History Headscratchers / TheHouseofNight

*** Does Rephiam say the rape was done because he was genuinely attracted to the victims? For all we know, he could have done it because he was bored. Or perhaps there are no female Raven Mockers, so if he's in the mood he either has to settle for a mortal or make ADateWithRosiePalms.

* The love interests in this series ARE ALL TERRIBLE. I don't care how hot they're supposed to be, in many ways, these guys are worse that [[{{Literature/Twilight}} Edward Cullen]] when it comes to creepiness.

*** According to WordOfGod, Zoey's sister went to college and her brother stayed with their Step-Dad because he didn't care about what was going on with Zoey and that "neither of them cared because they would have come back into the story if they did." Zoey drifted apart from her brother and sister after getting Marked.

** Oh my god yes, it annoys the f---ing crap out of me. It's why I stopped after the fourth book. Besides being an AuthorAvatar, she practically has no real "qualities" to herself and she is TheChosenOne to a degree of beyond realism. I mean I though [[Manga/{{Naruto}} Sasuke Uchiha]] was bad, but this character definitely takes it UpToEleven.

** In the book Marked, Damian is a third former, just like Zoey and Stevie Rae, while Shaunee and Erin are fourth formers. It's why Zoey and Damian and Stevie Rae have the majority of their classes together. Now, the total possible time-span from Untamed (which specifically end on New Years Eve) to Destined is three months. The evidence to support this is that in the Northern hemisphere the season of winter spans from December to Feburary. In Destined, while they don't outright state the name of the current month, it's mentioned that Winter is passing and it's now Spring, which means it's now March. So, how did Damian graduate a year in the span of three months? Did he apply to be boosted up a year because he's so smart?

* This goes hand in hand with the "no family loyalties" headscratcher above. It's stated in book one that Zoey had siblings, but she hates them for really petty reasons. Apparently her little brother plays violent video games and her sisters a cheerleader. Err, okay Zoey, since those are absolutely horrible things that no nice person would do, you have every right to hate them. Since they aren't mentioned for, like, six more books, I could accept that Zoey was retconned into being an only child, but no, they're mentioned again in Awakened. Why are the mentioned? So Zoey's mom can say that she loves Zoey more than them. What. Then in the next book they're completely forgotten once again. Do you know what that means? Zoey's mom dies and they're locked completely out of the loop. They have no clue what really happened to their mom, their grandmother is too busy cleansing her lavender farm to bother to think of her grand kids who aren't named Zoey, their father hasn't been in contact with them in years. Who is taking care of them during this time? The Steploser, who has shown that he does not give a shit about them? Does Zoey even think about telling her siblings what happened? Did she even think about contacting them after changing into a vampyre? I have siblings myself and even if I don't get along with them all the time, I wouldn't completely forget about them if I changed into a vampyre!

* In Betrayed, Zoey has already seen Neferet letting the ubdead Elliot drink from her, has heard her go on several rants about how much she hates humans, had a random dream about her and Loren murdering the missing football players, has witnessed Neferet basically telling Aphrodite that God hates her, has been warned countless times by Aphrodite that Neferet is not as good as she seems as well as the fact that Neferet drugs students into forgetting their dead roommates. So when the police come to question Zoey about Heath's disappearance she... Tells them about a dream she had where the Red Fledglings kidnapped him RIGHT IN FRONT OF NEFERET. Why on EARTH would she do something so stupid?
* I usually don't criticize the story until reading it to the end, but this seriously bugs me. I just finished the very first chapter and some of the second in the first book and I was wondering: Why in holy hell did Zoey get marked by a Vampyre? Did I miss anything? Did I skipped a book? It just came out of nowhere and something...happened. Some answers would be very helpful.

* So, it's established that vampyres worship Nyx. But...if you were a Christian or Jew or Muslim or any other religion prior to being marked, would you really just drop your old religion so suddenly to adopt the vampyre one? And if you're an atheist, wouldn't you struggle to drop that lack of religious belief?

** Not to mention that Aphrodite clearly wasn't being used - she was ''forcing a motherfucking blowjob on someone''. That's like saying that a construction company is being 'used' because they remodel someone's house for free... when the owners of the house didn't want it remodeled.

* Does Zoey's blatant MarySue tendencies piss anybody else off? She's just so awesome and ''speshul'', she's the freaking avatar of an ancient vampyre goddess, guys fall in hordes at her feet, she can't shut up about her 'exotic' Cherokee heritage for more than two sentences...

*** Not to mention that she is obviously a shallow, hateful, hypocritical, judgemental, racist, homophobic, misogynistic DesignatedHero, with absolutely ZERO redeeming qualities, yet all of the "good" characters (with the exception of Aphrodite and maybe Darius) and some of the bad characters constantly bow down to her to praise her and her uber specialness, no less than 5 guys have thrown themselves at her feet wanting to tap her SUPER SPESHUL SNOWFLAKE ASS, and she has to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to be a hero because Nyx literally holds her hand and does everything for her. Notice also how anyone that Zoey truly likes and deeply cares about (Stevie Rae, Heath, Stark) NEVER stays dead because OH NO WE CAN'T HAVE ZOEY SUE HAVE TO DEAL WITH HER FRIENDS DYING CUZ SHE'LL BE SAD! She is one of the worst Canon Sues I have ever seen, even wors than Bella Swan which says a LOT.

* The lack of family loyalty. They all seem to abandon their families for vampirisim or romance. Why?

** What this troper doesn't get is why it's seen as so weird that a vampire's human family would continue to associate them. The book openly states that all vampires grow up to be hot and immortal and are totally normal besides the blood drinking thing and the discomfort from sunlight (both of which aren't the weirdest things families put up with), and that almost all vampires go on to be insanely famous and wealthy. What reason, exactly, would cause human families to hate a child being Marked so much? Granted, the vampires in the series are all pretentious asses, but that's unintentional...
*** At a guess? There was probably a vague attempt to equate vampyr...vampiry...screw it, being a vampire with some other issue that teens have to deal with like the X-Men series did, but it got lost in the rush to give Zoey more special powers.
*** In a well-written story, this would have been a (likely LGBT-related or race-related) oppression analogy complete with systematic oppression, wherein vampyre actors have to 'pass' as human in order to get film roles (and have very little if any media representation), where they are assumed to be perpetrators of violent crime while actually being the victims of violent crime (which would have made [[spoiler: the deaths of Patricia Nolan and Loren Blake]] more credible, were there a social context of hate crime), where only a few successful vampyres are openly known as vampyres, where their only option is erecting isolated communities such as their schools as a form of survival. This is not a well-written story.

** It's...erm casually mentioned that they most likely survived and were taken to the hospital down the road on time, so Zoey assumes they were alright. Possibly. Still is never resolved. [[SarcasmMode No matter though,]] [[ProtagonistCenteredMorality she got away with making out with Heath.]]

* The series jumps time constantly. The book was published in 2007, and it's an unwritten rule that unless you specifically mention the time period or imply it through description of things, that it’s set at the current time the book was published. The date seems to be confirmed when Zoey mentions going to see 300 (released 2007) with her friends. But then they mention Twitter. Twitter, that never got big until about 2009. They also mention True Blood and Glee…the former wasn’t broadcast will 2008, and the latter 2009. That’s a year gap between all these references, and it’s been less than six months in the series since Zoey got marked.

* The fact that [[WhatCouldHaveBeen so many potential plot points]] are just left hanging to make room for the RomanticPlotTumor (though I think at this point, it's safe to assume that it's now Romantic Plot Cancer... the terminal kind. Okay, I'll stop.), most notably: The subplot about the relationship between Zoey and her mother after the whole HaveYouTriedNotBeingAMonster and subsequent "Accept me mom or I won't talk to you" conversations (yeah, I know it was mostly used for AuthorFilibuster with the whole "Religious Extremists Are Evil", but it seemed that Zoey genuinely cared about her mom and hated the way she changed), and Neferet's past and her motivations (from hints in the earlier books, it seemed like Neferet was almost like Zoey in that upon being discovered, humans who supposedly loved and cared about her pulled a BurnTheWitch, or something like that. Which would explain why she became a High Priestess- to have power and prove to the humans that wronged her that she could do amazing things; subsequently, she got tempted by the Dark Side at some point. I mean, it sounds cliche, but it gives her some CharacterDevelopment, kinda makes her sympathetic, and it's still better than the Casts' explanation of "Because she's Evil. Why? Just because. So yeah. EVIL~!"). It just feels like the Casts had a plan for all of this, and somewhere along the way someone screwed up and thought, "''Well, who cares about stuff like "characters", "plot development", "well-rounded personalities", and "motivations"? What the people want to really know is WHAT SEXY SUPERNATURAL BOY ZOEY'S GONNA END UP WITH BY THE END OF THE SERIES!''" [[SarcasmMode Yeah, that's what I want to read]]; never mind the whole TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt plot, all teenage girls care about are boys, regardless of whether or not they're all-powerful messiahs with the fate of the world in their hands!

** Heath: He takes advantage of Zoey's blood lust, essentially giving her a date rape drug and justifying it to himself by saying that "she wanted it". He's essentially a rapist, despite how much he "loves" Zoey. And she believes that bullshit.
** Erik: He was actually fairly decent until Derailing Love Interests kicked in and he turned into a possessive jerk. Despite knowing that Neferit is evil, he refuses to side with Zoey because she's "a freak". Luckily, he will probably never re-emerge as a love interest.

*** ...Perhaps she sees a lot of herself in him?

* Not just Zoey either...but some of the other couples just make you go "WHY???"
** Shaymin and Nicole: Seriously...this one came out of nowhere. It was "Shaymin meets Nicole. Next moment they're a couple. Ah....what?"
** Erik and Shaunee: "Oh, I'll watch over you and all while you're channeling your element.......and wow, we make a good couple"

** The readers are shown when Zoey loses her virginity to Loren Blake and when she has sex with Stark for the first time on Skye. The readers are also shown that Zoey and Stark are now having sex regularly. The readers are even shown sex scenes involving Neferet. The entire book of Awakened has Neferet running around naked and sleeping around with Kalona and various Sons of Erebus Warriors [[BestialityIsDepraved AND A GIANT WHITE BULL]]. But when it comes to Rephaim and Stevie Rae, especially after them having to go through all different kinds of drama for them to be together, the reader is shown... Nothing. The whole thing is glossed over. [[WhatTheHellHero What the hell Writers!?]] It's especially bad as it would have been Stevie Rae's first time as well.

** It's possible the Cast women realized this and retconned it in the graphic novel (or at least whoever wrote the graphic novel thought to do so). In it, Zoey actually does care about her brother, getting angry when her stepfather brings him to a People of Faith protest, defending him from bullies after school, and having a talk with him about how she's still the same sister she always was, even if she's now a vampire. The sister on the other hand... yeah. Absolutely no mention of her.

*** No, it's not. Most is much better.

** Oh my god yes, it annoys the f---ing crap out of me. It's why I stopped after the fourth book. Besides being an AuthorAvatar, she practically has no real "qualities" to herself and she is TheChosenOne to a degree of beyond realism. I mean I though [[{{Naruto}} Sasuke Uchiha]] was bad, but this character definitely takes it UpToEleven.

----
<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

*** Zoey's brother's name is mentioned in passing as Eric. Her sister on the other hand is nameless. Apparently her reason for hating him is because he plays really violent video games. Which begs the question what small hole has Zoey been living in? Plenty of young boys and girls play violent video games, should they? Probably not. Does it make them bad people? No. But I figure that Zoey's real reason for the hatred is because he accepted their evil step-father, even though he doesn't care for them. If Zoey was a more caring or smarter person she'd realize the reason he probably accepted their step-father so easily is because their father abandoned them when they were babies and so he has no emotional attachment to him and as a growing young boy surrounded by only older female presence he'd probably want a strong male role model to look up to, even if sed role model cares nothing for him, he's an impressionable teen (around 14 I think)so his accepting the step father is completely understandable. In short Zoey is a whiny self-centered bitch, who thinks that if someone doesn't see her way, they're automatically bad or evil. In the Graphic Novels Zoey is actually closer to her brother and defends him from bullies, so maybe in the series we'll see her grow up.

** Eric: He was actually fairly decent until Derailing Love Interests kicked in and he turned into a possessive jerk. Despite knowing that Neferit is evil, he refuses to side with Zoey because she's "a freak". Luckily, he will probably never re-emerge as a love interest.
** Loren: He's one of those creepy high school teachers who get arrested for statutory rape, enough said. Fortunately, he's dead and he'll never come back.

** Daimien and Jack: "I'm gay. Are you gay? Awesome, lets go out!"
*** Also applies to Daimien and Adam

<<|ItJustBugsMe|>>

* I know this is just a case of straight women who think they love gay guys writing the books, but Damien is introduced as a 'not a fluttery gay' then spends the entire series shopping, giggling, gushing and crying. What was the point of pretending he wasn't going to be a [[AlwaysCamp walking stereotype]] the whole time?