearly has a laughing mad fit and Kayla nervously asks if she’s feeling okay. Zoey whines about how Kayla’s still not coming near her, even though Zoey is currently nearly coughing up a lung and almost laughing hysterically, both of which I would take as signs to stay away from a person. Zoey gets pissed because she and Kayla have been friends since the third grade, and now she’s turning on her. That tidbit might have carried more weight if we’d have known Kayla for longer than… *counts* nine pages.
Ruin: It might have carried more weight if Zoey hadn’t spent those nine pages flinging nothing but contempt at her.
ZeldaQueen: Doubly so since the Cast ladies are going to treat this brief moment of distress and confusion from Kayla as sufficient grounds to prove that she’s a heinous bitch. Apparently she’s throwing away years of friendship when she doesn’t feel comfortable with Zoey touching her, but Zoey’s perfectly within her rights to call Kayla a skank and threaten her life (but more on that later).
Zoey makes a brief but somewhat glurgy speech about how she’s still the same person, blah, blah, blah, and then Kayla’s cell phone goes off
Ruin: The ringtone is ‘Material Girl’. Oh, how telling!
Stereotypes Mambo: 8
ZeldaQueen: The call is apparently from Kayla’s boyfriend, Jared (who we’ll never see and never hear about again after a brief mention later, so there’s really no point in having him at all), and Zoey tells Kayla that it’s okay and to go ride home with him. Kayla is relieved at this and, yet again, Zoey feels all hurt and betrayed by the fact that her friend wants to leave a stressful and awkward situation. I could understand this working if it were played as both of the girls were upset and reacting badly from the stress, but it’s never portrayed like that. Zoey never considers that maybe, just maybe, she misunderstood her long-time friend. Kayla, meanwhile, is turned into a very minor Mean Girl side villain for the rest of the series.
Ruin: Wouldn’t her inclusion in the story make more sense if more was done with her?
ZeldaQueen: You’d think so, but the Cast ladies have a fondness of using characters as springboards for hating and bashing. I personally suspect that Kayla, like we’ll see later with Elliot, is based on someone one of the Cast ladies knows in real life and doesn’t like. The pettiness they treat her with feels uncomfortably personal, at least to me.
So yeah, Kayla goes running off, talking into her cell phone the whole time, probably because don’t you know that shallow, stupid high school girls yammer on their cell phones the whole time…
Stereotypes Mambo: 9
… And Zoey talks about how she’s no doubt gossiping with Jared about how “I was turning into a monster”. No, I don’t know how she decided this, besides the fact that she seems determined to think of Kayla in the worst light possible. I’m sure Kayla is telling Jared what happened, but there’s a difference between “My friend just turned into a vampire!” and the “Ew, Zoey’s now a bloodsucking freak!” that’s being implied.
Miss Judgemental: 16
We then get to see the Cast ladies make an incredibly lame attempt at telling us that there’s conflict ahead.
“The problem, of course, was that turning into a monster was the brighter of my two choices. Choice Number 1: I turn into a vampyre, which equals a monster in just about any human's mind. Choice Number 2: My body rejects the Change and I die. Forever.
So the good news is that I wouldn't have to take the geometry test tomorrow.
The bad news was that I'd have to move into the House of Night, a private boarding school in Tulsa's Midtown, known by all my friends as the Vampyre Finishing School, where I would spend the next four years going through bizarre and unnameable physical changes, as well as a total and permanent life shake-up. And that's only if the whole process didn't kill me.”
ZeldaQueen: Doesn’t that sound interesting, Ruin? Aren’t you looking forward to a vampire series about an attractive teenage girl actually turning into a hideous monster?
Ruin: I’d read that, but that series isn’t this one.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. Light spoilers, people - those “bizarre and unnameable physical changes” Zoey mentioned? Humans turning into vampires become gorgeous, pale, get tattoos in artful places on their bodies, and their nails grow long. That’s it. They don’t smell bad, they don’t get strange eye colors, they don’t move like animals, they don’t act feral, they’re totally normal people. And Zoey (and every other frigging person in this series) ought to know this because prominent social figures as far back as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen have been vampires! We’re going to hear about there are famous musicians and actors who are vampires in modern times! People should be well aware that anyone turning into a vampire comes out more or less the same!
The same goes for the whole “Oh, I have to go to that creepy vampire finishing school” baloney. The school isn’t hidden behind some glamor or guarded at all times. It’s an ordinary building which is ridiculously luxurious. The second book shows that parents go in for designated days to meet the teachers and their kids, so again there’s no reason for the human community to not hear about what it’s like in there!
Now, would you say that the whole “I’m a vampire and that makes me a monster by default” thing counts as a tired metaphor?
Ruin: I’d say so, since it has no basis in the reality of this world and not even Zoey can keep that straight - one minute she’s talking about a Tracker with beautiful blue eyes speaking ceremonial words ‘like blood mixed with melted chocolate’, the next she’s bemoaning a fate that involves ‘turning into a monster’.
ZeldaQueen: Alrighty then!
Tired Metaphor: 4
Smells Like Teen Spirit: 1
Because “total and permanent life shake-up”? While she’s apparently terrified about what’s going to happen to her future? Really now?
So yeah, Zoey whines about how neither option appeals to her. And sorry for dumping another large quote, but… Jesus Christ.
“I just wanted to attempt to be normal, despite the burden of my mega-conservative parents, my troll-like younger brother, and my oh-so-perfect older sister. I wanted to pass geometry. I wanted to keep my grades up so that I could get accepted into the veterinary college at OSU and get out of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. But most of all, I wanted to fit in-at least at school. Home had become hopeless, so all I was left with were my friends and my life away from my family.”
ZeldaQueen: Urgh, where to start?
Ruin: Yikes, the first sentence, maybe?
ZeldaQueen: Good one. Here’s a tip, Cast ladies - if you want us to believe that your protagonist is suffering from a horrible home life, it helps if you don’t have her sound like a whiny brat who’s pissed that she can’t have a fifth cell phone after losing the last one running from the police at a kegger. Especially since “I have strict parents and annoying siblings” is something just about EVERY teenager has complained about at some point, whether or not it’s a legit problem!
Smells Like Teen Spirit: 2
Miss Judgemental: 19 (one for her parents, her brother, and her sister)
Ruin: I know I complained about my family as a teen, but I have a feeling it was for worse reasons than what Zoey’s dealing with.
ZeldaQueen: Well, her family does virtually nothing to actually hamper her life or choices. But we’ll get to that when we meet them in the next chapter. For now, let’s take a look at her “I have only my FRIIIIENDS” pity party there. Yeah, Zoey, I sure do believe you value your friends. That’s why you only seem to have one and you spend all your time talking about how stupid and ditzy she is. That’s why you only consider breaking up with your boyfriend (who we’ll later see has loved you for many years) because he’s going to be fat and smell bad, ew! That’s why you’ve already driven the Miss Judgemental count up to 16 with the catty and nasty descriptions of the other people at your school.
Also? You’re dating one of the football stars. In the later books, you’re going to mention how you often hung out at parties with the popular kids because you were there with Heath. I refuse to believe you “can’t fit in”, especially since you fit in just fine with the vampires and WE JUST MET YOU AND HAVE YET TO SEE YOU INTERACT WITH ANYONE!
Ruin: For someone with ‘mega-conservative’ parents, she’s been to more high school parties and functions than I have.
ZeldaQueen: She goes to parties, goes to sports games, and has a boyfriend. Yeah, that really sounds like her parents are controlling her life.
Ruin: Honestly, the Cast ladies should watch a few episodes of ‘Gilmore Girls’. Even in that happy show, they’d learn a thing or two about super-strict parents controlling their daughters’ lives.
ZeldaQueen: Or the very brief origins comic for Emma Frost. Her home life was utterly horrific. As an example, when her dad realized she was developing a precocious crush on a teacher because said teacher was actually praising her academic work and giving her a sense of self-worth and indirectly causing her to want to make her own career choices (as opposed to what HE wanted her to do), he arranged for Emma to accidentally be left stranded while getting a ride home so that the teacher would, by coincidence, give her a lift. She kissed the teacher in a moment of passion, her dad snapped a picture, the teacher got fired. All that because his daughter told him that she was going to make her own choices about her career and life.
Zoey continues to whine about how she’s lost even the small opportunity to have a life outside of her family. Dear lord above, YOU JUST SAID YOU WERE GOING TO A VAMPIRE FINISHING SCHOOL! This should be a dream come true for you! YOU GET TO MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR PARENTS FOREVER!!! Did the Cast ladies not read Harry Potter? Because when he was told, “You’re a wizard and you get to move away from your mean relatives and spend the rest of your school life living in a castle learning magic”, his response was a kid-friendly version of “FUCK YEAH!”
Ruin: Exactly! Because that poor boy had been abused his whole life and was being offered a way out.
ZeldaQueen: I could understand if the idea of moving out at the cost of turning into another species was frightening, but like I said, there’s absolutely no reason she should be going into this blind!
So Zoey uses her bangs to cover the tattoo marked on her forehead. And yes, it’s called her “Mark”. And no, I refuse to call it that. It’s a fucking tattoo used to show she’s a fledgling.
Vampire Elitist Snobs: 2
She goes to leave, with her head ducked down and generally acting as noticeable and suspicious as humanly (or vampirely, I guess *rim shot*) possible. I’m reminded of Johnny Tremain, where the titular character has his hand burned in an accident and later, after some character development, realizes that if he acts like his hurt hand is some ultra-gross thing, people naturally react with horror towards it. If he acts naturally and doesn’t draw attention to it, people don’t notice it. That’s how people work, you know?
Ruin: Not that the Cast ladies seem to have figured out.
ZeldaQueen: Indeed. They seem to follow Meyer’s school of thought, that having your characters be as obvious as possible is a clever way of being sneaky.
So yeah, Zoey stops at the door and sees that there’s a group of people flocked around Heath. She takes a moment to disdain both the girls for being flirty and the boys for “[trying] (but mostly fail[ing]) to look cool”...
Miss Judgemental: 21
… Before disdainfully thinking “Doesn't it figure that I would choose that to be attracted to?”. Uhhhh… what does that mean? You’re pissy because people gather around Heath? It would seem to me that being able to attract friends is a good quality. Or are you upset that your boyfriend attracts people you deem to be losers? In that case, the social circles you approve of are quite limited. And again, you talking like this doesn’t convince me that you cling to the life you have outside of your family.
Miss Judgemental: 22
Ruin: Something tells me this is why she ‘doesn’t have many friends’ and doesn’t feel like she fits in. This judgemental side of hers is going to stop her from getting to know people who may actually become really good friends… then again even if she did, she’d probably talk smack about them behind their backs.
ZeldaQueen: To add another layer of uncomfortableness to this, Kristin Cast has openly admitted to Zoey being based off of her and the decisions she’d make if she were in the story. Yeeeeeeeah… Just keep that one in mind…
Ruin: I will. Remind me to never attempt to be friends with Kristin.
ZeldaQueen: Don’t worry, I will.
Well, Zoey is in the process of a life-changing species-change, but she still has time to whine about a girl named Kathy Richter, a character who we never heard of before and will never hear about again, so there’s zero purpose to including her. She’s apparently “the biggest ho in school” and shows this off by smacking Heath, which Zoey insists is “obvious she thought hitting him was some kind of mating ritual”
Let’s Have A Ho-Down: 1
Miss Judgemental: 23
I guess there’s also the possibility that she’s just being playful, but that can’t be true. Zoey called her a slut and in this series, that’s automatic grounds for hating someone. If you think I’m joking, just you wait. Me, I’m just wondering why the hell the Cast ladies thought that was necessary. It just leads directly to Zoey wangsting that she can’t possibly reach her car without being seen, and it was already established that there were a lot of teenagers in the area. Do the Cast ladies really and truly think that it’s sympathetic to have Zoey talk like that? Or is this them trying to have her be Hip to our Jive? If so, I promise, it’s not a dealbreaker to have a teenage character who talks like that. Many don’t. I swear, no one’s going to say, “She isn’t calling girls ‘hos’! That’s not a believable teenager!”
Ruin: It’s not a dealbreaker! Honestly, I wish I saw more books where teen girls weren’t calling other girls whores and attacking each other due to an overdose of internalised sexism.
ZeldaQueen: Hell, that’s one of the reasons I loved The Princess and the Frog so much! Tiana and Charlotte were best friends, then they fell in love with the same guy… and they STILL were best friends! In fact, Charlotte stepped aside when she saw that Tiana and Naveen were in a real true love fairy tale romance!
But yeah, the Cast ladies slut shame a LOT and it’s horrible. It’s not just this series, incidentally. I’ve read some of PC’s works. Her stories, marketed as feminist fantasies that empower women, have it as well. How, I ask you? How?
*rubs temples* Right, moving on. Zoey thinks about something actually relevant, specifically how she saw the last kid at her high school who got turned into a vampire. He was changed on his way to first period (or “his first hour” as Zoey puts it, do they call it something different in Oklahoma?) and got changed in the middle of a crowded hallway. That lead to him running away crying, because we all know how humiliating it is for people to see you changing. *rim shot*
Zoey remembers how the halls were all crowded and everyone, herself included, backed away from the kid as he bolted from the hallway. She treats this like them viewing him as a pariah, but I have to wonder what else people would have done. In my high school hallways, if anyone, vampire or not, decided to go tearing down them, everyone would back up so they didn’t get run over. High school hallways are crowded and tend to have idiot students roughhousing. It would be common sense to back away from someone moving quickly and clearly too upset to care if they ran into another person.
Ruin: It would make perfect sense, yes, but I’m not certain on the irony of her not helping the boy because she “hadn’t wanted to be labeled as that-one-girl-who’s-friends-with-those-freaks”.
ZeldaQueen: Could she even have done anything to help him? She clearly understands that there’s no turning back once a person’s been changed into a vampire and the kid was running out of there ASAP, so it’s not like she had time to cheer him up or offer a ride to the HON or anything.
Ruin: True, which makes me wonder why she regrets ‘not helping’ if there’s nothing she could do.
ZeldaQueen: It would have made more sense if, say, someone decided to beat the kid up as he ran from the school and Zoey and a few others saw it and opted to walk away. That would have been believable as a traumatic experience where it was understandable that Zoey would have found it difficult to do something at the time, but in hindsight she wished she had.
Zoey slips off into the bathroom solely so we can have the obligatory Mary Sue badfic moment where she looks in the mirror and gives us an infodump on her appearance, which of course is given in as flattering a manner as possible. Here we go.
“It was like staring into the face of a familiar stranger. You know, that person you see in a crowd and swear you know, but you really don't? Now she was me- the familiar stranger.
She had my eyes. They were the same hazel color that could never decide whether it wanted to be green or brown, but my eyes had never been that big and round. Or had they? She had my hair-long and straight and almost as dark as my grandma's had been before hers had begun to turn silver. The stranger had my high cheekbones, long, strong nose, and wide mouth-more features from my grandma and her Cherokee ancestors. But my face had never been that pale. I'd always been olive-ish, much darker skinned than anyone else in my family. But maybe it wasn't that my skin was suddenly so white…maybe it just looked pale in comparison to the dark blue outline of the crescent moon that was perfectly positioned in the middle of my forehead. Or maybe it was the horrid fluorescent lighting. I hoped it was the lighting.
I stared at the exotic-looking tattoo. Mixed with my strong Cherokee features it seemed to brand me with a mark of wildness…as if I belonged to ancient times when the world was bigger…more barbaric.”
ZeldaQueen: *folds hands in front of her* Hmm, I’d say that this right here sums up a major issue with the series - the usage of the Magical Native American stereotype. Ruin, how familiar are you with that trope?
Ruin: Well, it’s the whole ‘paint with the colours of the wind’ thing, isn’t it? The idea of ‘the noble savage’ who is on one hand ‘wild, uncivilised’ like an animal, and on the other hand ‘spiritual, in touch with Mother Earth, practically magical’. ‘Magical Native Americans’ tend to be used as supporting characters in the adventures of white main characters, as with the ‘Magical Negro’ trope (see Morpheus of the Matrix), but the main deal is that they’re not portrayed as real people with real feelings, or flaws - they can be mentors, or sidekicks, or simply ‘mysterious and misunderstood natives’, but not actual people with their own stories and goals. But that’s my understanding.
ZeldaQueen: Well, mostly people think of the first part of that - the idea that Native Americans are inherently more in-tune with nature because they’re closer to the earth and such. These days, it’s like the Magical Negro trope in that it’s something Native Americans in real life want to discourage - like you said, it’s not about real people. It might be a nice stereotype, but it’s still a stereotype. It’s like thinking that all Chinese people are master martial artists. It’s harmful in that it doesn’t show people of that group as actual people.
The Cast ladies don’t seem very aware of that trope, because just about every Native American character in this series (and again, other works of PC Cast) are knowledgeable about their mythology, spiritually in-tune, and have some capability to perform magic. In all fairness, we’re going to see other characters who can work magic as well. But the Native American characters act like it’s totally normal for all of them collectively to know their mythologies backwards and forwards and believe in it like it’s real. To go back to my comparison, it’d be like expecting all Chinese-American people to not only be able to rattle off all their mythologies, but believe in it. Sure, some would and plenty would know some of the stories, but not all would. And making this even more telling, we’re going to see in the next chapter that Zoey and her equally- Magical Native American grandmother treat her native-descended mother like some sort of traitor because she doesn’t memorize their legends and is happy to marry and settle down in suburbia and not know what a fucking Yule log is (and yes, the third book bashes her for that).
I’m sure the Cast ladies wanted Zoey to be a character who took pride in her heritage, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that said heritage is described in an exotic, fetishized way. Oh look, she’s got exotic dark skin and hair! Oh look, she has a tattoo that makes her look like a barbarian from the days of yore! If she weren’t in the bathroom, I’d half-expect to see her posing dramatically on a rock as John Smith came by.
Stereotypes Mamba: 10
Ruin: Just thinking about that makes me feel sick, I’ll be honest.
ZeldaQueen: It makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable. It’ll only get worse when Grandma Redbird and her gratuitous Cherokee shows up.
And speaking of uncomfortable topics to address… okay, we just talked about how the Cast ladies pulled up one trope that ought to be avoided when using an ethnic character. Here’s another. However stereotypical she was written, the Cast ladies clearly did want Zoey to be seen as clearly Native American. That’s who she is and they made sure her features just screamed “CHEROKEE” at us (which I suspect wouldn’t work that way genetically because her dad was Caucasian, but whatever).
Well, right now, the Cast ladies just whitewashed her.
That’s what that is. She turns into a vampire, she suddenly became pale.
Ruin: Didn’t they learn when Meyer tried to pull that shit?
ZeldaQueen: Apparently not! And what’s more, this makes even less sense than when Meyer tried to pull it! She, at least, gave a weak-ass justification for her vampires losing color. Yes it made fuck-all sense, but she knew to put it in. The Cast ladies wanted to have scientific vampires as well, but I have noclue why their vampires would go pale! We’re given some nonsense about hormones and junk DNA being the reason for the sickness (and yes, we’ll be sporking that part when it’s relevant in the next chapter), but I fail to see how that would make someone get more pale. The Cast ladies probably had it happen because older sources described vampires as being pale… except in those cases, the vampires were dead! These ones clearly aren’t, they still have blood, so why do they go pale?!?
Ruin: Because regardless of whether your characters are POC or not, vampires are ‘pale’, so Zoey should be pale here?
ZeldaQueen: >_< But if your vampires are scientific, they should have a scientific reason to be pale. It’s logical! *furiously rubs head* Okay, so point is, if you’re writing about a POC character, saying that they turned pale is really not a good idea, regardless of if it’s expected in media.
Stereotypes Mambo: 11
Then, there’s the last thing to address. Uh, Cast ladies? If you’re going for the whole “look in the mirror and be horrified by the changes” thing, it helps to actually have changes happen. Saying “her eyes are a little bigger and rounder and she’s a little more pale” doesn’t count, unless she’s morphing into a live action anime character.
Ruin: I don’t think it counts at all. It’s an opportunity to wax lyrical about Zoey’s beauty, as well as her white-washed but CHEROKEE appearance. I’d say ‘’that’s it’, but it’s ten times worse when we see that she’s not only, suddenly, happy about not belonging, but also proclaiming that “deep inside of me the blood of my grandmother’s people rejoiced”.
ZeldaQueen: Yeah, I doubt the Cherokee would have rejoiced about her being a bloodsucking being. And she still seemed to indicate that she was a “stranger in the mirror”, which makes no sense. She still has the same features. Is she so shallow that that’s all it takes to confuse her?
No, wait, don’t answer that.
And that’s all for Chapter 1, ladies and gents. Man, we’ve got a journey ahead of us!
Ruin: Indeed! Join us next time for chapter 2 - if you can stomach it!
Tired Metaphor - 4
Sledgehammer Of Symbolism - 0
Miss Judgemental - 23
As Paris In The Spring - 0
Stereotypes Mambo - 11
Procrastinators Unite Tomorrow - 0
SUBTLE FORESHADOWING - 1
Smells Like Teen Spirit - 2
Vampire Elitist Snobs - 2
All The Beautiful People - 1
Interfaith Smoothie - 0
AU Doesn’t Work Like That - 1
Speshul Snowflake: 0
My Deus Ex Machina Senses Are Tingling: 0
Let's Have A Ho-Down: 1
Acknowledgments | Table of Contents | Chapter 2