@IvyLB can give you at least one good recc. was that rivers of london, or am i mixing up book series here?
nah rivers of london is like "Harry Potter but more adult and more snarky" You were thinking of The Black Dagger Bortherhood! Which has some content warnings and dead dove-y things and is also soft porn-y so might not be appropriate for all age groups on this forum ;D
Sunshine by Robin McKinley is pretty good, and it's a standalone. For series, I really do enjoy the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs (more focus on werewolves, but one of the main supporting cast is a vampire and vampire politics are the plot of... three of the books? Part of the focus in at least four?) and the Riley Jenson Guardian series by Keri Arthur (VERY NSFW), both of which have that overarching romance thing while doing the more mystery style plots. [Noncon warnings for both of them though. It's not a frequent thing by any means, but I'd rather not have someone caught off guard by it.] Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black is supposed to be really good. THERE'S MORE I KNOW OF but I'd have to sit down and really think about it. Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead is alright. Not great, but alright.
Re: vampires: Dead dove warning, but Fledgling by Octavia Butler is excellent. The main character is a genetically engineered super-vampire, and a lot of what makes her a super-vampire is just the fact that she's black.
Talking of FanFiction.net characters: does anyone in the Criminal Minds fandom know what the fuck MAP is? It predates the usage common on tumblr.
THAT WAS SUCH A GOOD BOOK. I fucking loved how at the start, all the vampires are like 'we don't have stupid human prejudices (despite forming intense mutualistic pairbonds with dozens of humans throughout our lives) so we can't possibly EVER be racist!'. I was like 'oh come on. you live with humans. you learn about the world from humans. you're going to be racist. humans are super good at teaching each other to be racist.' Spoiler The vampires are racist.
It's even better when it's the official translations that miss the references. (Like the localization of Knights in the Nightmare that apparently was done without access to the existing romanizations, because they came up with "Algiery" instead of "Alighieri". Or (probably) the Tales cameos that list Tales of Innocence's protag as Ruca instead of Luca. Or the millions of awkward accidents in older games, like "Exdeath" instead of "Exodus"...)
On the plus side, you do occasionally get, say, Ultros, whose name was originally a nonsensical reference, so the misspelling is kind of an improvement.
see i actually read house of night up to the second to last book because i was invested in the differences between red and blue vampires and some of the minor characters bu then Spoiler: spoilers for one of the side novellas, cw rape the authors went and made the Sexy Evil Vamp Teacher's reason for being evil the fact that she was raped as a young woman (possibly incest rape I don't remember?) and I just went drop like a hot potato because holy shit the implication of Rape Makes You Evil skeeved the fuck out of me. [/late to party probably]
You forgot about the horrifying mash of Fluffy Paganism and Native American beliefs into something that results in the most White Christian Woman Pagan Religion I've ever seen. Though I will admit that the "breaking the Magic Element Circle borks your magic" aspect of it was actually a successful way of keeping dramatic tension much of the time. YEAH IT REALLY FUCKING IS and it came hand in hand with "villain who did mythology-time-long-ago rape has a shot at redemption" which in itself isn't bad, but the timing of the two together was kind of really horrifying and I stopped reading there. I think the series is finished now, or possibly has only one book to go, but. They were trying for a theme of "it's our choices that make us good or evil and you can always choose good no matter how much evil you've done" but there's some Twilight-level fridge implications in there. (Also Twilight-level 'main character is powerful and boring, side characters are way more interesting and worth getting invested in.' I read the last handful of books BEFORE said novella for Stevie Rae and Twins Drama, not the main plot.)
given that they started coming out in the wake of twilight, i feel like some of the plot elements were Let's Get Darker And Edgier in response, because once you get past the thin veneer of bullpoopy there's some fairly horrifying things going on. Just, y'know. A horrifying case of the authors not actually knowing what the morality they're using as a guideline is, all the more horrifying because they didn't think through the implications behind going Making It Sexual Automatically Makes It Darker And Edgier Right?
so one of the first things i complained about on this thread was people who decide to put every tag under the sun in the "additional tags" section (including the people who write comments in the tags section) BUT it turns out in your ao3 preferences you can turn on "Hide additional tags (you can still choose to show them)" which basically collapses all of the additional tags on fics and then you can click "show additional tags" on a particular fic if necessary so! that makes that issue better c:
basically by having a token gay, a ~paganism~ religion, and the bit about being able to change your name and cut ties with horrible family, the Casts did a really good job of appealing to a specific section of the Teen Demographic, but a huge amount of what seemed forward-thinking about that was just dressing. The House of Night series is pretty much as White Suburban Mom in morality as anything Smeyer and her ilk produced. Like another point on the "just dressing" thing - Spoiler: these are just some actual spoilers there was a big deal made out of the fact that it's acceptable in their vamp culture for a female vamp to be poly, at least at first, because they're allowed a human partner and a vamp partner! This was great! but then Zoey's human partner gets the short end of the stick for several books and then dies. And then they acutally had her call out her nasty vamp BF for being a shit, which was good! But then she got a new BF and the whole concept of "guardians" was introduced and suddenly it's back at ONE TRUE SOULMATE kinds of ideas. (and it should be noted that I actually liked Stark, prior to him getting the Warped By Being the Hero's Boyfriend treatment. But then he got drawn into that and also the "I'm the Bad Kind of vampire, I will lose all of my actual kind of jerkish personality traits that made me interesting in favor of ANGSTING ABOUT MY DARK SIDE" bit, with a side of once he's turned back to "good" he doesn't really have any consequences about that? And then he actually does regain some jerkishness, but that's because he's ~possessed~ and I don't know how that arc ended because I stopped reading. But like. He doesn't even use his bow anymore, he became Generic Sword Dude, I'm SO disappointed by that you have no idea.) And the whole time we see Zoey supposedly adapting perfectly to her new culture, except she doesn't really? we're told but we're not shown, the only thing she really adapts to is "OH I HAVE AUTHORITY NOW TIME TO USE IT." She still frets constantly about how she's emotionally cheating by having feelings for more than one dude at once in what's basically Classic Love Triangleism. There's also like... you know how anti-feminist dudes will wail on about how feminism means that women will take all the power and basically treat the idea as "men and women will swap places and basically nothing will change"? The vamp culture in the House of Night is basically exactly like that. Women have all the positions of authority except in a certain arena which they're basically not allowed to enter (in this case, physical combat) - HMM, sure sounds like a gender swapped version of how men are treated as the default authorities in everything except raising kids. i could probably be here all day honestly
I feel like the obvious solution is to work build a better version of house of night BECAUSE I LIKE THE RED FLEDGLINGS DAMN IT and I like the markings thing damn it
