#shadowkissed

[jetsteelyourheart]

Vampire Academy Book 1 by Richelle Meade

Illustration of the accident before the series:

Excerpt from Chapter 1:

I felt her fear before I heard her screams.

Her nightmare pulsed into me, shaking me out of my own dream, which had something to do with a beach and some hot guy rubbing suntan oil on me. Images -- hers, not mine -- tumbled through my mind: fire and blood, the smell of smoke, the twisted metal of a car. The pictures wrapped around me, suffocating me, until some rational part of my brain reminded me that this wasn't my dream.

Excerpt from Chapter 22:

"Not that hurt?" he laughed. "I'm not talking about her ankle, which was still impressive. I'm talking about the car accident. Because you're right, you know. Rose didn't get 'that hurt.' She died."

He let the words sink in.

"That's... no. She lived," Lissa finally managed.

"No. Well, yes, she did. But I read the reports. There was no way she should have survived - especially with so many injuries. You healed her. You brought her back."

[thisismylovelettertoyou]

This wanting, this yearning suffocates me, held tightly in its grasp I am helpless. But if it reunites me with him in the end, I will gladly endure it.

[inprogress-predicament]

Incorrect Vampire Academy Quotes

*end of Shadow Kiss* Rose: You don't understand. Lissa: I understand you're my guardian and can't leave me. Adrian: Let her go, Cousin. Lissa: No, she can't leave Adrian. Adrian: Maybe we all need a minute to calm down. Lissa: Rose if you walk out that door, you're no longer my guardian. Rose: Good bye, Vasilisa. Christian: Lissa, calm down. I'll go get her. Christian: You Get Out Of Here, You Hear Me! Never Look Back! You Are Dead To Us! Christian: Sorry guys, there's just no getting through to that one. Adrian: Thanks Christian. That was very helpful.

[romitricrazed]

My heart is not okay

@gigi256

Shadow Kiss DPOV:

"I watched her, steady and focused, as her gaze flicked back and forth looking for any sign of deception. She had been let down before, by others and even by me, so I felt no personal offense, but I could see the moment she found what she was looking for: that perfect, honest, one hundred percent complete and total devotion to her.

Because in that moment, I knew. I knew that Rose was everything to me. She was my best friend and my confidant. She made me the best version of myself and I strived to be a little better every day just because of her. She was my love and, when she was ready, I would be honored to be her lover. She was my partner and my equal. She drove me crazy in more ways than I could image and made me feel more at peace than anything else ever could. She was my joy and my hope. I'd be lost without her, and I wasn't truly living until that wild girl walked into my life. I loved her with every fiber of my being.

And she finally knew it."

**Fangirl noise**

[authorgirl1111]

Started a vampire academy fic. Where Dimitri was killed by his father when Dimitri attacked him to stop his father from hurting his mother, but his 6 year old half sister was there (For reasons I haven't figured out yet)... and brought him back from the dead.

... Which means Dimitri from the age of 13 is bonded to his 6 year old sister.

I love my brain.

[lunentity]

𓉸♰ dark magician girl NPTs ₊ ˚ ⊹ 🪄

⧼ ✙ names ┈ hypnyra. sorcyrie. spella. duske. hazoire. eerene. cantasyia. glyra. dreerie. myrror. silouet. twyllusia

⧼ ✙ pronouns ┈ di / dim. sha / dow. sini / ster. du / dusk. som / somber. shae / shade. hae / haze. poi / poison. mi / mist. sh? / h?r. vae / vaer.

⧼ ✙ titles ┈ the shadowkissed girl. the magician of darkness. she of sinister magic. the dark spell caster. the gloomy maiden. the girl of nightfall.

━╋━━ notes ⊰ pronouns in the titles can be changed to whatever you wish. silouet is just a shortening of silhouette.

[literallyjakeyy]

fic rec !!

the sweetest kind of revenge - yeonbin

[author -> heartbeatdown (shadowkissed)]

[rated -> explicit]

[tags -> assassin/hitman au, violence, unhealthy relationship, smut]

[status -> one-shot / 13,722 words]

[summary -> Yeonjun is tracking down a hitman, who happened to have a certain dimpled smile that makes him weak on the knees.]

[link -> the sweetest kind of revenge]

[earlgreyandanime]

The Dragon and her Shadowkissed Raven

I really wish the shadow kissed raven had come up again in the series, or even become Lissa's pet/familiar.

Imagine how useful that could have been. The raven could have protected Lissa from the sky while Rose protected her on the ground.

Imagine, the raven let's out a warning call a moment before Rose gets the nauseous feeling and strigoi come out of nowhere to attack. Imagine, while the strigoi are trying to fight Rose and kill Lissa, a huge raven swoops down and starts attacking the strigoi.

Rose sometimes used the souls of the dead to defend herself. Lissa could have used a raven!

Also, since they were both shadowkissed, that raven is probably the one animal that would have no problem with Rose as a Dhampir.

Also, can the raven pull darkness from Lissa? Would it affect it the same way it affected Rose, or would being an animal somehow make it immune to the negative side effects of spirit?

[becoming-not-became]

ShadowKiss

And now as candlelight dances and plays about your body nightimes shadows stand incorners watching afraid of coming close lest they disappear inthe light not unlike my smile when upon you I do kiss

[antoniadixon]

I am also almost done with the third book of #thevampireacademy #shadowkiss if rose and dimitri is not endgame I’m going to be so mad

[cryptidconnieredbubble]

Are you a fan of a certain Shadowkissed Dhampir and her badass Russian God boyfriend? Well, I have just the merch for you, my Vampire Academy collection is now available in my store!

[pitofneverendingsarcasm]

I didn't even finish the Bloodlines series so it's really interesting to read how you felt they developed. I completely disagree about Last Sacrifice, however. I did my big reread of the books in early 2022 after nearly 12 years. When I was younger, the books I remember revisiting the most were the run of books from shadowkissed to spirit bound, but not Last Sacrifice and I couldn't figure out why. On reread though, I realised I found it a very disappointing conclusion. It works nicely for the characters in that everyone sort of ends up where they want to be. But I don't think it tied anything up in a satisfying way. That definitely fed into why I didn't enjoy Bloodlines so much, besides the fact Adrian was really starting grate. It didn't feel like a natural progression for the series because nothing in my mind had really been resolved. Again this series is old now but spoilers below the cut.

I think Last Sacrifice really drops the ball. There had been a really consistent building on the idea that the strigoi are much more dangerous than the moroi world realises and this all gets dropped really suddenly to go hunt through Eric Dragomir's dirty laundry. You don't even get to engage with the political intrigue that much, at one point Lissa is dropped into a trial (which is really badly explained) testing her mettle in the wilderness to see if she can be a good queen and we just...skip...the whole trial??

There are not one, but two restored characters who spent time as strigoi. Yet with the exception of "dimitri has some stuff to work through but don't worry he'll have it all sorted just off screen somewhere before the last chapter" the political implications of how you reintroduce these people to society is completely dropped. The assumption is that Lissa will sort everything once she's queen. But how? Why? What actually is her stance on any if this? She had an incredibly basic proposal for dhampir and moroi battle training...at a pool party....4 books ago, but she has been kind of robbed of any opportunity to actually discuss what the strategy should be going forward. And despite the series leaning heavily into the fact her relationship with rose makes her better suited to rule, she isn't actually shown to consult or discuss her politics with any of the dhampir around her in Last Sacrifice. A pretty massive flaw in the whole concert of guardians is shown in the events that lead up to Eddie's arrest and yet this doesn't become a focus of her campaign or anything.

On the point about strigoi. This has been building since book 2. Their guardians have been proved to be unprepared for the sort of organisation strigoi are proving they are capable of, moroi have the power to change their strategies and cam even protect themselves but are unwilling to. Instead, they're putting more and more dhampir in the firing line. By the end of LS, though, we haven't actually rectified anything at court. If anything, the motives of the person who just MURDERED THE HEAD OF STATE are really unclear unless you happen to know all the drama of a small group of college age teens.

I agree Mead is her best with a mystery story, but Last Sacrifice really didn't do it for me on my reread. This is a big shame because I think the series is one of the strongest ones to come out of the 2010s vampire YA period.

I know that a lot of this is down to what I was enjoying about the books, and that for a lot of people they may have been happy to see other areas explored more in LS. But I really did think that at the very least the final threat of the books would be linked to the strigoi, and its a little strange that instead the only real threat is lissa might not be able to be queen unless we can find this half sibling

Oh..no???

I know that I'm pretty late to the conversation, but I've just reread all of Vampire Academy and Bloodlines (possibly for The Untitled Jill Project) and it's the first time I've reread the VA series in years.

I'm just thinking about how, in my opinion, the quality of the VA series improved as we got into the last few books, and with Bloodlines, I think the reverse sort of happened. Spoilers for both series ahead. (Yeah, the last book came out nine years ago, but you never know.)

I think I hadn't realized how cohesive the ending of Last Sacrifice was. Details from as far back as the first book came up and were very relevant. The political plotline came together in a really tight way, Sonya Karp turned out the be Chekov's spirit user, we got more world-building details, the antagonists had complex and convoluted motivations, and even when there were plot threads left dangling, those actually served a purpose. I loved the part where Adrian pointed out to Rose that her actions had consequences and even though she had gotten what she wanted, not everything else was resolved, so people like Eddie and Sydney and Jill were left in bad situations, and she was partly responsible. It created a little more moral ambiguity, which I really enjoyed, especially since YA tends to like the very neat endings where everything winds up happily ever after.

The Vampire Academy books improved the deeper into the series you got. And, although I love Bloodlines, I do think that the first three books are much stronger than the last three. Which is a shame, because the series has so much potential.

I think Mead is at her best when she's writing something of a mystery. Last Sacrifice obviously comes to mind (they're solving a murder mystery, after all). Bloodlines had that, with the tattoos, Lee, and Keith being shady all building up to a really exciting climax. The Golden Lily wasn't quite as much of one, but the clues leading up to the reveal of the Warriors were well-placed. Indigo Spell went straight back into mystery territory, trying to find Jackie's sister. And then The Fiery Heart is where, in my opinion, things start to falter. There's a lot of interesting worldbuilding information introduced, with the new details about spirit and magic coming up, and it was fun to get into Adrian's head, but it definitely felt like this supernatural romance was shifting to become a lot more romance and a lot less concerned with the supernatural. But that's not such a big deal. It's the middle of the series, we're building tension, Re-Education has been a threat hanging over Sydney since page one of Bloodlines and we're finally seeing that fear pay off.

But then we get to Silver Shadows, and while I guess figuring out where Sydney is could be a mystery, it doesn't really resonate the way 'who killed the queen' does, in my opinion. Sydney's arc in Re-Education is great, and I do like the way the books deal with Adrian's mental health issues, but some of Adrian's chapters felt more like filler. And a bigger issue, imo, was that this was when we really started to lose the side characters. Some of my favorite parts of the first few books were characters like Jill, Eddie, Trey, and Angeline, and then the ensemble atmosphere was largely gone, because Sydney was in Re-Education and Adrian left Palm Springs. The final fight and flight sequence was really good, though, so I had high hopes going into The Ruby Circle.

The Ruby Circle is probably my least favorite of the books between both of the series, and I think that's a shame, since it's the finale. We'd just had a 'kidnapped character' arc, so I think there was less emphasis on describing everyone's reactions. We saw the biggest reaction from Eddie, but as a result, he got kind of flattened out from the really well-rounded character he'd been from the back half of the VA books and the first part of Bloodlines.

The Ruby Circle could have been a really good mystery, with lots of twists that tied up a lot of the lingering questions from the series. Except that a lot of threads from the rest of the series were dropped and didn't resurface. They never caught whoever was behind the assassination attempt on Jill. I don't think we even got an official resolution on whether Lissa managed to change the quorum law. The political plots that were integral to VA weren't significant in Bloodlines, despite it all starting because of a politically motivated assassination. We also never got a resolution on the rogue spirit user who turned Lee back from being Strigoi, or the spirit users who had been sent to the psychiatric facility in Tarasov (the prison from Spirit Bound). We never found Robert Duro. The bond itself was somewhat discarded, too, whenever it wasn't immediately useful for a plot point. Instead, we just got a scavenger hunt across the country, a few fight scenes where the protagonists were pretty much guaranteed to win, and a final showdown with a magic barrier that, as we learn after, would have dropped down on its own in a few hours for them to bring Jill food, anyways.

I obviously still like the series, since I'm rereading it and talking about it nine years after the fact. But I think that there were a lot of opportunities to continue plots from VA that were lost, even when they should have been brought back into the story.

If anyone has made it this far, I suppose I should throw in a pitch for The Untitled Jill Project, which will be my attempt to rewrite the Bloodlines series from Jill's perspective, because I think there's still a lot more story to be told. I haven't got it all mapped out, but I intend to at least tie up some of the narrative loose ends I mentioned that bothered me about the series in that story. I might write up another post here soon about how Jill's characterization also suffered as Bloodlines went on, if anyone's interested.

Anyways, if anyone has any strong opinions on what I said (agreeing or disagreeing) please let me know! I'd love to talk about the series with people, since no one in my real life has read it, and I'm curious to know what the rest of the fandom thinks about how the narrative progressed in Bloodlines.

[emma-blackthorn]

"Sydney—what’s going to make you feel better about creatures of the night? Easy escape on the first floor or distance on the second?”

— Rose Hathaway, Bloodlines: The Fiery Heart, Richelle Mead

[libraryinthecountry]

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[hathawaydontrunaway]

Straight line:

Dashed line:

Iconic line:

“It’s not about you, okay? This time, it’s about me. Not you. All my life, Lissa… all my life, it’s been the same. ‘They come first.’ I’ve lived my life for you. I’ve trained to be your shadow, but you know what? I want to come first. I need to take care of myself for once. I’m tired of looking out for everyone else and having to put aside what I want.”

[authorgirl1111]

Hey so because of spoilers... I know realize it's likely he went with Jill because she's shadowkissed. And Adrien needs to be near by to give Jill frequent healings.

Started reading bloodlines, and the moment I heard 'another moroi will be joining[Jill]" I was immediately like "Adrien. It's Adrien. Tell me it's Adrien."

And then they mentioned 'Ivashkov.'

So... given the 'Lost Chapter' I read I want to believe that Adrien decided to go with Jill for the purpose of Jill just... not being alone.

Watch it be one of the reasons Sydney falls in love with him.