55 pages • 1 hour read
Richelle MeadVampire Academy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Implicit Romance between Best Friends
Lissa and Rose enjoy an extremely close friendship, one in which they risk their lives and reputations for one another. While they also share a direct psychic bond, their friendship is the catalyst for the bond, not its effect. Over the course of the novel, Rose learns that Lissa brought her back to life in the aftermath of a car crash that killed Lissa’s entire family. This occurrence indicates that the girls’ friendship was already so strong that Lissa channeled her powers to save her best friend instead of her family. While much of the girls’ friendship shows Lissa and Rose sacrificing for one another, such as when they spend two years on the run to escape potential persecution over Lissa’s spirit power, they also derive great comfort in being one another’s primary form of social attachment. However, this dynamic is threatened when they return to St. Vladimir’s Academy, as Headmistress Kirova actively works to keep them separated and as their own social lives become more complicated.
While Lissa and Rose’s relationship is not sexual in nature, there remains a certain romance to their attachment, insofar as they each wish to be the other’s primary attachment. This sentiment is particularly strong for Rose, who feels that Lissa’s growing interest in Christian challenges her position of primacy in Lissa’s eyes. After using her psychic bond to listen in on a conversation between Lissa and Christian, Rose grows angry to realize that speaking to Christian brings Lissa “[a] feeling of peace” (119) that Rose believed to be something that “only [she] could bring” (119). In the midst of her resulting fury, Rose does not fully recognize the reasons for her frustration, but the author clearly implies that her emotion is a form of jealousy. Lissa’s budding romance with Christian forces Rose to realize that Lissa may come to care for someone else as much as or more than she cares about Rose. Because Rose has oriented her life around Lissa and plans to do so indefinitely, she feels like Christian is usurping her rightful place by Lissa’s side.
This struggle, wherein characters experience feelings of jealousy when their platonic best friends enter romantic relationships, is a common trope in YA literature, emphasizing that these emotions are heightened for adolescents as they enter their first sexual or explicitly romantic relationships. Rose comes to navigate these feelings of jealousy by accepting that she and Christian have common ground, for they both want what is best for Lissa. Moreover, her own romantic feelings for Dimitri help her to learn that developing further attachments does not diminish the bond that the two best friends already share.
Self-Preservation Versus Self-Sacrifice
This theme becomes most prominent in the novel’s climax, when Victor finally reveals himself to be the villain who kidnaps Lissa to utilize her spirit talents for his own purposes. He further reveals that he has been ordering Natalie to leave dead animals for Lissa, and he defends his actions as a function of the greater good. He admits to torturing Lissa to bring forth her powers and even goes so far as to kidnap her and force her to heal him. His justification for these actions is the dubious assertion that he will become a benevolent leader to the Moroi, and while he is aware that this stance is less than ethical, he fully believes that the ends justify the means. Ironically, even as he exploits Lissa to ensure his own self-preservations, he boldly declares that Lissa should sacrifice herself for the good of their people, asserting that the suffering of one is worth the benefit to many. Lissa does not agree with his position and works to escape Victor’s imprisonment. By contrast, Natalie accepts Victor’s logic and murders a teacher so that she can turn into a Strigoi and free him, ultimately destroying herself for a misguided and unsuccessful endeavor.
While the narrative clearly denounces the shaky rationalizations for Victor’s scheme, the novel nonetheless sets clear boundaries emphasizing the importance of taking care of oneself and refusing to allow the misguided desires of others to take priority over self-preservation. For example, the narrative implicitly supports Lissa’s contention that Victor cannot ask her to sacrifice her own happiness, health, and freedom for him; likewise, the text supports her tacit assertion that sacrifice can only be given willingly. This concept is reinforced when Natalie is killed trying to aid her father, for although Victor claims to belief that sacrifice is merited for the sake of the greater good, he ultimately proves willing to depend upon the sacrifices of others to ensure his own self-preservation.
Just as the narrative condemns Victor’s villainy, however, it also champions Lissa’s decision to prioritize her own welfare and mental health. When Lissa laments that her antidepressants prevent her from accessing her magic and comments that she “[keeps] thinking about all the things [she] could do, all the people [she] could help,” Rose retorts, “You have to help yourself first […] I don’t want you getting hurt again. I won’t let you” (322). Christian reinforces this position, and Lissa reluctantly agrees. Though the end of the novel foreshadows the idea that Lissa may be able to find a way to use her magic and preserve her mental health, her companions clearly emphasize that protecting herself is essential, implying that preventing loved ones from sacrificing themselves is itself an act of love and care.
However, voluntary sacrifice is also presented as an ethical choice in certain circumstances. For example, Rose’s decision to give up a relationship with Dimitri so that they can better protect Lissa is portrayed as a noble sacrifice, not something that is coerced. The novel portrays self-determination as being central to the idea of sacrifice when it comes to the matter of forgoing love. Because Victor gives up his daughter in a way that hurts Natalie, his choice is branded as evil, but Rose’s decision to give up Dimitri in a way that harms herself is portrayed as an expression of the intense love that she holds for her best friend.
The Complexities of High School Dynamics
Vampire Academy presents its titular setting as a place that is both distant from the real world and directly linked to it, for the school serves as a microcosm for the whole of vampiric society. Thus, the overtly petty machinations between students have material effects on the broader world of the Moroi. For example, the political maneuverings of the royal students mimic the power struggle that extends beyond the school’s campus, and the broader significance of the school itself is implied when St. Vladimir’s is deemed important enough to merit a royal visit. These larger and partially unseen connections imply that the characters’ actions at school are directly applicable to life beyond graduation.
Even so, the text wavers in defining whether these connections between school and the broader world of Moroi politics are actual or perceived. For example, Rose’s fear that her reputation as someone who connects blood-giving and sex will relegate her to a life spent as a “blood whore” in a dhampir commune is not presented as entirely immaterial. When she returns to St. Vladimir’s in the early chapters of the novel, Headmistress Kirova threatens her with expulsion, implying that she knows that Rose would be destined for these communes in such an event. However, this threat is a response to something that Rose has actually been caught doing (helping Lissa escape St. Vladimir’s), not as a response to gossip or hearsay. This difference might suggest that school gossip is only important to the teenaged students, but when Dimitri learns of Rose’s “reputation,” it becomes clear that such information proliferates among the staff as well. The novel therefore presents an unclear portrayal of how life within the school is connected to life beyond it. As a result, the concept of social popularity is paradoxically both petty and vital, as demonstrated in different sections of the novel. This deliberate lack of clarity speaks to the presumptive adolescent audience of a young adult novel, for such readers may likewise wonder how the things they are asked to learn in high school are applicable to “real life.” Despite the novel’s fantastical elements, the story incorporates many authentic elements of high school, particularly given the fact that the students find their social world to be all-consuming and all-important, even as they wonder whether concerns like social hierarchy will matter once their time at school ends.
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By Richelle Mead
